Arugula Pesto Pasta

(I finally am putting my photos on Flickr, so I reposted the pics in my posts to appear larger. Huzzah! However, I must note that for some of my posts, including this one, photos were taken with my iPhone. Eek.)

Three things to love: arugula, pesto and pasta. In one glorious dish. I've never had the drive to make pesto myself before. For one, I've never owned a food processor. Now I have one of those hand blenders/processors, which is useful most of the time. But there are still things I don't think I can make. At least not without some crazy splatter factor. I also have never owned a mortar and pestle. And three, I have this thing about nuts.

My thing about nuts: I don't have a hatred of nuts. On the contrary, I love creamy peanut butter, marzipan, satay sauce and the like. I just never crave nuts as snacks and hate nut chunks in my food (nuts on ice cream sundaes: sooo gross). Nut chunks throw off the balance of the food bite. When I'm chewing and there are nut chunks involved, the nuts remain the last thing to swallow. Not cool.

Anyway, I was fortunate enough to get some Nalo Farms arugula in my CSA delivery last week. The company I subscribe to distributes a grab bag of produce each week, so it's kind of like Christmas (Hanukkah, whatever) when I receive the goodies. I always shout a big "YES!" when I get arugula. Same reaction goes for getting avocados, lychees, apple bananas and sweet basil. A big "NOooo...ooo!" when it's eggplant or sweet potatoes.

One thing I've discovered is that I'm a much bigger fan of baby arugula rather than mature arugula. Sometimes the spiciness is just too much. So here I was with this bag of mature arugula. After one spicy salad, I decided I needed to do something else with it. Arugula pesto! Without nuts! I looked at this recipe and this recipe as springboards. And of course I left the nuts out. All the ingredient proportions are up to you.

Arugula Pesto

2 cups packed arugula leaves (if you use mature arugula, blanch the bunch for about 15 seconds, dip in ice water and wring dry. If using baby arugula, no blanching necessary)

1/2 cup fresh parmesan cheese

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil

1/2 tablespoon minced garlic

Salt and pepper

Roughly chop the arugula, then blend it up with the garlic, salt and pepper. Drizzle in the olive oil as you blend. Same with the parm — you can pulse this in on a lower speed.

For the pasta, I used some thin whole wheat spaghetti. Cook it just under al dente, as it will cook further when you combine the ingredients.

I also had some leftover buttery-garlic-white wine mushrooms from a barbecue (note: I don't like mushrooms. But these were prepared by a former fine-dining chef. No complaints here). And I threw in some Ho Farms grape tomatoes I had. I'm thinking that I could have used the mushrooms with the pasta alone. But what's done is done. Sigh!

My conclusions about separating the mushrooms and pesto were right. But the dish wasn't too bad, nonetheless.