Allow Me to Digress

My so-called retreat to privacy is postponed for now.  I’m back to blogging. Sadly =(  I will not write about something too personal - I would not want to write about my love life, whether it exists or not. (I’m not telling if it exists or not! Hehe :)  Nor do I plan to write about people I loathe, if there’s any.  I will write nothing about my "extreme" (can’t think of an adjective - real? true?) joy, sadness, excitement, frustrations, anger, hopes, and others that will expose too much of myself.  I wouldn’t elaborate on my plans of conquering the world, too.  This is as far as I can share myself to the world wide web - another of my "journey of the stomach" entries.       

Enough of my ex-unwritten rules on blogging.  Yesterday, I was craving for pesto. Badly.  I forgot to have some when I had the chance. 

I asked a couple of friends who love to cook, Clara and Aimee, and asked what basil leaves are in Filipino.  It’s just basil leaves, Clara said.  Aimee said they’re called dahon ng basil. That’s what I thought too Searched the internet for the recipe and found out I have almost all the ingredients Olive oil - check!  Parmesan cheese - check! (Two essentials I brought with me this time - Parmesan cheese and low calorie non-fat salad dressing.) Garlic, pepper, salt - check!

The only missing ingredients are pine nuts (can be substituted for pili nut according to a Filipino website) and of course, basil leaves.

I have vowed not to eat nuts and chocolates, two of my favorite things in the world, for my entire stay here.  I had a chocolate binge two weeks ago and just before I left, I indulged in pili nuts.  A friend ventured to buy those for me from Bicol, despite Mayon Volcano eruptions.  (Thanks, Ate Jeny! Hehehe:) So good-bye chocolates and nuts - for now.    

Oh,  it just dawned on me that I did have pesto before I left.  But it wasn’t pasta, I wanted pesto pasta yesterday. I had it with bread.  Lately I’ve noticed how the information retrieval process of my brain is delayed for some reasons which I don’t know.  Getting old?  For instance, when something reminds me of someone, a student or a friend whom I haven’t seen for a long long time, I spend some time recalling what his name is!  Memory delay disorder. Is there such a thing? But good thing is, I still remember in the end.  Better late than never. 

Ok, so back to my search for basil leaves.  I went to the market looking for "bah-sil leaves," not knowing what they really look like.  I tried "bey-sil" too, but to no avail.  The website says fresh basil leaves!  But then too bad I just have to settle with McCormick basil leaves in those little bottles, as Aimee suggested.  Looking for that was not easy too, in this place.  Finally, in the third grocery I visited, I found one little bottle with bits of  - not fresh, of course, but dried basil leaves.  33 pesos a bottle.  So can I make pesto sauce for my pasta with that?  Would it taste even half as good as pesto made of fresh basil leaves?  On the bright side, I didn’t have to put those in the blender. 

For midnight snack, I had pesto on toasted bread!

Here’s what I found out about pesto from wiki:

Pesto is an Italian sauce that originates in the Liguria region of Northern Italy, specifically in the city of Genoa (pesto alla genovese), although at least one other well-known variant exists: pesto alla siciliana, a sauce from Sicily that replaces the basil of Genovese pesto with tomato. Pesto has been known, in various forms, since Roman times, and probably was imported from North Africa.

I read in a website that "pesto" comes from the Italian word "pestare" which means "to pound." That was how pesto was made before, using mortar and pestle, not using food processor or blender.  Click here for pesto sauce recipe. 

Here’s how i made my pesto.  I just mixed the following:

2 tablespoons of Mc Cormick basil leaves

1 tablespoon of Parmesan cheese, or as much as you want

1 or 2 cloves of garlic - minced

olive oil - You would know how much to put.  Trust your instinct. 

a dash of salt and pepper

The result?  Modesty aside, I loved it!  I must be too hungry.  Fresh leaves would have tasted a lot better, I’m sure.

The question prevails:  What are basil leaves in Filipino? 

What if I used kangkong leaves instead? Hmmm…..

Where can I buy basil seeds?  (I remember having searched for those two years ago for a friend in Beijing. Now I know why he wanted those!) I want to grow basil.

What is kangkong in English?  Questions seem never-ending, but I just have to accept that there are some questions in life that would be left unanswered, or sometimes, one needs patience to get the answers.  And by the way, it’s not having the answers, it’s about asking the right questions, they say.  Ok, I’ll stop right here.   

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006 at 8:16 pm and is filed under Edibles and Other Related Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.