Basil and Books

This afternoon I decided that I wanted to have some pesto pasta. But, seeing as I have a lot of procrastinating to be doing, a quick meal simply wouldn't do; In order to avoid reading about the electoral systems of Ireland, I needed to make it from scratch. All the pesto recipes that I could find involved a blender, which I don't have.

I was about to completely abandon the idea when I realised that pesto probably came a long time before the blender, and there's bound to be another way of making it. Hence the following:

Parmesan, pine nuts, olive oil, salt, garlic, and basil

I stripped half of the leaves from a conveniently-nearby basil plant, and gathered them together on a chopping board. I then started to chop them, which took a surprisingly long time, and I frequently almost lost the tips of my fingers. I think I must have cut some of the leaves so small that they were invisible to the naked eye; a lot of them seemed to disappear. Hmm.

The mysterious disappearing-basil.

I similarly chopped up the pine nuts and garlic (fingers still intact), and grated some parmesan into the same bowl, before adding some olive oil, salt and pepper then mixing it all up.

Before mixing.

After a lot of mixing and mashing the paste against the side of the bowl to make it look more pesto-y, I put the pasta on the hob while the pesto basilified itself a bit more.

It was meant to be an artistic angle. But no, just blurry.

To try and make it authentically Italian (and bear it in mind I've never been to Italy in my life), I added some fresh mozzarella to the top, cracked an egg yolk into the middle, then spent probably-too-long toying with the idea of putting an decorative basil leaf on the top. I didn't.

It looks like an incredibly mouldy fried egg.

It tasted surprisingly nice, considering there was no real recipe or plan. If anything, it might've even been a bit too basil-ly. The most important thing though, is that it took at least 30 minutes to do. Which meant 30 minutes less of revising electoral systems.

After dinner, I reluctantly returned to revision, and went back to poring over countless articles about electoral reform in Ireland. The author of the first book I read...?

Basil Chubb.