Here’s a crazy fast and delicious recipe for a Friday. Basil Pesto. Honestly, it takes 10 minutes to make and apparently keeps for an eternity. This was the 3rd sauce I made on Sauce Day last week. Unfortunately I don’t have any photos of this pesto on anything yet, so I’m limited to an unappealing photo of it still in the mixer bowl. I didn’t really think the photos for this one through. But I can tell you it is delicious. But instead of my usual “finished recipe” photo to start, here’s a picture of the abundance of basil I’ve got growing on my back steps. The stuff is growing like weeds, and it is delicious and incredible having it fresh whenever I want to cook with it. But it was starting to take over this flower pot, so I decided to cut down half of it and make a big patch of pesto.

I should admit here that although I had Mario Batali’s recipe, I first decided to just “wing it” and make up a pesto recipe for a new How To page. I kind of realized this wasn’t going to work as I planned, so I went back to Batali’s recipe and tried to adjust it best I could with the ingredients I had (I didn’t use any pecorino romano, just parmesan). So I’m posting the original Batali recipe here, but my results are a little more of a bright green affair than his are in the magazine. And I doubled the amounts in this recipe because I had so much basil. But here is the original.

Basil Pesto (from Mario Batali’s recipe in the May ’10 Food Network Magazine)
Makes about 1 cup of pesto

3 garlic cloves
2 cups lightly backed fresh basil leaves
3 Tbsp pine nuts
Generous pinch of sea salt (he suggests Maldon, I used kosher salt)
1/2 cup plus 2 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
1/4 cup freshly grated parmesan
3 Tbsp grated pecorino romano

Read more on Recipe-A-Day Week Vol. III, Day 6: Basil Pesto…