Even the simplest sauté of crimini mushrooms tossed with pesto e.g Basil Walnut Pesto (vegetarians, this one's for you), tastes as delicious as Pesto Chicken and Pesto Salmon.
Do you feel what I feel? (oh, that Christmas song "Do you hear what I hear?" continuously lingering over my ears these days).
With salmon in season, I have been making roasted salmon quite regularly. It is an easy and healthy meal to put together - roast the salmon and steam some vegetables.
I usually marinate the salmon with spices - curry powder, ground turmeric, ground coriander, cumin, and black pepper. But since there is homemade pesto available, why not use it as the marinade?
Today, we will have Pesto Salmon, packed with Omega-3s as found in the fish itself and the walnuts in the pesto. Such a fuss-free recipe is a perfect weekday savior, as 30 minutes or less is what it takes for this healthy and delicious dish. It is also a good way to give salmon a quick make-over when the regular grilled/oven-roasted salmon occasionally becomes boring.
With pesto, I do not even have to cook a sauce for pasta anymore! Okay, quite frankly, some of my pasta dishes e.g. Roasted Vegetables with Pasta, Kale and Tomatoes with Pasta, do not need sauces. Sometimes, a glorious vegetables-saute or vegetables-roast is good enough to be the "sauce" for pasta.
But if there is homemade pesto, ready in the fridge waiting for you, why not use it to make a good dish better?
Think of pesto like a salad dressing, a spread, a dip, a sauce - it is very versatile in appetizers such as Pesto Cucumber Bites, Pesto Pita Bites; side-dishes e.g. Hasselback Potato with Yogurt-Pesto Dressing, and entrees such as Pesto Chicken, Pesto Pizza.
The only reason for taking extra effort to de-bone chicken drumsticks is to "save and keep" the bones for making stock. Part of the week's menu-plan requires the use of some chicken stock, so instead of buying chicken backbones separately, bone-in chicken drumsticks work fine as an alternative - the chicken bones, and meat can both be used.
In our family, we don't shy away from chicken "dark" meat, meaning parts of the chicken e.g. chicken thigh or leg, that comes with fats/skin. For that, Trader Joes organic chicken drumsticks ($1.99/lb, $3+ for five organic chicken drumsticks) is one of the best-value organic chicken around. Bone-in chicken are very flavorful when making chicken curry, chicken soup and roast chicken, for example.
It may not be a lot of bones (and flavor) from de-boning five or even two chicken drumsticks, but it is better than water as liquid base, and very useful when cooking a small-serving pot of rice or congee/porridge.
De-boning aside, this is an easy organic chicken recipe that makes use of homemade pesto as the marinade. You can also cook a bigger batch by roasting more boneless chicken using this recipe, and then shred the chicken leftovers which could be reheated later to make pesto-chicken sandwich, for example.
There are many ways to use pesto such as Potato with Pesto-Yogurt Dressing, Pesto Pizza, Pesto Cucumber Bites, or Pesto Pita Bites.
Hasselback potato must be one of the fancier ways to serve potatoes. I seldom cook potatoes at home. They usually appear in vegetable potato curry (refer Spicy Cauliflower and Potato Curry) or chicken curry; or when occasionally, steamed/boiled potatoes or mashed potatoes is served alongside a Western-style meal with entree e.g. oven-roasted chicken or oven-roasted salmon; and vegetable-sides e.g. steamed broccoli, roasted carrots, roasted cauliflower (refer Roasted Cauliflower with Basil, Roasted Whole Cauliflower).
The urge of try hasselback potato came by when I made yogurt-pesto sauce some time ago and simply love that sauce-dressing. As the homemade pesto (Basil Walnut Pesto recipe) already has cheese in there, this yogurt-pesto sauce perfectly stands in for the cheese-bacon combo often seen in hasselback potatoes.
Of course, potatoes can be simply diced, then boiled or steamed or roasted (whichever way you prefer), then tossed with this yogurt-pesto sauce. But did I say hasselback potato just looks fancier? It even scored a WOW, or rather "what is that" (in amused and amazed tone) from the other half, as if the potato sliced this way has become something else and not a potato.
The yogurt-pesto sauce is easy to make by mixing homemade pesto into organic plain yogurt.
Now I can have this pizza every time when heirloom tomatoes are in summer peak, also assuming there is fresh basil in the garden every summer to make pesto.
There seems quite some conditions to satisfy so until then, why not enjoy the moment right here, right now?
Trader Joes Pita Bread (also used in these Pesto Pita Bites) is perfect for this pizza. This pita bread is thin yet not as thin as lavash bread that typically turn out too crispy and not able to hold too many pizza toppings.
I was too quick in making such comments. Now I think these pesto cucumber bites are the easiest hors d’oeuvres to make. Alright, I maintained my stand on these pesto pita bites being delectable, relatively more delicious than these cucumber bites; but effort-level, give it to these cucumber bites!
Well, they are different. One is warm and toasty while this is cool and crisp.
Without question, I prefer a warm toasty cheesy bite anytime. However, when there is no real need to crank up the oven, these fresh pesto cucumber bites will be the next alternative.
Food historian, Waverley Root, once wrote that a cucumber is “about as close to neutrality as a vegetable can get without ceasing to exist”. In addition, cucumbers are not much of a nutrition powerhouse.
However I sometimes buy
them as they can be a super quick "vegetable" addition to sandwiches. Though not a powerhouse on its own, it can be made a powerhouse
snack-bite with basil walnut pesto.
Finger-friendly snack bites that will definitely please a crowd and
even better, make a crowd envious of this homemade pesto. These pesto pita bites are one of the easiest hors d’oeuvres to make, and they are delectable.
This Italian oil-and-herb sauce with basil's flavonoids and volatile oils - eugenol and rosmarinic acid, boost brain production of dopamine and serotonin therefore lifting up your mood. Basil is also a good source of vitamin K and manganese.
The other healthy ingredient in this pesto is walnuts. This pesto sauce is packed with Omega-3 good fats. Walnuts is a terrific source of protein, but it may not be easy to unlock the energy from the nuts as they are covered in phytates. Phytates is an indigestible plant compound that inhibits our enzymes from fully digesting nuts. By soaking the nuts in purified water overnight, you will rinse away phytates and make the nuts, including the key energy-booster nutrients, more digestible.
