Green Sauce as a Way of Life

Part one: Pesto

Welcome to Still Life with Lemon

I am currently working on an index of all my recipes. In the meantime, here are some ideas for Spring cooking: rhubarb ice cream, sumac chicken roasted over potatoes, green beans, hazelnuts and vinaigrette. You can always go through the archive of recipes by visiting the Still Life with Lemon homepage here, and clicking on ‘archive’. Here, you can also search for recipes or ingredients.

As well as cooking, I also do ceramics. I make functional pieces to use everyday in the kitchen and home, many of them show up in my photos here. You can visit my website at vernorpots.com.

The time has come- green sauce on everything! There is nothing better than grabbing a big handful of herbs and turning it into a sauce to be used on everything from a bowl of pasta to a good steak, all manner of vetetables, fried eggs or just a piece of toast. Everything is better with green sauce- especially at this time of the year when the herbs are young and fresh and abundant!!

Basil is at its most delicious in the late spring and early summer, when it is sweet and young, before the hot summer sun offsets the delicate balance of anise to a subtle bitterness.

I start making pesto before my basil plants have even grown enough to make a decent sized batch- picking off the little top florets to encourage them to grow wide rather than tall. I then combine those precious few leaves with whatever else I might have- parsley is my go-to but I have had terrible luck growing parsley thus far and so instead this week I used a few leaves of sharp arugula, a few beet leaves from my plants that had come back after the winter and have now gone to seed, and a few small leaves of kale. There is enough flavour in those couple of leaves to wash away all memory of winter!

There are too many wonderful variations of green sauces than I will be able to get down in one go- this is a ‘to be continued’ situation which doesn’t worry me at all because I could talk all day about green sauce. The best thing about any green sauce though is that you really don’t need too much of a recipe- the main thing its to keep tasting and adjusting as you go.

My only real rule when it comes to a green sauce, is that if you can help it, only make as much as you need for today. Call me crazy, but I would rather make pesto everyday than eat a day-old one. Occasionally it happens, and I am still very grateful for having something prepped in the fridge, but if you are really going for optimal flavour, you’ve gotta make it fresh. It does get tricky when you want to make a giant batch of pesto at the end of the season to use all the basil- in that case I say make it with half parsley or arugula and pop it in the freezer in single-serve containers (an all basil pesto will go brown and sad in the cold).

My Guide to Making ‘Pesto’/ Pistou