five things

1. Lemon Drizzle Cake. One of my favourite treats from the Riccarton Farmers Market. There’s nothing like a leisurely morning spent debating whether I want golden or purple beetroot this week and then coming home to a slice of this delicious, barely sweet cake for afternoon tea.

2. Dogs. Meet Bordeaux, the fluffiest, largest dog in the world. I spent Sunday at a going-away party for a friend and Bordeaux was the secret guest of honour. I spent the majority of the evening just staring at him slack jawed and wondering how a dog who came up to my waist could possibly be so gentle and friendly.

3. Tea by the fire.My mother’s solution to all of life’s problems is to sit down and “have a nice cup of tea.” That phrase has become synonymous to me with relaxing and taking a moment to reflect on my often hectic day, and there’s something so luxurious about curling up by a warm fire on a cold night and sipping hot, strong tea.

4. Dinner dates with my sister. My older sister and I took a night to catch up together and head out to celebrate my acceptance to Grad School with pizza. We don’t often get to spend quality time together so it’s lovely when we get alone time, especially while eating this (rather inauthentic) antipasto pizza covered in artichokes, cubes of eggplant, sour capers, salty olives and delicious mozzarella.

5. Weeknight movies. I love going to the movies on a Monday night when most people are at home and I get the theatre to myself. I have a massively oversized poncho that I always wear to the movies and use as a blanket, and curling up on the plush seats and letting my mind drift is one of my favourite secret pleasures.

Ice Cream, You Scream

Funnily enough, the best Christmas present I got this year wasn’t actually something I was given, instead it was something I gave to someone else. This present was a long time in the making, for some years my father has wanted an ice cream maker.  Now my father is a good man, a good man who loves food and is a very adventurous, exciting person to eat with. He’s also someone who loves to collect kitchen gadgets, if it’s shiny and goes in the kitchen he thinks it would be a good thing to have. What he is not however, is a man who cooks. So whenever he brought it up this desire to acquire an ice cream maker we would have the following conversation:

“I’d love an ice cream machine”

“But you’ll never use it. I’ll use it. You will never use it.”

“Yes I will; I’d love to make my own ice cream.”

This is a conversation that had been going on for years. So finally this year, my sisters and I got together to make his dream a reality. Purchased in secret and hidden away until Christmas, when he finally opened it we made him promise that he would use it, and that it wouldn’t sit undisturbed in the box for years like his pasta machine. So it was dutifully unpacked, and recipes were researched, and shining and happy, our brand new Cuisineart Ice Cream maker joined the bench along with our other gadgets.

Guess what?

It’s nearly March now and as anticipated, he hasn’t used it. I’ve used it. He has never used it.

But I don’t care because oh how I have used it. I had no idea that these babies were so much fun. I started out small, making strawberry and framboise ice cream, but soon after that things started getting weird. I have a list of flavours waiting to be made that includes but isn’t limited to:

• Chocolate and rosemary
• Lavender shortbread
• Brown butter
• Gin and tonic sorbet

I’ve limited myself to making two batches a month maximum because honestly, otherwise I would be eating ice cream for every meal and pretty soon things would spiral out of control. Out of my experiments so far, I’ve had two particularly successful flavours.

The first has been my hazelnut caramel ice cream (you might remember it from my five things teaser). This is the ultimate in rich indulgence. Thick, vanilla ice cream with ground hazelnuts blended in with a swirl of hazelnut caramel that is just the right combination of sweet, nutty and savoury to stop things from being too overwhelming. If there is any ice cream that is perfect for winter after a meal of slow braised oxtail, this is the ice cream. Yes, the recipe is a little complicated – but in all honesty it’s not that complex. It’s more just a matter of following step by step instructions that are all by themselves quite simple.

The other is the polar opposite. Matcha ice cream is just barely sweet with a strong green tea flavour that resonates throughout the palate. It’s a lot lighter than the hazelnut caramel and is a great dessert to eat on a hot day when the idea of anything too cloyingly sweet seems like too much to handle.  It has a very complex flavour that really tastes of the matcha powder, so if you don’t like matcha you might not like this much. On the other hand, if you do then you will love this. Plus it has an added bonus of being the much simpler of the two recipes.

