Cooley Family Farm

Kevin started harvesting garlic so I decided to give green garlic pesto a try. So glad… what a yummy treat. The green garlic is milder than dried garlic. If you love garlic you will love this recipe. We made some whole wheat pasta and tossed it with a little butter and added the pesto. It was great. The pesto also tasted wonderful on the veggies. I was out of french bread but I have a feeling it would make fantastic garlic bread as well.

I made a full batch of the pesto which yielded about 1 1/2 cups. A little can go a long way so next time I plan to cut the recipe in half. What I’m posting below is the full recipe, so be sure you want a lot of pesto if you make it as is.

5-6 shoots of green garlic, trimmed of tough dark green parts and cut into 2 inch pieces
2 oz. Parmesan Cheese, cut into small cubes
3/4 t. coarse salt
1/2 t. pepper
1/2 C. extra-virgin olive oil

Put everything except olive oil into a food processor or blender. Process until it is fairly smooth. You may need to stop and scrape the sides a couple of times.

Next pour in the olive oil until you get everything is pretty smooth. If needed scrape sides again during this process.

You can be flexible with the ingredients too. I used about 1/2 Grana Padano and 1/2 Parmesan for the cheese. I also was about out of olive oil so I ended up using 1/4 cup olive oil and 1/4 cup plain sesame oil (not toasted). It was still great and no one knew I altered it. Also… it is very common to use pine nuts when making pesto. I prefer mine without but you could put some pine nuts in as well.

Best of all this is simple to make and you can be creative when spicing up a meal.

Tracy