Two summers ago, I discovered the magic of hand-cut pesto. I had just moved back to Brooklyn from Baltimore and I was visiting Matt in Baltimore for the weekend.  We had made a trip to the Waverly Farmers Market on a Saturday morning - one of our favorite things to do in Baltimore - and returned home with a ton of produce, among which was a huge bunch of basil and purple string beans (like green beans, but purple!)


One of my favorite pasta dishes is Trofie Genovese, which I discovered at Supper restaurant in the East Village (it used to be my favorite Italian place in NYC but for a variety of reasons, I won't go there anymore.  Feel free to ask me why).  It's a blend of trofie, a thin corkscrew pasta, pesto, green beans, and cubes of potatoes - a very simple dish, but when done well, it's delicious.  I hadn't had this in ages so I decided to create it myself using the purple string beans and basil from the market along with some amazing pasta and cheese from Mastellone's.  There was just one problem - Matt didn't have a food processor or chopper with which to make the pesto.

It was 103 degrees in NYC yesterday so there was no way in the world I was going to stand in the kitchen any longer than absolutely necessary.  We live on the 4th floor of a small walkup building and it gets – and stays – really hot in our apartment.  Combine that with the fact our air conditioners are small units that are not really capable of cooling down a 100 degree room and you have a recipe for a very hands-off dinner.


Eating out and a big salad were not options (the former because we have so much produce from our CSA share and the latter because we had already had one for lunch), nor were turning on the oven or anything that needed more than 20 minutes on the stove so as to not overheat the apartment or the person standing over the stove in the kitchen (which would be me).

Pesto is one of my favorite condiments. It makes everything taste better and can be used a thousand different ways – tossed with pasta, as a sandwich spread, as sauce on a pizza, mixed into mayo (great with frites!), and the list goes on and on. Because you need lots of basil to make a small amount of pesto, summer is the time for making lots of it. Huge bunches of basil are incredibly cheap at the farmers market right now, so I buy lots of basil and make pesto, which I then freeze so that I can unearth it in the dead of winter when basil is expensive. (Tip: freeze it in an ice cube tray, then put all the cubes in a Ziploc bag so you can take out just a little bit at a time without having to defrost the whole container.)