 

Hazelnut Caramel Ice Cream

1 cup full cream milk
2 cups  cream
3/4 cup sugar
1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise
5 large egg yolks
1/2 cup ground, roasted hazelnuts

1/2 cup ground hazelnuts
3/4 cup brown sugar
3 tablespoons butter or margarine, cut into chunks
1/2 cup cream
1/4 cup hazelnut-flavor liqueur (eg frangellico)

First heat the milk, cream, and sugar in a large saucepan until just barely boiling. Scrape the seeds from the vanilla bean into the milk and  then add the bean pod to the milk as well. Bring the temperature down to just simering and leave for five minutes. Remove from the heat, and let the flavours infuse for one hour.

In a separate bowl, stir together the egg yolks. Rewarm the cream mixture and gradually pour 1/2 cup of the milk into the yolks, whisking constantly as you pour. Pour the warmed yolks and milk back into the saucepan. Cook over the custard over a low heat, stirring constantly and scraping the bottom to bring up the vanilla seeds, until the custard thickens enough to coat the spatula. If you have a food thermometer you want to be aiming for about 170 degrees c. If your mixture gets too hot it will begin to scramble, but don’t panic! Just quickly take it off the heat and strain it a few times through a sieve before you put it in the ice bath.

Strain the custard into your ice bath. Stir over the ice until cool and then refrigerate to chill thoroughly. Once completely cool, mix in the ground hazelnuts, freeze the custard in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions. The ground hazelnuts will give the ice cream a slightly grainy texture, so don’t worry if you find your ice cream isn’t completely smooth as that’s to be expected.

To make the hazelnut caramel, in a medium sized saucepan combine the sugar and the butter. Shake the pan frequently to mix the sugar and butter, but do not stir it as this might cause it to sieze. When the sugar and butter are melted together completely and have turned a dark amber colour remove from the heat. Make sure you watch carefully because sugar can go from not dark enough to completely burnt in seconds.

Once off the heat add the cream, ground hazelnuts and liqeur and mix until the caramel is smooth. Return it to the heat and stir until it boils vigorously and then bring back off the hook. Transfer to a bowl and refrigerate until it has cooled and thickened.

Once the ice cream has churned and the hazelnut caramel has cooled, swirl the caramel through the churned ice cream and transfer into a container and freeze for at least three hours. Check occasionally to make sure the caramel hasn’t sunk to the bottom, if it has – mix with a spoon.

Matcha Ice Cream
This recipe is adapted from Manu’s Menu

2 cups of cream
½ cup sugar
3 tbsp Matcha (100% natural green tea powder)
1 pinch of salt

Put the cream, sugar and salt into a medium sized sauce pot until it comes to a full boil. Keep whisking until it starts to bubble, then remove it from the heat and whisk in the matcha powder.

Transfer the mixture to a large bowl and let it cool down until completely chilled over an ice bath.

Churn for 20-25 minutes in an ice cream maker, according to the manufacturer’s instructions and then transfer into a container and freeze for at least 3 hours before serving.

Douhua or: detox dessert

After all the excesses that come with the festive period (which, yes has lasted for me until February) I always find myself craving lighter, more simple food. This week I’ve been heading back to the gym, and forcing myself to try more things that I was afraid to do, which aside from my forays into dance classes – it turns out I was born to be in a Bollywood movie – has included pushing myself out of my food comfort zones.

Do you guys fall into paterns of cooking the same sorts of things most nights? For me, I often find myself falling back on roast vegetable salads, spinach and tomato salads and grilled meats most night for dinner, and a smoked sea salt hot chocolate or homemade ice cream for dessert. While those things are delicious don’t get me wrong, I’m the sort of person who loves to experiment.

So if we combine this love of experimenting with a craving for lighter and yes; cleansing food, I’ve found myself going on somewhat of a detox this week. For me personally (and I’m not advocating that you follow my food plan) that means I’ve been eating a lot of cucumber marinated in chilli and garlic, protein shakes, and a heck of a lot of silken tofu.

Tonight I was craving something sweet, but din’t want to A) put a lot of work into it or B) have anything too heavy. Turning to the fridge for my salvation, I saw a block of silken tofu. I’d been thinking about making douhua, a silken tofu pudding that is popular in Chinese, Malaysian, Indonesian, Thai and Vietnamese cuisene, for awhile now, and seeing as it was literally the only thing in my fridge now was the time.

This version is a very simple take on douhua, which can be served both sweet and savory. Traditionally fresh ginger is infused into a simple syrup, however all I had was freeze-dried ginger powder, so I used that instead. I can’t say if it compares to fresh ginger, but I can tell you that using the ginger powder produced an amazing result. Just in case you are wondering about the mystery empty bowl in the back of this photo… I have only just realised that white bowl plus white sugar makes your bowl look empty.

