Have you heard the adage “you can’t please everybody all the time”?
Turns out that, like taxes and death, that also is one of the surest things in life. A smart person soon learns that trying to please everybody is a fool’s errand. In the end we all just have to assess our priorities and decide which things are worth trying, which best forgotten about.
Life is too short to spend it pleasing everyone but ourselves.
In these 11 years, I’ve spent writing about food our site always included the recipes that I made and loved, whether they were Dominican or not. After all, it’s not like we Dominicans only eat Dominican food. Anyone who believes that needs upping his medication. When we moved to WordPress and this new concept a lot of those recipes were left behind because there was simply no time to move everything. I had to prioritize.
Email after email I was told that people missed those recipes. Many of our readers are not avid food blog readers (guilty as charged!), some only come to visit us, and they liked finding their favorite recipes, be they Dominican or not, in one convenient place.
In between classic, traditional Dominican recipes that we know and love, I also write about those other recipes that we know and love. And before the next soul steps in to complain that pesto is not Dominican I have a ready-made answer:
“You don’t say!”
Luckily rude people are a tiny minority of our readers. The vast majority of people who read our blogs, even when they see fit to criticize our work, are polite and make decent arguments. Thank goodness for that.
The vast majority of our readers know that is silly to complain that my recipe is not identical to their moms’. That this or that recipe is not “Dominican”. Or other some such nonsense.
So, anyway, I started the chronicles of my organic urban garden in our Spanish blog (it will be soon here too), and plan to keep blogging about my experience. One of the best successes I’ve had was with basil, a very forgiving herb to grow. And when you have a lot of freshly cut organic basil, the mind instantly flies to the delicious, classic Italian sauce. One of my favorite foods. It’s incredible how something so simple can have such complex flavors. It tastes rich, light, fresh. All at the same time.
So I made a couple of jars of it, and I tried it on everything, from pasta to bruschetta. And to please my insatiable taste for the green, these zucchini “fettuccinI”, all raw, and oh so good!
Wanna try it?
Aunt Clara
- 4 cups of fresh basil leaves
- 1/3 cup of pine nuts
- 1 cup of pecorino cheese (in small crumbs)
- 3/4 cup of extra-virgin olive oil
- 3 garlic cloves
- 2 teaspoons of sea salt
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Mix all the ingredients in the food processor and pulse until everything is finely minced.
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If you are not using fresh you can refrigerate up to two days.
To serve with pasta, boil pasta al dente following the instructions in the package. Drain pasta and mix with pesto. Do not cook the pesto.
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8 Comments on "Classic Pesto"
How do I measure 1 Cup of Basil Leaves. I have a measuring cup, but it’s confusing. With solids, such as salt, pancake mix..etc is easy because all I have to do is make sure it’s at the line marked 1 Cup, but how does this work for anything other than liquids and solids?
You pack the cup with the leaves.
RECETAS MUY BUENAS.
por favor tradeccion en espanol,,,GRACIAS!!
I have always wanted a pesto recipe!! Thanks for sharing:-)
Glad to hear that.
Presto is my absolute fav sauce and I always make a lot and freeze and keep using as and when I need. Makes life easy š
It makes the two of us. I could have pesto in everything.