piero's sun dried tomato pesto pasta

Instead of populating the world with more resource hogging American babies,¹ part through our peculiar life circumstances and the rest by subsequent choice, and by sharing a single almost sensible traditional passenger car, the ani and bob show realized as it was cruising into/through middle age that it was not entirely (at least financially) insane to take advantage of winter airfare bargains when airlines practically give away transatlantic tickets and do long weekend vacations in Europe. Ani being an American wage slave with precious few annual vacation days, a chunk of which are usually reserved to meeting bob during his academic summer visits to Rome, just never has the time to do real European vacations. [Dare we admit this in public? Okay, we're still guilty of abusing the world with our middle class lifestyle.] So with Philadelphia's direct European destination list growing, our winter flight choices have broadened considerably.

Munich was a logical choice. bob had spent 9 months living in its Schwabing neighborhood at the beginning of the eighties when there was still a "West" Germany officially, and as the millennium was approaching, our Roman astronomer/astrophysicist friend Piero was working at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) headquarters right next to the Max-Planck-Institüt für Astrophysik in the suburb village of Garching where nonastrophysicist dr bob had been a guest, now connected to the city center by subway. Allowing us to easily buzz on out to Piero's place for our parting Saturday night dinner. The bus driver helped us get off at the right stop in town minutes from the end of the U6 line, and a pizza place person helped us find his apartment building address. All in English. German internationalism.

bob confesses that he was not entirely confident of Piero's ability to deliver on this dinner thing. So when the mascarpone-filled avocado halves came forward followed by the terrific pesto pasta made with the Braun super hand blender system we'd helped him decide to buy earlier that day, bob was really impressed, as were Helene the Dutch-Brit colleague and Gordon the Canadian collaborator from Bezerkeley, another old stomping ground of dr bob before the prefix got added. (dr.) And of course Ani the Lebanese Armenian cooking team partner. We're apparently hopeless internationalists. The pesto had been an earlier improvisation of Piero in when he was closer to us back in America, perhaps influenced by Annette the Scotch Canadian astrophysicist companion, now in England, an annoying commute. The old dual career couple problem. Anyway, enough of this culture name dropping. This pesto recipe will be the one concrete reminder of our Munich trip that will linger on with us the remainder of our culinary days.

By coincidence Ani's Israeli colleagues Penina and Binyamin had had a bumper crop of tomatoes the preceding summer, the surplus product of which they had had the good sense to convert to sun dried form. A bit of which found its way into our supply cabinet due to their generosity. Waiting for some idea of what to do with it. International kitchen collaboration to the max.

We are regular pesto feeders. We make a big batch and freeze the extra. Comes in handy when a quick supper fix is required. Our recipe guidelines were set by Anne Willan's Look and Cook Perfect Pasta Sauce from her every recipe step, ingredient and kitchen tool fully photographed cookbook series, modified by Marcella's 1/3 Romano cheese substitution to give it more bite, supported by our Italian cooking library sources. Piero used linguini but we had not long pasta on hand, so we stuck with our usual fusilli standard initiated by Anne's choice.


¹Okay, we admit it, it's a dirty job and somebody has to do it. Just not us.
We like kids though. Are we excused?

ingredients

pesto minus cheese
1 c tightly packed basil leaves (1 large "bunch") [okay, so we never packed them into a cup to check]
2/3 c olive oil
3 T pine nuts
5 cloves garlic [we're garlic lovers]
10 sun dried tomatoes, plus 2-3 T soaking water
add the cheese
2/3 c parmigiano
1/2 c romano
finish with
salt to taste
freshly ground black pepper on servings
don't forget the pasta
1 lb fusilli or linguini

instructions

  1. Start the pasta water boiling. Continue with the pesto process but throw in the pasta (and some salt) when the water is actively boiling.
  2. Boil up water in a teapot and use it to just cover about 10 sun dried tomatoes in a bowl with boiling water and cover with a plate. Let sit about 15 minutes. Or boil the sun dried tomatoes directly for 5 minutes or so if you're in a hurry. [We started out with 5 tomatoes the slow way, but finding the resulting color factor not sufficiently in the red zone, we hurriedly readied 5 more the fast way.]
  3. Wash and dry the basil in a salad spinner and pull off the leaves from the larger stalks.
  4. Food process the pine nuts, garlic, and a little oil, then add in the rest oil and basil and process, and then add in the sundried tomatoes and runoff water and process, and then the cheeses and process. Use a spatula to push the pesto down from the sidewalls when necessary.
  5. When the pasta is al dente (check), drain it and vigorously mix in about half the pesto sauce. You only want the slightest hint of sauce to coat all of the pasta surfaces, so no globs are left visible. Freeze the rest of the sauce for another pound of pasta another night. Check for salt and add some if necessary. A minimum sprinkling is probably warranted unless serious health issues are at stake.

notes

  1. For some reason the sun dried tomatoes really give pesto an extra kick worth the additional effort. However, if you are in a traditional pesto mood, just double the basil back to the normal amount and skip the sun dried tomatoes. Tomatoes? Tomatos? Looks like there is a little Dan Quale in all of us now, because the extra ``e" there looks funny to me. In fact it looks funny either way now. English!
  2. The butter factor. Several other pesto recipes suggested putting 2 T of room temperature softened butter in the hot drained pasta and mixing it up before adding the pesto. Maybe it lubricates the pasta to help spread out the pesto? We were a bit worried with our initial pesto glob in the pasta—it did not want to deglob—so we had to add some more oil and tomato liquid to loosen the rest up a bit.
  3. The veggie manual dicer/slicer. bob bought his from a street vendor in 1980 in the central Munich shopping pedestrian mall. Still there in 1998 when another buy took place for the mother-in-law. Useful little device, and ecologically sound. Until it ends up in a landfill.
  4. Did we forget Hans and Hortense? German-Portuguese couple we met by chance in Munich's famous Hofbräuhaus (beer hall and low brow restaurant). Talked for hours. They missed out on Piero's gourmet dinner because they thought they might be out of place in a gathering of old friends. Their mistake. [But bob undertook a missing person search for Hortense's dear American Peace Corps friend Janice met in Niger a dozen years before but lost track of in a later relocation back in the states. Small world, but still big enough to get lost in.]
  5. About the avocados. [No "e" here! Don't ask why.] Cut the ripe avocado in half lengthwise. De-pit it. Rub a few drops of olive oil on the exposed flesh of the avocado. Fill the pit hole with mascarpone cheese (not!). You can mound it up a bit over the rest of the exposed interior as well, so that you can get a bit of mascarpone with each bite. Don't do this too often but at least once is a must. [Not!, since it is not really cheese.] Thank Piero.
pstpesto.htm: 7-aug-2001 [what, ME cook? © 1984 dr bob enterprises]