It couldn’t be more simple, insude the syrup for 10 minutes for a more subtle ginger flavor or up to 30 minutes if you want a strong ginger kick and then pour over the silken tofu and enjoy. I prefer my tofu broken up into smaller, rustic chunks so that the ginger syrup coats it more thoroughly, but I have seen it prepared with a large block of the tofu. I was a little nervous about making this, unsure if I’d like tofu in a sweet arena or not, but it turns out this was everything I wanted it to be: soft, creamy, sweet and light, delicious.

Douhua
serves two

100 grams silken tofu
1 cup water
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon freeze dried ginger or 2 cm long chunk of fresh giner.

Combine the water and the sugar in a small saucepan over a high heat until boiling and then reduce the heat to low, stirring until the sugar dissolves. If using fresh ginger, peel and slice it into thin rounds. Add the ginger to the simple syrup mix and let it infuse for a minimum of ten minutes (I simmered mine for about 20 minutes which gave me quite a sweet syrup that had a kick of ginger heat right at the end, my preference). If using the powdered ginger, make sure you stir the syrup until it dissolves into it – mine had a tendancy to try and just float on the top.

While the ginger syrup is infusing cut or break the tofu into small chunks and put into your bowl of choice. You can choose your own ratio of tofu to syrup, but I preferred to have mostly tofu with just enough syrup to coat the pieces so that the nutty flavour of the tofu complemented the overall flavor, rather than getting masked.

Once the syrup has reached your desired strength, pour through a strainer over the tofu and serve immediately. This is great piping hot in the colder winter months, or you can chill it in the fridge until icy to enjoy in summer.

When life gives you lemons

What do you do when life gives you lemons? Make lemonade? Throw them back at life and childishly yell that you don’t want any of his damn lemons? If you are anything like me then you will take lemons and apply to everything. Lemon is by far my favourite sweet flavour, and the basis of most of my favourite lemon dishes begins with this – lemon curd.

The problem I’d always had with lemon curd was the effort involved with standing over a double boiler for half an hour desperately hoping it wont scramble or split or curdle, because while I love lemon flavoured sweets, I’m not a huge fan of lemon scrambled eggs. I know, call me crazy. So for a while I gave up on the idea of making it homemade and simply bought it from the supermarket, which as we know if simply not the same. The lemon curd of my dreams is rich, custardy and tangy; but the lemon curd I was buying was thin, syrupy and more like a lemon scented glue than anything I would want to put in a tart shell.

So I begged the advice of an old Greek Nonna who had been growing lemons longer than I’d been alive (roughly 70 years longer). She waved a hand at her over flowing lemon tree and said “go fill bag, I write down recipe.” So I did. And she did.She handed me a scrap of paper and pushed me out the door, commanding me to bring her some of what I made “when you get right.” God forbid that I would go against a Greek Nonna, I went home and industriously set home to practise.

This is what resulted. Thick, sour just before the point of puckering but also sweet enough that you know it’s dessert, rich and eggy and almost a custard. This is the lemon curd of my dreams. And the best part of it? It only takes six minutes to cook. From there you can do just about anything you want with it. Fill miniature pie shells with it for a portable snack, slather it over thick slices of french toast for a twist on an old classic, or my favourite spread over slices of brioche, scatter with raspberries and pour over a egg custard mix to make the most delicious bread and butter pudding you’ve ever tasted.

Or… if you’re home alone… you could just eat it with a spoon straight out of the jar. I promise not to tell.

 

Six Minute Lemon Curd

3/4 cup of lemon juice (I prefer to use meyer lemons)
The zest of one lemon
3/4 cup of sugar
3 eggs
125 grams unsalted butter

Combine all ingrediants in a bowl over a pan of boiling water on the stove at a medium-high heat.
Start whisking, and whisk constantly for six minutes until the mixture has thickened and is bubbling – constant whisking is important to stop the eggs from scrambling.
That’s it! Transfer into a sterilised jar and leave in the fridge until cool or preferably overnight.

five things

1. Hazelnut Caramel Ice Cream. This might be the best ice cream I’ve ever made. Rich, vanilla and hazelnut flavoured ice cream with chunks of hazelnut caramel swirled throughout it. It’s dangerously addictive, I already can’t trust myself in a room alone with it. Recipe coming soon.

