Real Food for Real Life

Thursday, June 10, 2010

One recipe, so many possibilities...

9 grain baguette topped with Sundried Tomato Pesto

I love pesto and I love sundried tomatoes, so I whipped up a (big) batch of sundried tomato pesto.  This simple, tasty pesto is just as versatile as traditional basil pesto.  We had this last night on crusty baguette slices to accompany our grilled steak dinner, tonight I will be topping a baked brie with it, and tomorrow I will be spreading it inside some grilled ciabatta rolls for Italian sausage burgers.  I'll probaby even stir a few tablespoons into some low fat cream cheese for a tasty bagel topper (or spread it on some protein for grilling, or toss it with some pasta, geeze, the possibilities are endless :). 

I was working from an open jar of tomatoes so I dumped them and their oil onto my kitchen scale to see if I was correct in my guess that I had about 8 ounces (I was!).  Since I had the scale bowl dirty anyway, I just measured the rest of my ingredients in by weight before dropping it all into the food processor...it couldn't get any easier than that!  The following recipe makes A LOT of pesto, so you may want to halve it, or plan for lots of uses like I have (I have never frozen it before, but imagine it would freeze well).

Sundried Tomato Pesto

8 oz. oil packed sundried tomatoes with their oil
4 oz. walnut pieces
4 oz. permesan cheese
4 large garlic cloves, peeled
coarse salt, to taste
additional olive oil, as needed

Place the tomatoes with oil, nuts, cheese, and garlic into the bowl of a food processor and grind to your desired consistency.  Taste for seasoning and add any additional oil desired, process again to combine.  I added a big pinch of salt and about 1.3 cup of olive oil to loosen the pesto as it was very thick.

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