Sunflower Seed Pesto

A few days ago I was craving a caprese salad with mozzarella di buffola. I’m going to be painfully cautious (and hopefully not insulting) in saying that caprese anything is a combination of tomatoes, fresh mozzarella (think soft, mild, buttery, succulent) and basil. Mozzarella di buffola is buffalo mozzarella in Italian (I am still committed to providing all translations).

Now it is definitely the time of year for abundant fresh and cheap basil. Since I don’t have my balcony garden set up yet (and even when I have had basil plants they are always picked clean to a morbid and grotesque extent) and since I live in the grocery wasteland of Queen West, I try to take advantage of groceries when I see them. This can be as practical as stopping in Kensington on my ride home from work or as ill-thought-through as buying a baguette on my way to the bar. In a tireless quest to perfect the practical, I stopped at the green grocer at the corner of Manning and Bloor on my way home from work the other day. The Manning Market is one of those places where I do what I like to call my carpe diem produce shops. So long as you’re not stock-piling veggies for some unforeseen natural disaster, which you can’t really do anyway, the Manning Market is the place to buy. In stark contradiction, though, there was that one disturbing time when my sister and I road-tripped to Upstate New York, bought a head of lettuce, came back to Canada with the lettuce, which I then proceeded to forget about, and rediscovered it 4 months later, pristine, in my veggie crisper. To clarify, the road-trip wasn’t disturbing, it was great, and the trip wasn’t for the purpose of buying the lettuce. That was just incidental. The very important and eerie message about certain American produce however needs no further explanation.


You may, or may not, be wondering why there are no photos of the caprese or at the very least basil, and why, conversely, I’ve posted a photo of a bowl with what looks to be 7 pieces of rigatoni in it. Well, I’ve done so because today’s post is actually about the by-product of that caprese: the pesto I made with the loads of remaining, and rapidly aging, basil.


Traditional Genoese pesto is made from basil, olive oil, pine nuts, parmigiano reggiano and garlic. In 2007, I spent 10 hedonistic days in northern Italy visiting friends on Lago di Como. Northern Italy is breathtaking and on top of that I ate well. The food at gas stations in Italy (please don’t ask me why I know this) was without a doubt better than many restaurant meals in Toronto and after only 10 days away, eating at home seemed lacklustre and depressing for weeks.

Unlike that of my Genoese soul mates, this evening’s pesto was made by throwing basil, olive oil, sunflower seeds, hemp seeds, flax seeds and small amounts of both parmigiano reggiano and cave-aged gruyere into the food processor. No salt necessary since parmigiano gets the job done. The other photo is of an arugula, toasted pine nut, jalapeno oil (homemade) pesto which I made another night. We’ll call it Pesto 2. I added the photo of Pesto 2 in an attempt to compensate for the photo of Pesto 1.


Pesto 1 (and Pesto 2 for that matter) did not disappoint. Flavourful, colourful, creamy, fresh, simple food.


If you’ve come to the well-reasoned conclusion that I forgot to photograph the meal before eating it, ergo the photo of 7 noodles, I’m not going to sugar-coat it, you’re wrong. The sensational truth is that I made the pesto on the tail of the caprese in that foreboding and pointless attempt to outfox Father Time. I wasn’t hungry, but was also not comfortable with the idea of not trying the pesto while it was fresh. While hunger is typically not something I take into consideration when deciding whether to eat, today I boiled a scant few noodles, enjoyed the pesto, and froze the rest for another day. Cryogenics. Brilliant.