Monday, November 21, 2011

Kale Pesto~ So Many Possibilities

What a busy and extremely productive weekend we had! We woke up Saturday morning with a list of projects we wanted to get accomplished, and decided to add repainting the office to that list. We had been talking about it for a while- it was a mustardy yellow color and it was not at all aesthetically pleasing. Lucky for us, there is a paint store within a mile of my house, so running up there was no problem. We were there and back within 20 minutes! And double lucky for us a friend offered to help us out and paint most of the room for us! She really is incredibly awesome-she even let the oldest two girls help her out. It takes a brave person to let a 5 year old paint! While she got to work on the office, my hubby got to work steam cleaning our living room carpet. It's the only carpet in the entire house, but it takes more spills than any other floor space! Ah the joys of having 3 kids:-) We borrowed a steamer from another friend (our friends are incredible) and now my carpet looks (almost) brand new!

With those two projects going on, I got to work in the kitchen. Since the big girls were helping to paint, and the littlest one was napping, I had a few hours to work on my own. I had 2 HUGE bags of Kale from my CSA that I needed to use up. I had made Kale chips this night before, but that barely made a dent in it. I looked up several recipes and settled on trying Kale Pesto. When I saw I could freeze it, I was totally sold on the idea!

I looked at several different recipes and methods, and made up one of my own. Here's what I came up with:

Ingredients:
1 bunch fresh Kale


1/2 cup almonds


Juice from 1/2 fresh lemon
4-6 cloves of garlic
1/2 cup Olive Oil (or more)
Sea Salt to taste



Directions:
1. Remove stems from Kale and blanch in boiling water for 5 minutes. Immediately cool under cold running water. Once cool, drain and squeeze additional water out of the Kale.


2. While Kale is cooking, chop your almonds in your food processor.


Once they were ground up into small piece add the garlic cloves and pulse those several times.

3.Add the kale, about a teaspoon of salt (or less). Drizzle in 1/2 cup olive oil while processing the kale. Add the lemon juice. Process to your desired consistency.



4. If you intend to freeze it, you can do so in muffin tins. 1 muffin cup is roughly 1/2 cup of pesto. Fill the cups, cover with plastic wrap, and put in your freezer for about 12 hours. You will need to use a butter knife to get each pesto "muffin" out. Put them in freezer bags to use whenever you want.



So many ways to eat this: on a crostini as an appetizer, served warm over pasta as a meal, as a sandwich spread, served as a dip with veggies or crackers...

We had some for lunch and it was so good:


Along with that I also made a batch of my homemade meatsauce to freeze, a cranberry orange bread that I will be sharing the recipe for in my next post, and meatloaf for dinner. All in all, it was a very productive Saturday.

3 comments:

  1. This looks yummy! I can't wait to try it out. The muffin tin is just genius!

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  2. Thanks! It really is so good. You can adjust the garlic, oil, and salt to your taste too. I used almonds because it's what I had in the cabinet. If you freeze them in the muffin tins- running a little hot water along the bottom for 5 seconds or so will make getting them out easier:-) Just be careful not to drop them in your sink.

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  3. I made this tonight and it is delicious...thanks for sharing!!

    Steph K

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