cilantro pesto

Ah, Cilantro Pesto. I made this two years ago and it lasted through the entirety of the year. It has a freshness that can't be touched in the dead of winter and in the summer it is exactly the way that summer should taste!

I just took in the first harvest of cilantro this morning. It's important to do that before it goes to flower. The leaves loose their vitality and taste to a degree once the plant flowers. Mine was shooting up spikes of frondy kind of leaves and I new it was now or never. Another thing about growing cilantro that makes it nice, is that the plants are so forgiving. I left about a quarter of the existing leaves on each plant and they will grow into full bushy cilantro plants again within a couple of weeks. Harvesting this stuff is a joy in itself: The smell is amazing.

So, what do you do with a whole harvested garden row of cilantro? MAKE PESTO!! This pesto freezes so well, and doesn't loose a bit of its color. Really, great stuff. The lime really adds to the

natural flavor of the Cilantro, it doesn't get in the way.

I used a recipe that I found three years ago on a foody blog post... here is the link, http://5secondrule.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/04/summertime-is-pesto-time-with-an-overabundance-of-basil-in-my-earth-box-the-boys-and-i-head-outside-on-hot-afternoons-to-p.html. Kind of a big link... anyway, I took between 8 to 10 bunches of cilantro out of my garden and made pesto out of the whole lot of it. So, I have about 8 to 10 times the amount of pesto that

the recipe makes. The final product fit nicely in a larger cereal bowl.

It took about half an hour to finish it up. I would also recommend listening to The Civil Wars while making this. I did, and although I'm not guaranteeing that the pesto will taste better for it, I bet it might. :)

Here is the basic recipe with my own little tweaks here and there.

You can compare it against the original on the blog post that I linked to above.

1 bunch of cilantro (the original blog said to discard the stems a short distance from the leaves, but if you are growing your own cilantro, the stems don't get nearly as woody as the store bought stuff and they have a ton of flavor, so I treat them like asparagus, I bend them until they snap and use the part closest to the leaves. If they don't snap clean then they are too woody to use in the pesto).

1 half a lime, zest and juice

a grind or two of black pepper

3 tablespoons of Canola Oil. (I actually like the clean taste of this better than Olive Oil. This pesto should taste fresh and clean.)

1/16 Tbs of salt. (just a tiny pinch)

And that's it. I grated the limes with a microplane. Everything is pretty straight forward here. Combine the cilantro, lime juice and zest, Black Pepper, and salt in a food processor. Start the thing spinning, then drizzle in about half of the oil as it spins around. Stop it, scrape down the sides with a spatula, then start it up again and drizzle in the rest of the oil. You should really do this in a small steady stream as the pesto churns around. Also, I would advise making at least a double recipe, it doesn't really make a ton and, at least in my food processor, it kind of sat under the blades and didn't blend as well until I added another full recipe to the mix. Plus, it uses up a whole lime nicely.

That's it. Hope you enjoy it. If you choose to make some and try freezing it, I did it in ice cube trays and then kept the little green jewels in a ziploc in the freezer.