Presto Pesto, Vegan by Default.

It's been awhile since I wrote a food post, but I made a pesto sauce tonight that I want to record for posterity and share with you all, because it was delicious, if I say so myself!

Because I'm pregnant/lazy/tired/hot/etc, I haven't done a big shop yet this week and I've been scrounging around in the pantry, fridge and freezer to put together meals. Tonight, it was either bean and rice burritos, or spaghetti. Since the burritos would've required me to make some tortillas, and that requires far more energy than I care to expend at the moment, spaghetti it was. But who, but a three year old and a five year old, wants to eat plain old spaghetti? So, I looked in the pantry,  fridge and freezer and here's what I found:

1. Frozen peas
2. Lemons
3. Garlic
4. Olive Oil
5. Pine nuts

With these things, I cobbled together a vegan pea pesto, just eyeballing the amount of each ingredient. (And lest you think this is purposely vegan, it's not. If I had found parm in my fridge, it would've been in the sauce...) 

Here's what I did:

In a skillet, I heated up some olive oil and threw a few crushed cloves of garlic in there. 

When the pasta was nearing the end of boiling time, I dumped the frozen peas into a colander and stuck the whole colander in the boiling water. I took it out when the peas looked a healthy green, then rinsed them under cold water. I poured the peas into my food processor (reserving a bunch to put in the kids' pasta), then drained the pasta. To the peas, I added the juice of one lemon, and a lot of pine nuts. I can't say how much... the whole bag, pretty much. I pureed those up, adding the olive oil in a stream through the feeder until the consistency looked right. I left it a little chunky, just thick enough to coat the spaghetti. I didn't add garlic to this mixture because of the garlic-infused olive oil but if you don't make the olive oil, then definitely add a few cloves of garlic. 

I portioned out two bowls of plain spaghetti, added butter and the reserved peas. I gave these boring bowls to the kids. The remainder of the spaghetti, I added to the infused olive oil, stirred it around and served it up in bowls for Henry and I, with a big spoonful of the pesto on top. Seriously delicious. 

Also, no pictures because do you know how hard it is to photograph green food well? Very.