Frankenpesto (Reader Recipe!)

Thanks to Oddmonster at Hooray for Dogs!

The worst part about being broke, for me, has always been when you feel broke. When you let the bank balance and bare cupboards get you down, to the point where you start to feel like that wee one digit before the decimal point's some kind of judgment on your eternal sooooooooooooooul.

What can I say? When I get down, I get dramatic.

So I try to find some small indulgence I can give myself until things get better. It's gotta be small and it's gotta be worthy of the splurge, and let's face it, I am hella food-motivated. It's gotta be edible. For me, every time, basil does the trick. Fresh basil, in the summertime, is spectacular. It's fragrant and vivid and tastes amazing. As I have a black thumb, though, I have to buy it at the shop. If you're lucky enough to be able to grow it, it can still be an indulgence, and a clever one at that. Let me introduce: Frankenpesto!

(I feel like he should have some music or something)

The canonical ingredients of pesto are as follows: fresh basil, sweetest most virgin olive oil, aged parmesan, pine nuts picked by hand by retired left-handed nuns, and garlic.

Now, some of those things are perilously expensive, and are not, more importantly, threatening to expire in my fridge.

(Sidenote: it's true, I am possibly over-thrifty in using up everything in my fridge. This is genetic; my grandmother lived through The War, and we've caught her scraping mold off things that she really shouldn't have way too many times. On the other side of the coin, though, CHEESE IS ALREADY MOLD. Sigh. Where was I? Oh! My fridge.)

So, having gotten, out of the blue, a very large bunch of basil that needed to be used up before the heat got it, I canvassed the fridge, and found absolutely none of the above ingredients. Except I did have:

--cheddar
--suspect heel of cambozola
--spinach attempting wiltiness
--plain old canola oil
--cashews and almonds

Seriously, cooking should be fun, and I really can't taste the difference between my pesto and the store-bought pine-nutted version. Right! If you've never made pesto before, it's dead simple. Wash your basil leaves. I personally swear by my salad spinner, which I found at a garage sale for $1. Why? Because every single garage sale ever has a salad spinner. Don't believe me? Hit the pavement this weekend and check for yourself. They're super-useful little critters.

Wash your basil, and assemble the food processor. Or if you're cheap and broke, your blender, the same one your husband mixes margaritas in. Tequila forgives a multitude of sins.

Puree your basil in small batches, while adding tiny (tiny!) splashes of oil to keep things moving. Once you've got a nice base going, toss in some salt and some minced garlic. Puree puree. More basil. Puree. Now some shredded cheese (puree) or some roughly sliced cambozola (purrrrrree). Maybe a dash more oil and another thick handful of basil. Puree. I added spinach too, for undetectable bulk. Puree. Once you have a nice goopy base. Toss in your nuts.

(Now now, peanut gallery)

Puree. Thunkathunkathunka puree-under-protest. Puree.

Keep going until it tastes right. Seriously that's the whole process right there. Then you can freeze some, or mix some with pasta, or you can be me and suck it out of the blender with crackers before your husband detaches from You!Tube and wanders in looking for dinner.

Do not puree. That's punishable with a jail sentence. Instead, simply sit on the back stoop in the sun and have another cracker loaded down with garlicky, cheesy basil goodness, and feel like at least for the moment, you might be the richest person in the world.