Pesto with gusto!

Pesto sauce is one of the most tasty sauces one could ever taste. That is what I think. It is unlike the marinara or the alfredo, in both colour and taste. Marinara is red, alfredo is white, and pesto is green. Together, they form the trio of sauces that make Italian pasta so irresistible to me.

It is not only me, I gather, who is hooked to pasta made with pesto sauce. My better half, or rather, to be politically correct, my other half, adores it as much, or more than I do. And there lies the hitch. We have not yet learnt to be careful about how much of it we spoon into our baggy stomachs.

Anyone who has ever made pesto at home knows what all goes into it. Much of it is fat and oil. The universal ingredients in pesto sauce are:

1) basil
2) toasted pine nuts
3) garlic
4) olive oil
5) Parmesan cheese
6) salt and pepper

Which are the fatty ingredients here? The pine nuts, the olive oil, and the Parmesan cheese. So, the pesto sauce is a fatty sauce. You can make it in large quantity and keep using it a long time if you keep it in the refrigerator. I've done that with my breads and buns. What a taste it has there too. Since I am wary of having butter, or margarine, pasto makes an extremely tasty spread.

That it is so fatty with saturated fat like pine nuts and Parmesan, I've now a days begun to use more of olive oil. Sometimes I forego the cheese altogether. That way, good fat is more in the sauce. It does not seem much different from the regular butter or margarine, as the olive oil congeals into semi solid in the lower temperature inside the refrigerator.

One thing that one needs to keep in mind with pesto in the house is to use it sparingly, just enough on the bread to get a mild flavour of the basil and the toasted nuts. The less the better.

Whenever I boil pasta, I add pesto to only a small quantity from it, and not the whole pasta in the pan. The rest I prepare as usual, with the red tomato basil garlic herbs sauce. That way, I can get the best of both types of pasta. And keep our calorie intake under control too. For I know, we'd end up finishing more of pesto pasta if I cook more on any single day.

Recipe Books

Nowadays, my reading during a day has come to be circumscribed by what I cook. Most often.

Like if I am planning to cook pasta with soya sauce, I need to clarify what spices I need to add. If it would be ginger, garlic and onion, or something more too. Whether I need to be strictly making an Asian pasta/noodles, or move somewhat away from that path and add the Italian tomato sauce that contains oregano.

It is an extremely good idea to have cookbooks in the house. More if you like cooking, and on top of that, if you have someone in the house who is a finicky eater.

But there are disadvantages to having cookbooks too. You end up making too much good food, and then eating it too. The outcome? Maybe indigestion, obesity, high bp, or even diabetes. And then cholesterol fear always looms large.

The result is that you learn to cook healthy, and eat healthy eventually. Because you search for such recipes in cookbooks that spell out the exact calories and other components, like cholesterol and sodium, that it contains.