dinner fail

Tonight i decided i'd avoid making meat and cook a pasta dish for me and des. i found a nice looking recipe at my favorite site for arugula pesto. Fantastic. I gathered the ingredients. Roasted the garlic. Roasted walnuts. The pic in the link makes it look all clean and white, while mine ended up being green, grassy, and too intense (raw garlic). Alternate bites would yield alternate results...first a tasty chew, then essence of lawn clippings.



There's Desi chowing down on my green fiasco. Later she would complain of intestinal pain, and I blame myself. I have created death pesto, which attracted Tacky the Death Cat to creep up on Des in that pic. He was about to harvest her soul. I fended him off with a couch cushion and a hissing noise. Weak-ass Death Cat.

Post mortem: I believe my main failure was in the amount and kind of arugula I added. I hyper-compressed the cupfuls, so it was likely too much. The recipe called for arugula leaves, and I left the stems on. That would explain the woody/grassy taste of the pesto. The garlic intensity was pretty clear cut. I have to get a better idea of what a "clove" constitutes. I bet I had a couple that were too big, so when I roasted them, they didn't roast all the way through and as a result were super-intense. I was supposed to add a half-clove of raw garlic for a little kick, and instead added the equivalent of 4 cloves.

Overall, I'd recommend it, with the caveats of removing the damn stems and roasting the garlic fully. I was wondering what it would taste like if the arugula leaves were blanched in boiling water as well. I'll report.