"Sad Greens" Pesto

Prepare your leafy green mix. It can consist of anything you have on deck, including but not limited to kale, spinach, chard, arugula, and the pesto standard of basil. If it is leafy, green, and not lettuce, we'll try blending it into pesto.

Using the flat side of a knife, crush garlic cloves (3) and remove skin, let sit for about 1 minute before cooking. If your leafy greens have stems, remove the leaves from the stems and sautée with garlic in olive oil (about 1 Tbsp) over medium heat.

Using a food processor (or blender) blend leafy greens, handfuls at a time, and lemon juice (1 Tbsp) into a paste. Keep adding olive oil to the mixture to help it blend.

Meanwhile, toast nuts (1/2 cup walnuts) for 3-5 minutes, be careful not to burn. One toasted, coarsely chop and set aside.

Once garlic is browned, add stems and garlic to pesto mix and blend.

Combine about half the the nuts with fully blended pesto and reserve the rest for topping.

Pesto can be stored refrigerated in an air-tight container to use the next day or two.

We recommend using this pesto as a pasta sauce, sandwich enhancement, salad dressing, or breakfast hash topper. But let your imagination run free and try it on anything you want.

Do you ever buy a ton of greens in anticipation of increasing your salad intake? Or maybe you needed a few handfuls of arugula for a recipe and they only had the 500g box in the grocery store. Regardless of the reasoning, time to time you find yourself in a situation where your greens probably only have a day or two's worth of fridge life left. Already, you're finding a few spinach leaves eeking out brown juice, or that basil you bought last week is starting to curl and soon it'll turn brown and mold. In our household, we call these "sad greens".

What do you do with these? You know if you don't act quickly, these greens will have to go into the compost or green bin (or god forbid, the trash). If it's spinach or kale, you can put it in your freezer to add to stir fry or something later, but some of these other greens don't keep as well. Have you ever tried freezing arugula and then using it later? It's really not the same.

We started experimenting with pesto sauce when we realized that we kept struggling to get through a whole package of arugula on our own. Even if we ate arugula salads and added it to our grain bowls and breakfast sandwiches, the one week of fridge life it permitted was still too short to prevent it from "going home" (as Bubie Sheila says). One week night, we tried blending the almost-off arugula (or "rocket") with olive oil and garlic, adding the juice of a lemon wedge that was also close to going off. It tasted...like pesto sauce. And, we didn't even have to add pepper to it! We haven't discriminated against non-basil pesto sauces since.