2. Red Lipstick on Rainy Days. Does anything brighten my mood on a wet, miserable day like rugging up in thick, snug knitwear and a bright swathe of cheery, cherry red lipstick? It makes me feel chic, put together and just a little bit fancy.

3. Peach Blush Roses. I picked this bunch of roses up a week ago and their sunny bloom has been keeping me company in the kitchen, making me smile whenever I go to the sink. I can never stop myself from leaning over and inhaling their perfume while I’m washing the dishes.

4. A Balanced Meal. Nothing says a healthy, well balanced meal like a long black, a plate of fries and aioli. Not something I’d eat every day… but admittedly something I indulge in almost every time I meet my mother for lunch at Brigittes. While the rest of their menu looks delicious, I always find myself going ‘hmm, not really in the mood for this. Coffee and chips it is.’ It’s almost ritualistic now.

5. Ballerina Buns. Whoever says that this is a easy hairstyle that you can just throw your hair into… no. Just, no. 13 bobby pins and copious amounts of hairspray and I was still unconvinced. But that might be my inherant fear of wearing my hair any way but down talking.

Stuffed and Squashed

Summer in New Zealand is a fragile thing, easily shattered by grey clouds overhead and sudden thunderstorms. For the past few days the skies have been threatening to rain down upon us and apparently today was finally the day. Sundays are perfect rain weather, it’s a day built for lazing around home and being domestic. So that’s exactly what I did.

My day was filled with steaming hot chocolate with a touch of vanilla and smoked sea salt, getting ahead of the game by pre-cooking tomorrow night’s venison and pancetta slow cooked stew and reluctantly leaving the house to do the grocery shopping – although I will gladly take any excuse to dress up in my winter clothes; oh cream woollen cape how I have missed you. Regardless, my reluctance soon turned to excitement when I found the most adorable butternut squashes, just the right size to be split in half and stuffed for dinner.

After slicing in half and scooping out the seeds, I sprinkled the obnoxiously orange flesh with a little pepper and truffle salt, topping each with sprigs of rosemary and sage to impart a gentle hum of flavour. I’m always a bit suspicious of this method of infusing flavour (But it’s just sitting on top of it! How could that possibly work?) but it really does work. Easy as that, they were ready for the oven.

Once they’d roasted until the flesh was soft, I pulled them out of the oven and prepared the stuffing.  First you need to scoop out the cooked pumpkin, leaving about a half centimetre of flesh so you can stuff it back in later. At this point you can go in almost any direction you want – if you were vegan then maybe a mixture of garlic, onions, rosemary and cannellini beans mashed with the pumpkin, if you’re craving Italian flavours then black olives and parmesan. It’s really up to you. Me? I was feeling vaguely Spanish.

I pulled the meat out of three unsmoked chorizo and fried it off, mixing that with the pumpkin, Persian feta, garlic, paprika, and pine nuts. I said vaguely Spanish, alright? Spooning it back into the oven, I topped it all off with a little more truffle salt, pine nuts and Persian feta and then put it back in the oven to finish.

After twenty minutes or so, the tops are crisp, browned and ready to be splashed with a little vino cotto to finish. The end product had an almost custardy texture that was both sweet and savoury, with a pronounced kick of paprika and feta. We all agreed that it would definitely be repeated the next day we had bleak weather – so much more interesting than the perennially boring backed potato but just as comforting and delicious.

Chorizo and Persian Feta Stuffed Butternut Squash

2 butternut squash
4 small sprigs fresh rosemary
4 sage leaves
4 small unsmoked chorizo, or 2 larger ones
¼ cup pine nuts
¼ – ½ cup Persian feta
2 tsp pureed garlic
1 tsp paprika
Truffle salt
Pepper

Preheat an oven to bake at 180 degrees c. Slice the squash in half lengthways and scoop out the seeds with a small spoon. Rub a small amount of olive oil across the face of the flesh and season with salt and pepper to taste. Arrange a sprig of rosemary and a sage leaf on top of each squash half and roast in the oven for a half hour or until the flesh is easily pierced with a fork.

Letting the squashes cool for a little while, remove the casing off of the chorizo, pull apart and fry off until browned. Next, scoop the cooked flesh out of the squash, leaving ½ – 1 centimetre of the flesh behind. Don’t scoop out so much that the squash collapses in on itself; the halves should still keep their shape.

