Making Pestos

Pesto is an ingredient we love to use for both pasta and pizza, but itss something we've never actually made on our own up until this point.

Traditionally pesto is made with basil and pine nuts, but there's no reason it can't be put together with different fixings entirely. Today we'll look at two interesting variations we whipped up - sun dried tomato pesto and spinach pesto!

For our sun dried tomato version we're going to use walnuts instead of pine nuts, since they are cheaper and we're more familiar with how to cook them. To start off with we take a bag of walnuts and lightly bake them in the oven.

Next we use about half a bottle of sun-dried tomatoes, using most of the oil packed in the jar.

The tomatoes and walnuts go together in the blender or food processor.

Next we throw in a half cup of Parmesan cheese along with some standard seasonings. It all gets blended together and magically becomes delicious pesto sauce! Add more oil as necessary until you get the correct consistency.

For this pesto we cooked up some rigatoni and then tossed it with the sauce.

This was some of the most delicious pasta we've had in recent memory, and it's a fairly simple recipe. Cover it with some more Parmesan and pepper and throw together a vegetable side for a fantastic weekday dinner.

Next up we made something a little more along the lines of the traditional green pesto. For this version, we toasted almonds in the oven and then blended them with spinach and seasonings to get this thicker pesto below to use as a pizza sauce.

We topped our pesto pizza with roasted red bell peppers and mozzarella cheese.

Here's a slice of delicious pesto and pepper pizza ready to be devoured! We're looking forward to making these again, as well as trying out several new pesto variations in the future.