Basil pesto pasta

One of the best parts of having my own (small) garden is that I have fresh herbs on hand all summer and into the fall. Fresh herbs, and particularly basil for some reason, are really expensive at the store but can be grown easily, even indoors. Unless you're me. Then it is absolutely impossible to keep an indoor plant alive. One person commented that my house looked like a plant graveyard and a coworker just recently removed the plants from my office to try to revive them. Anyway, outdoor herbs are easy and if you have a bumper crop of basil then pesto should be an obvious next step. The recipe below makes enough pesto to cover two pretty hearty servings of pasta, but you could easily just use this as a sauce and spread it on a grilled cheese or on crostini with goat cheese.

Ingredients:

1 cup basil leaves, loosely packed

1 small clove of garlic, minced

2 tablespoons pine nuts

1/2 a lemon, juiced

1/4 cup parmesan, grated (not the stuff in the can) plus more for the top

olive oil, a few good sized glugs

2 servings of spaghetti, with some of the cooking water reserved

8-10 cherry tomatoes, cut in half

Directions:

Heat a dry skillet over medium heat, when it is warm add the pine nuts and keep shaking the pan until the nuts are golden brown, which should only take about 3 minutes. Transfer the pine nuts to a food processor, add the minced garlic and a small glug of olive oil and pulse a few times to break things down. Add the basil to the nuts and garlic and pulse a few more times. Add the lemon juice and process for about 30 seconds. While the food processor is running, stream a good sized glug of olive oil (maybe like 1/4 cup) into the mixture. Continue to process until a loose paste forms. Mix in the cheese and process a few more times, if it looks dry add a little more oil. The goal is to get the pesto to be bright green and sort of creamy, but not oily and runny. In a medium sauce pan, boil water for your pasta and salt it well - someone once said it should taste like the ocean in order to properly season pasta. Boil your pasta, but when it is done cooking take about 1/3 cup of the cooking water out before you drain it. Drain pasta and transfer it to a large bowl (or back in the pan but don't return it to the heat). Add your pesto and mix well, adding some of the cooking liquid back in as you're stirring to loosen up the sauce and coat the pasta. Stir in cherry tomatoes and grate more parmesan on top.

*If you want to save the pesto you have two options: freeze it or refrigerate it. If you freeze it then don't add the cheese, mix that in the day that you're serving it. If you refrigerate it you can make the whole thing but then coat the top with a nice layer of olive oil to prevent it from browning. If it browns it still tastes fine, it just looks nasty.