Parsley plethora recipe: parsley pesto

First, some light housekeeping that you may skip if you’d like:

1) Last week’s Wordless Wednesday post is a photo of Snowy and Molly, a friend’s Cornish Rex cats, taken last Saturday, 6/27/09. The white cat, Snowy, passed away Monday. Rest in peace, Snowy.

2) It’s a lot easier to blog consistently when one is virtually unemployed for six months. Be sad that my posts are few, but be happy that I have work and can start thinking about possibly paying off some debt now. Thanks.

Now, down to business.

So, what do you do when your parsley looks like this…?

4 foot tall parsley

Why, you stop buying overpriced basil and make parsley pesto, of course.

I was trepidatious over the idea of parsley pesto. Who eats parsley, anyway? Isn’t parsley merely a garnish? Isn’t parsley just for show? I wanted to grow it in my garden because so many recipes call for a little bit of it, and I hate buying a whole bunch each time. So I planted some, and now I have a lifetime supply.

So I figured I’d at least try the parsley pesto recipe. When life gives you parsley, make pesto … isn’t that how the saying goes?

The recipe for parsley pesto (linked above) is very similar to the recipe for basil pesto. You use parsley, pine nuts, some garlic, olive oil and salt, just like basil pesto (substituting parsley for basil, of course). You do not add parmesan cheese. But then the explosive difference is the addition of lemon juice. The lemon adds such a nice tangy zing, some might even say a ZANG, to the herby concoction. Especially when you use bottled lemon juice, as I did, because bottled lemon juice is so flavorful. (After Googling around I’ve found some basil-lemon-pesto recipes, which I’ll probably try in the future. But until now, I’ve never used lemon in pesto.)

When you first taste parsley pesto, you can’t go into it expecting basil pesto, if that’s what you’re used to. They’re different animals. But they can be used the same way, and I think that the addition of the lemon juice actually makes for a far more flavorful pesto in general.

My favorite way to use pesto is to add it to noodles. Really, any noodles will do. My first dish with the parsley pesto simply involved some rainbowy-shell-type pasta noodles with grated parmesan cheese on top:

But the next dish I made was fettucine noodles with shrimp that had been marinated in the parsley pesto. The lemon and the shrimp tasted wonderful together, along with the noodles. This is my current favorite dish, though I’m on a shrimp kick. Photo next time; today I was too hungry to stop to take a picture.