Someone asked what they could put on pasta noodles other than tomato sauce or olive oil. Challenge accepted! I never made pesto before so I thought I'd give it a try. I never had it before either so I don't know what it's supposed to taste like. First I had to find out what pesto is. What I do know is what I have on hand and what tastes good to me. So let's start with that.
The word "pesto" simply means "crushed" usually using a mortar and pestle. I live in an age that includes blenders so let's use that. I looked up a traditional recipe for pesto. It includes basil, garlic, pine nuts, Parmesan cheese and olive oil. But who says that's all you can put in it?
Since I'm on a WFPBNO journey through life, focusing on keeping my weight down, I chose to leave out the pine nuts, cheese and oil. It's not that pine nuts are a bad choice. I had already met my limit of nuts and seeds for the day and didn't need them. Parmesan cheese is 64 % saturated fat so that's out. I left out olive oil because ITS OIL!!! Oil is fat and my body has no trouble making all the fat I need so I'm skipping it.
Everything goes in the blender together so it only took about 5 minutes to prepare. The whole wheat pasta was boiled for 12 minutes to get it the way I like it. Drain the pasta, put it back in the pot and on low heat stir in the pesto. The heat makes the sauce stick to the noodles.
Pesto!
3T dried basil, 4 cloves garlic, 1 green onion, a handful of fresh parsley, a handful of kale, a handful of spinach, a 6oz can of drained green olives, 1/4t cayenne pepper, 2T apple cider vinegar, a tomato, 5 mushrooms and 2T nutritional yeast in the blender. Make it into a paste. Add salt to taste. Pour it over whole wheat spaghetti and you have yourself a main dish! Enjoy!
