Cilantro-Serrano Pesto (with Chicken and Penne)

Lately, I have been eating pesto medicinally. I have had this recipe on my radar since I first purchased the cook book in which I found it (Cooking Light - Best of Everyday Favorites) more than 2 years ago. I foolishly believed that I was unable to make delicious homemade pesto sauces because as I am yet unmarried, I don’t own a freaking food processor. I guess if you are a white girl in these United States, when you get married, you are automatically awarded by the State one food processor and one Gucci-ass big ol’ stand mixer. It’s our 40 acres and mule. So I thought that homemade pesto, like motherhood and a decent credit rating, was just on the other side of the fence from me. ALAS, for the first time ever in my life I was mistaken. You CAN make pesto without the aid of a big fancy food processor – I did it with a little dinky onion chopper.

Lotta practice tearing wings off bugs as a child.

 This pesto is so fresh and crisp and summery flavored. I mean I guess it is summery flavored. I guess I remember what summer is like. This has been the longest and wettest and coldest pacific northwestern spring I have ever experienced. Moss is growing on everything I own. Sickly, sickly moss. I looooooooooooooooong for some freaking sunshine and this pesto recipe is so delicious, that I tricked myself into thinking I could eat it for dinner on the back porch. The soggy mossy porch. So, if you live in a place what already has summer, or at least where spring isn’t freezing monsoon season, then I encourage you to eat this recipe out of doors. For the rest of us, pretending will have to be enough.

Suggested use: This pesto goes fantastically over whole grain penne and a cup or two of halved cherry or grape tomatoes, which is how I will serve it for the purposes of this recipe. Additionally, it “rocks over London” mixed 50-50 with some thawed and squeezed dried frozen spinach, and a couple of tablespoons of goat cheese, and rolled up in a pounded flat chicken breast. It is delish on toast, in scrambled eggs, spread on sandwiches, really in any case where traditional basil pesto is used. As my dear mother has said more than one time, I would eat a fucking pine cone, if there was enough of this spread on it. It will keep for at least a week in the fridge, but I guarantee you will eat the hell out of it before it gets a chance to spoil.

An important, if overlooked, member of the UN of cheese.

Also, this recipe calls for Cotija cheese. Cotija is an aged Mexican cheese that is stupid amazing. It is salty and nutty and kinda crumbley like feta. They sell it in most grocery stores, but for some reason they segregate it from the other cheeses. In my little suburban universe, they always group it next to the orange juice, along with some kind of flan looking stuff. If you can’t find Cotija cheese at your grocery store, then use Parmesan cheese. Also, move.

Summa these parts = a whole lotta yumma.

Again, this recipe calls for a lot of fresh herbs, which can be pricey as hell, but also all of these herbs and peppers can be grown in pots or windowfarms fairly easily, and for notta lotta scratch. I am specifically planting the ingredients in my garden this year, so as I never ever have to be without this pesto again. Not without my Pesto.




Please enjoy this super easy and amazing recipe. And then enjoy it again spread on your turkey sandwich for lunch. And then again smeared on crusty bread with your next dinner. And then again on your English muffins, under your poached eggs and avocado for breakfast the next morning. And then again when you catch yourself just scooping a finger directly into it like peanut butter every time you pass through the kitchen until finally your significant other asks you if anything is wrong. God damn, it’s good.

Shizz Besides the Basics:
If you have a food processor, by all means use it. Add all the ingredients except the olive oil, and pulse until you have a paste, and then run it on low or whatever, and add the oil as it’s still going. Harness the power of the internet if you need further instruction.

For the rest of us: I have this awesome little onion chopper made by Chef’n. It has a big ol’ circular pull ring, like “the dog says bark” kinda action. I just threw everything in it and pulled the string until it mostly resembled the pesto I am accustomed to seeing in other people’s grocery carts. If your pesto is too thick and clumpy, loosen it up with a few tablespoons of starchy cooking water from your penne.

Ingredients:
Pesto:
1 ½ cups fresh cilantro

½ cup fresh mint

1/3 cup cotija cheese (or a widdle more or less, to taste)

3 tablespoons toasted pecan halves (buy them shits raw in the bulk section of your grocer’s store and then toast on a cookie sheet at 350 for 5 minutes, cool completely)

1 teaspoon kosher salt

2 garlic cloves (or 3 or 4 or maybe 5 if you’re a dirty birdy)

Cyrano de Penis Pepper.

