Saturday, July 12, 2008

Pasta with baked tofu and pesto

I'm behind on my homework. This was made on June 22.
This is the basil plant on our porch.
We grow various herbs on our porch which means they're available fresh for cooking, but we can't grow too many plants because of space. The problem with growing one basil plant is that most recipes I've seen use just a couple leaves, while pesto requires the whole plant. (The exception is caprese salad.)

At farmer's markets, they tend to sell entire basil plants. We picked one up at Drumlin farm, so of course I went with pesto. I used the recipe from the NYT cookbook:
2 cups basil leaves
2 large garlic cloves
3 tablespoons pine nuts, lightly toasted
1/3 cup grated parmesian cheese
1/3 cup olive oil
pinch of salt
Mix all in a food processor.

To add more protein, we searched for a recipe mixing pesto with tofu in some form and found this one which involved baking the tofu with oil and vinegar.
The tofu came out tasting like not much, but mixed with the pesto was not bad.
We also had some ears of corn lying around (I think it was from Whole Foods where they had been on sale- not local though, from Georgia.) The final result looked like standard pesto and pasta with some tofu blocks on it:

We also had many pounds of fresh strawberries because we had gone to the Land's Sake Strawberry Festival the day before. I made strawberry shortcake, although I made the cake as one big sheet instead of biscuits as in this recipe. Unfortunately, by the time we remembered to take a picture, it looked like this:


1 comment:

Jeremy Marin said...

For another easy, nutritional and tasty pesto (you said you added tofu, so I assume you want the nutrition) you might try Soba with Herbed Edamame Sauce.

I got it from Cooking Light, Jan. 2003 but just found it online for easy viewing.

http://find.myrecipes.com/recipes/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=407504