In a bowl, mash the pumpkin together with the chorizo, pine nuts, feta, garlic, and paprika, seasoning to taste. With a spoon, push the mixture back into the squashes and top with extra pine nuts and feta. Put back into the oven for another twenty minutes or until the mixture has browned.

Serve immediately.

The Brownie Wars

I’m really not the kind of person who views food as ‘treats’ or ‘for a special occasion,’ I more believe in the idea that your body knows what it needs and if you listen to it, it will tell you. So sometimes I will have days where I only eat tomato salsa and raw snow peas, followed by a profiterole stuffed with salted caramel. And I never let myself feel bad about that – because hey girls, we have all spent long enough feeling bad about ourselves.

A few days ago, my body was telling me it needed brownies. Although… looking at that picture my body is going ‘brownies? Are we talking about brownies? ARE YOU MAKING BROWNIES AGAIN? LETS EAT BROWNIES!” So maybe that is one food my body can’t be trusted to tell the difference between truely needing and just wanting based from a chocolate whores lust. Anyway… I’ve been experimenting with brownie recipes for a while and have finally come across a recipe that I thought needed no improvement. It is soft and gooey, fruity and chocolatey and best of all it’s packed full of zuchinni, apple sauce and buckwheat flour so as far as I’m concerned it’s basically a health food.  So when my girl Zo from Two Spoons text me asking if I wanted to help her try out a recipe for raw brownies, I of course said we should have a brownie bake-off. Because that it how I roll. I had a barbeque to go to that afternoon which was going to be full of vegans, so I figured this was the perfect time to experiment with making this recipe completely animal product free, as usually my food is just packed full of delicious, delicious animal products.

In the end both recipes were a huge success, and between the two of us we have come up with some recipes that are guaranteed to shut up the most allergic, pernickety and food-intolerant of your friends. We both decided that the raw brownie will be more happily accepted if you consider it a delicious chocolate slice, rather than try to claim it is an actual brownie – but that is not to say that it isn’t delicious. I was a bit suspicious that with just three ingredients this would taste too much of raw cocoa powder, but actually in the end what we were all surprised about was how buttery and rich it tasted. The dates and walnuts mixed with cocoa powder make for such a rich and Moorish slice that I sort of regretted letting Zo go home with the entire batch. Head over to Two Spoons to check out the recipe.

But then I remembered that I had these little beauties sitting in wait for me. These are seriously delicious, and you wouldn’t know they weren’t vegan if someone didn’t tell you. The zucchini just melts away into the mixture in some kind of food magic, so don’t worry that you will be pulling strands of it out of your teeth, it just adds body and texture. This recipe is so rich and full of dark chocolate with a hint of cherry flavour to it, it is by far the best brownie I’ve ever had. If you like your brownies fudgey in texture then these might not be for you, they definitely fall into the cakey spectrum, but they are so dense with chocolate I doubt you’ll even notice.

The Best Vegan Brownies

Ingredients

• 1 tbsp vanilla extract
• 1 cup  sugar
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup  applesauce
• 1/2 cup buckwheat flour
• 1/2 cup whole wheat or plain flour
• 1/2 cup / 45 g unsweetened cocoa powder
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp ground cardamom
• 2 cups (about 300 – 320 g) grated zucchini
• 1 1/2 cups dark chocolate chips

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350°F / 180°C.

In a bowl, combine the vanilla extract, sugar, salt, and the applesauce.

Sieve the flour and the cocoa powder into another bowl.  Add the baking soda, the cinnamon and the cardamom.  Mix well.

Add the apple sauce mixture to the flour mixture and combine until the dry ingredients are mixed in well.

Add the grated zucchini and the chocolate chips. Mix once more.

Pour the brownie batter into a greased 8 x 8” / 20 x 20 cm baking tin or something with similar dimensions.

Bake at 350°F / 175°C for  40- 60 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out somewhat clean. Because it is vegan, it will take somewhat longer to cook. If the top of the brownies begin to burn during this time, cover with foil.

Allow to cool completely in the pan.

 

The Basil Saga pt 1

Considering I am what can best be described as an ‘amateur’ gardener, my budding garden can be described as 90% guess work and 10% ‘I’ll water it some more just in case.’ What that basically means is that I spend a lot of time planting things that I think might be fun to have and then scratching my head as I watch the seedlings wither away. I think that there is something to be said for sheer cluelessness however, because I don’t have any idea of what plants are supposedly hard or easy to grow and instead I just plant at random.

