Our secret recipes...revealed!

After reading RIK's post about making micro-green pesto, I thought I'd share the two recipes we settled on as the very best (you can see the results of our vigorously nerdy taste-test here and here; good spreadsheets and MSWord tables are, for better or worse, a part of the Farmitage ethos).

As RIK mentioned, we used a food processor to make each of our pestos. The rest of the preparation is pretty straightforward: add the ingredients, one by one, and keep pushing down on that pulse button. The olive oil is usually added gradually, as the final ingredient.

And yes...this is a world wide web exclusive: get in line, micro-green pesto innovators!

Without further ado:

Recipe 1: Roasted Garlic and Walnut Micro-Green Pesto (i.e. "the Pauly Walnuts")
Ingredients:
1. 3 cups micro-greens (ours were a mix of sunflower, daikon radish and broccoli raab)
2. 1/2 cup toasted walnuts
3. 1/2 cup shredded parmesean
4. 1 head roasted garlic
5. 1 clove raw garlic, minced
6. 1/2 cup olive oil
Flavor: The roasted garlic compliments the original flavor of the micro-greens really well. The daikon radish and micro-green earthiness come through clearly, but it still tastes like a good ol' fashioned pesto.

Recipe 2: Sun-Dried Tomato and Minced Garlic Micro-Green Pesto (i.e. "the Vafangu")
Ingredients:
1. 5 cups micro-greens
2. 5 cloves of raw garlic, minced
3. 1 teaspoon lemon juice
4. 1/2 cup toasted pine nuts
5. 1/4 cup shredded parmesean
5. 2/3 cup olive oil
6. 1 cup sun-dried tomatoes, drained and thinly sliced
Special note: Leave all the sun-dried tomatoes and a 1/4 cup of the pine nuts out of the food processor and add them when the rest of the pesto is done.
Flavor: This one had a really pleasant, low-key taste, pretty similar to a regular basil pesto. The mouthfuls with a few slices of sun-dried tomato and one or two whole pine nuts were particularly good.
Attribution: This recipe is suspiciously similar to this one, with micro-greens tagged in for the arugula. Read More...

"There is no room for that beer; the fridge is full of microgreens."

A few weekends ago Max B. and I dreamed about what we'll do when we have excess bounty from the Farmitage. (We hope we didn't get ahead of ourselves.) To explore this ideal, we ran an experiment using extra microgreens produced in the science lab run in the daytime by Max B. and The Breach.

We had about 5 lbs. of various microgreens (radish, sunflower, cress, etc.) to use up--all on the bitter side. What to do when you have excess bitter greens that are best served uncooked? Clearly, pesto! Since pesto is raw and vegetable-based, there aren't really any hard rules which was a plus to the medium. After a search for "microgreen pesto" gave us nothing, we tagged in arugula and had options galore, none of which were off the table, including dubious ones like yours, Robert Love.

Our tools were pretty basic: a food processor (with an engine that smells like burning), a cheese grater, wine, stale baguette, and a few Lyle Lovett albums, most notably Pontiac. The night proceeded accordingly and ended with a classic taste test. Summation: Our hypothesis that microgreens can replace arugula was indeed correct, and roasted garlic is still the best pesto ingredient.

Anyway, I think the pictures pretty much speak for themselves. Enjoy!






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