When I’m on the road I stay at a room with a kitchenette and boil up pasta with pesto sauce.  By far my favorite pesto is called Sauces ‘n’ Love, which Whole Food sells.  It’s a refrigerated pesto and neither has the bitterness nor the staleness in jar pesto and other refrigerated brands.  Today, though, with a bouncy castle week off the road I decided to make homemade pesto.  My wife and I went to Lincoln Park’s Green City Market and bought some fresh basil from Growing Power, a favorite spot of ours and bought some Italian basil.   With some pine nuts, garlic, Parmigano-Reggiano cheese, salt, pepper, and olive oil, and a blender or food processor and shazam!  Pesto is done in 10 minutes.  I still haven’t been able to match Sauces ‘N’ Love but believe I added too much garlic and didn’t take some stems and leaf-ends, which added bitterness.  The recipe came from Ruth Reichel’s Gourmet cookbook, but I also found the online link to share.

However you make pesto, hopefully you will find it’s much, much better than what you find in most supermarket shelves.