Basil however, I know is hard to grow. I can hear people protesting that already and trust me I’ve been told that you can grow basil inside or outside and if you can’t grow anything else you can grow basil.

Not me.

I’ve been known to buy flourishing plants of basil and within days watch them shrivel and brown, mulishly refusing to grow and silently judging me and my ineptitude. So needless to say when this year’s crop went in courtesy of my father, I stayed far away from them. I hesitated to even look in their direction, preferring to make him water them so he couldn’t accuse me of inflicting my witchmagic on the poor plants.

And wouldn’t you know it – the man can grow some basil.

In fact he grew so much basil that we’ve been frantically trying to use the bulk of it before it all goes to seed. There’s only so many caprese salads, pizzas, lasagnes and sorbets (more on that later) that you can make before you need to pull out the big guns.

Pesto.

The quickest way I know to make an over-abundance of basil go away… into my mouth, is to make a big jar of pesto. The funny thing about pesto is whenever we are out, I never miss it, but the moment I have a jar of freshly made pesto in the fridge – suddenly everything would be better with a little of that magical green spread thickly over top of it. Asparagus? Mmm asparagus dipped in pesto. Chicken? Roasted chicken seasoned under the skin with pesto thanks. Empty Spoon? Fill with pesto, insert into mouth.

The best thing about pesto is how insanely easy it is to make.

Grab yourself some basil, pine nuts, parmesan and garlic, throw in a blender and season with good quality olive oil, salt and pepper. I personally try to go quite heavy on the basil and parmesan, and a bit lighter on the parmesan and garlic but you can mix them to whatever proportions taste the best to you. My dad thinks it is heresy to even consider squeezing lemon into that heavenly, fragrant mixture – while I personally think that the bite of the lemon cuts through the sometimes overwhelming richness of cheese and fatty nuts. Blend it until you are happy with it, again some people prefer it to be nearly paste like, but I prefer a little texture in mine.

I used two bulbs of garlic (yes, bulbs) because my little garlics are home grown and are curiously sweet and mild… as well as having grown as giant single bulbs instead of sectioned cloves, so even with that much garlic you won’t be knocked over the head with the punch of raw garlic. If you don’t like the taste of raw garlic you can use pre-minced, but you’ll lose some of the bright, vividness of the flavour that way. It’s really worth it to grow your own garlic, the flavour when fresh is completely different from buyign the dried bulbs from the supermarket; it’s sweet and sticky and mild, in a word amazing. And literally all it takes is sticking an old garlic clove that’s been sprouting in the back of your fridge (we’ve all been there, no judgement!) into some dirt and occasionally watering and throwing wistful glances in its direction. Garlic is the queen of unneedy planting.

Just like that! Literally minutes after starting, you’re done. There has got to be no easier recipe than this, in fact I would barely count this as cooking, more just blending and then putting in a jar. In my mind cooking should take longer than three minutes. In other words the time versus reward ratio for this recipe is completely off the hook. For something that takes almost no time at all, you have enough pesto to last for weeks as well as a big jar of self-satisfaction smiling back at you from the fridge every time you open it.

“Hi! You made me! Ready for some deliciousness?”

Pesto is a friendly food.

Traditional Genovese Pesto.

• 2 cups very tightly packed basil leaves
• 3 garlic cloves
• 8 tablespoons freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
• 1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil – use the best quality possible.
• juice of 1/2 a lemon
• coarse sea salt
• pepper

Rinse the basil if home grown (we don’t want bugs in the mixture) and very gently so as not to bruise the leaves, pat dry. Place the leaves in a food processer with the pine nuts, garlic and a pinch of salt. Blend just a little at first, you don’t want to over-blend it beyond all recognition. Add the cheese and half of the olive oil and blend once more. If not saucelike enough in consistency add more of the olive oil. By this point it becomes a matter of taste testing to get it to where you like it. Season to taste and add the lemon juice if you like. Season conservatively because the flavours will develop over time.

Transfer mixture to a large bowl or jar and cover with the remaining olive oil. If not keeping in a jar make sure to tightly cover with plastic wrap or similar. This extra layer of oil will help keep the pesto fresh for longer without it turning black and going bad.

Pesto is best used the same day but keeps, its surface covered with a thin layer of olive oil and tightly covered, chilled, for 3 days.