Red Pepper Pesto

I haven't posted any cooking as of late mostly because I have been completely and utterly out of spoons. On top of that, my trusty Braun hand-blender finally met its end. It was the first kitchen gadget I bought when I moved to England, and it did eight solid years of making breadcrumbs, soups, sauces, hummus, pesto, crushing ice and just about anything else you would use one for.

It has been dying a slow death for a while (any look back on the recipes posted on this blog shows how much I have used it), but last weekend made the most awful screeching noise, and when I took off the blade shaft, it was full of black gunk, which meant that the motor had now well and truly died. I would be sad (dead kitchen gadgets always are), but I got my £15 worth and then some, and it was really just an excuse to buy a new one!

I came across a recipe for Red Pepper Pesto in the latest magazine published by my local Co-op supermarket and decided to try it today to break in my new shiny Braun hand blender.

I'm considering this low-residue recipe, as the skin and seeds from the peppers are removed and the pine nuts are ground. I have generally found that I'm fine with nuts as long as they are ground. If you really want to low-residue it, use 2 tsp of garlic powder instead of garlic cloves.

So what to do. Cut and de-seed 5 red peppers, removing the steams and the white insides. Lay skin side up in a roasting tray and spritz with sprayed olive oil.

The recipe said to roast them under a hot grill for 20 minutes until the skins start to blacken, but I found they needed 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, I toasted 50g of pine nuts in a dry frying pan, giving them a shake every few minutes to turn them.

Once they were done, I ground the nuts with the hand blender.

I peeled and chopped two large cloves of garlic and set them aside.

When the peppers were done, I used tongs to move them into some big resealable bags. The steam helps to loosen the skins.

I then peeled the skins off, which is a bit of a messy job. 

Then, using the hand blender, I mashed up the peppers with the garlic.

Then I added the ground nuts to the peppers.

I then added 30g of Parmesan cheese, 1 tsp of paprika and some ground black pepper and mixed it with a spatula.

Meanwhile, I cooked up some spaghetti. I had some leftover turkey in the freezer from making a roast last week, so I thawed some of that and threw that in.

The recipe said to use 1/4 of the sauce per serving. Two spoonfuls (nowhere near 1/4 if the mixture) was far more than I would have used! In fact the recipe said it serves four, and I got 6 small size containers full for leftovers!

It's quite nice, but I found it needed a bit of salt to really bring out the flavour. I also added some extra Parmesan and black pepper, and if I were to make it again, I would probably add another clove of garlic. But overall, it was quite good and went down a treat.