1 Serrano chile, seeded and sliced (honestly, I wish I had used two. Serrano peppers are pretty much the best thing)

2 tablespoons extravirgin olive earl

2 teaspoons sherry vinegar (I include this part as a courtesy to the original recipe, but I have never used it, as I have never seen sherry vinegar in the grocery store. Never. I have some cooking sherry but it has a lot of salt in it because it’s the bad kind, so I don’t use it very often. If you have some fancy vinegar, I guess you should use it. I never have and I lived to tell, so who knows. It is stupid delish without it.)

1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper



For pasta for two (with half the pesto left over for use on literally everything else):
1 ½ cups dry whole grain penne pasta

~1 cup chicken breast (I used the left over mixed chicken from the baked chicken used for soup and stock) but otherwise, about one large boneless skinless breast, cubed and pan sautéed until done.

1 cup cherry tomatoes, halved


Order of Operations:
1. Set your penne water to boiling.

2. As stated before, I really enjoy the no-mind practices involved with cooking. I tend to take the slower and more involved route to get to the prize at the end. We could discuss why, but I don’t think that’s really any big mystery. I also enjoy using an embarrassing amount of prep bowls and setting all of my ingredients out before hand, and having them all in order and ready to go when I need them. It soothes my self-diagnosed and wholly invented OCD. Also I forget things a lot. Where am I? Oh right.

A Whore's Bath. Also, wash ya herbs.

3. Wash and spin your herbs. Begin the slow and mindful and mindless task of plucking each cilantro leaf from its stem, and place them in a bowl.

4. Mint follows suit. Alternatively, you can wash your herbs and dump them stems and all into your food processor.

5. Crumble with fingers or attempt to grate your fantastic cotija cheese.

C D Cds?

6. Using a smaller paring knife, open up your washed Serrano. See them seeds? Those will get hot juice on your fingers which will burn your eyes and peepee and other mucus membranes if you do not wash hands directly after handling your peppers. Only you can prevent forest fires.

The little men in the boat.

7. Remove the fire seeds and discard. I use a plastic measuring spoon like a scoop. They make specific pepper de-seeding devices, but come on. You have a drawer full of shit you don’t use already. Find something in there.

Don't mince words, only chili peppers.

8. Slice up your safely seeded Serrano into baby tiny pieces.

Garlic Press.

9. Use your big knife to pop the garlic bulbs on a cutting board to remove their skins. I cut out the root also, for stock purposes mostly, and vanity.

It would be cooler if pasta screamed like shellfish.

10. Your pasta water should be boiling like hell by now, and you shoulda probably already added and started cooking your penne. Sort it out.

Food processor, schmood processor.

11. As I go along through this list, I am putting my ingredients into prep bowls. This isn’t really a necessary or even valuable step, in any way, other than it makes for better pictures maybe. You can and probably should, be just tossing these ingredients into the bowl of your food processor, or into the bowl of your dinky onion chopper, as you go through them and get them ready to go. If you are weird and particular like myself, then go ahead now and dump all your prep bowls into your processor. Cilantro, mint, cheese, salt, pecans, garlic and Serrano peppers go into the mixer-upper of your choosing.

12. Process by whatever means necessary until well blended. For me that means about 15 to 20 pulls on the ol’ speak n spell ring.

My food chute not pictured.

13. Add your olive oil. Either thru the “food chute” or just open the lid up and dump it in, before re-lidding and another 5 to 10 string pulls.

14. Scrape pesto out into a large bowl and add sherry vinegar (yeah, right) and black pepper. Well done, everybody.

Cut down the road, not across the street.

15. Wash and slice your cherry tomates. I can’t decide if I like to slice them horizontally or acrost the middle, so I do half and half which satisfies my weird empathy issues and my need for symmetry quite well.

I serve my pasta Al Dentata.

16. Penne gets drained (but reserve about a half cup of cooking water) and into the pasta bowl.







17. Add as much or as little pesto as you like to your pennepasta. Couple of tablespoons of pasta water right down in the middle of it all, add your chicken and tomatoes, and stir it up 'til it is time to disco.

18. Serve it up alone, or with a lil salad and veg and bread and you got yourself a little dinner going here. Big ups.

19. This pasta and pesto action has about 440 calories and 14 gramma fatso in it, if you have to know.