First find a good bottle of wine. Open it. Sample the contents. If good enough – continue, otherwise open another and go back to the first step.
Harvest some basil and get rid of the snails (you can offer them the wine you discarded). Don’t be rude – drink with them – pour yourself some more wine.
First find a good bottle of wine. Open it. Sample the contents. If good enough – continue, otherwise open another and go back to the first step.
Harvest some basil and get rid of the snails (you can offer them the wine you discarded). Don’t be rude – drink with them – pour yourself some more wine.
Shake the basil around a bit – have some more wine – a glass is not really necessary at this time, just tip out the bottle.
What was this all about?
Oh yes, pesto… I don’t have a set recipe but what I do is the following:
Grab lots of basil (the annual basil with fleshy softer leaves makes better pesto – but the perennial, which I normally have growing) does just fine. Try to use younger leaves – ie not old, hard leaves. Trim the stalks off the leaves. Toss them into a blender (if you have access to one) and pile on some olive oil on top and whizz it up. How much oil? Just enough to get a paste going, otherwise you will have some chronically mashed leaves and a pile of untouched leaves.
Now you need some cheese – the fancy stuff is Pecorino, but me over here usually grabs some feta and gooi’s it in! It is quite adequate; adds to the saltiness and moisture.
Now to make it taste good:
Some chopped garlic is nice but don’t overdo it.
If you can get your paws on pine nut (Pick and Poof sometimes sells R20 bags of it) – this is traditional and has a nice taste. Some rocket or coriander leaves are also a good idea for variety. A bit of salt will be needed and when everything is mooshed up and you want to put it in a bottle, top up the olive oil to make sure the solids are not in contact with the atmosphere to preserve it.
*Hans King is an intrepid engineer, cyclist, and father of a journalist, from Cape Town.
