Presto! A fast and easy pesto

Cooking Italian food is second nature to me. I don't need recipes, and I don't need too much thought to put together a dish. Growing up roughly 25 percent in a house where both my mother and father excelled at Neapolitan-style food meant to me that any sense of culture I had was given to me through cooking. I remember getting a little choked up the first time I made marinara sauce (or gravy, as it's called in my house) at college just because the smell made me feel at home.

That all being said, my family never made a pesto. The dish originates from the Genoa region, the root of the word referring to a pestle, which is how the sauce is traditionally made.

It being the 21st century, I used a food processor, which can pump out a pesto for you in about 3 minutes.

Like I said, I'm not going to measure out any of these ingredients. This is what I used:

From Another Cook in the Kitchen

2 cloves of garlic (1 if you're sensitive to the flavor, but I love garlic)

olive oil

about 2 cups of basil leaves

a handful of pine nuts

about a 2 1/2 by 1-inch cube of romano cheese

(Can coat probably 4 servings of pasta)

I really recommend to anyone that cooks a lot of Italian food or wants to make pesto sort of frequently to get a basil plant. They need a lot of sunlight, but that's about it. I've found of all the plants I've had that they are the easiest in terms of upkeep.

If you really trust your food processor to shred the hell out of the cheese for you, then you don't have to pre-shred it yourself with a grater. Otherwise, I'd recommend shredding it beforehand. (This is also the obvious choice if you're going the pestle route.) The cheese is the binding agent of this dish, so when the cold pesto hits the hot pasta, it will stick when the cheese melts.

The rest of it really doesn't get much harder than putting all the ingredients in the processor (olive oil last, about a 7 count) and shredding them up! To get the pesto out of the processor, I recommend using a spatula to get out every last bit of basil.

From Another Cook in the Kitchen

I put my pesto on top of some fettuccine and had it for lunch. But don't limit your pesto making to pasta or even Italian food. You could substitute the olive oil for butter and make some pesto garlic bread out of it. Pesto works well on pizza dough, which you could cut in small pieces and top with melted cheese as an appetizer. I've even taken a mixture of rosemary, parsley and mint and used that in place of basil and encrusted some lamb with it.

From Another Cook in the Kitchen

Look for that Tackle Box post soon. Next weekend, I'll be reviewing D.C. food star Jose Andres' Jaleo.