We love broccoli, but sometimes we have a hard time coming up with ways to use it. We steam, blanch, stir fry and grill it in veggie kabobs. We add it to tofu dishes, soups, stews, and salads. We eat it raw with dips. We wanted to find new recipes to incorporate this truly luscious and nutritious veggie into our meals.
So we turned to our trusty Vegetarian Times, which never lets us down. After a few minutes of searching we hit upon a perfect match: bowtie (farfelle) pasta and broccoli pesto. We had never heard of broccoli pesto, but our terrible culinary faux paus a few years ago with basil pesto and blender made us want to try it. In our basil pesto episode a while back, the recipe required a blender, but we forgot to secure the lid before we revved up the machine. Suffice it to say, we spent several hours wiping green oozy and oily pesto from our kitchen ceiling–not to mention our selves–and we vowed to avoid pesto ever since.
But this new broccoli recipe called for a food processor, and ours, like others, doesn’t start unless the lid is snapped shut–lucky for us. And this broccoli pesto seemed so easy we had to try it. All we had to do was blend the cooked broccoli, mint, lemon, hazelnuts and a few other ingredients in a food processor and cook the pasta. The pesto called for a quarter cup of oil olive, which left a fairly stiff but pliant mixture. We folded the pesto into the warm cooked bowties in a large bowl. And that was it.
We added a fresh romaine lettuce salad with tomatoes dressed with a homemade lemon
vinegarette as well as crispy garlic toast made with about two gloves of minced garlic and a few tablespoons butter. And dinner was served. Total prep and cooking time was about 1 hour. And we couldn’t have waited longer because the pesto looked and smelled divine. In the end however, we think this recipe was a little bland. It was missing the punch that pesto has when made with basil. We could taste the lemon and garlic, but it just wasn’t quite enough to carry the whole dish. The broccoli made for great color, but sadly added very little flavor. But it was a nice change from the basil variety and is a great way to add more broccoli to your diet. You can find the recipe here if you’d like to try it for yourself.
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