Homemade Pesto Sauce

Grandma's garden is blooming with herbs and we decided to use some of them for our gifts this year.

First step was collecting a lot of basil to make a pesto sauce.

For a mason jar full of sauce we used the equivalent to 3 times the jar of leaves.

Next steps: wash everything and pick the leaves, throwing away any that was not perfectly fresh.

Oh, the smell in the kitchen...

The recipe is quite simple and we eye-bolled the quantities, ending up with roughly:

• the equivalente of 3 times the jar of washed leaves of basil

• 4 drops of lime

• 3 tablespoons of good quality grated Parmesan cheese

• 2 cloves of garlic

• 6 tablespoons of virgin olive oil

• 1 cup of nuts (originally, Italians use Pinolli, but that's quite expensive here, so we used local Brazilian chestnuts)

• salt and freshly grounded black pepper

You simply mix everything up on a mixer until it gets to the thickness you want. We chose to leave it a bit rustic.

Try the sauce and adjust seasoning or even add ingredients to your liking.

Place the sauce into a sterile mason jar and its done.

To give it as a gift, we chose to use a recicled paper and stamp it with a bird image.

We then wrote the name of the sauce and the date with a fountain pen.

We then envolved the jar with a cotton cloth and fastened it with a natural fiber string. All of these little touches helped create a sense of old-fashioned production, almost like what Little Red Riding Hood would be carrying on her basket ;-)

We used the same paper and stamp again and added the imaginary brand "Les Herbs d'Itupeva" (Herbs of Itupeva, which is the city grandma lives in). It's kind of nice, since people getting this gift will immediatly know the gift was homemade with produce from our garden.

You may add other text to the label, such as ingredients and suggestions of how to use the sauce. We used the back of the label to explain that you may use the quantity of sauce you want and then add a bit of olive oil to the remaining contents on the jar and keep it refrigerated for about 2 months.