So this cooking adventure started at Panera. I had their tomato and mozzarella panini a few weeks ago, and I thought, I could make this at home if I had the right sundried tomato pesto spread. The rest of the ingredients are simple.
But I had a hard time finding the kind of recipe I wanted. Most sundried tomato spread recipes were based on cream cheese, which sounds delicious also, but wasn’t what I was looking for. And then there were some that were more pesto-y, with a lot of olive oil, which would be perfect for pasta, but I wasn’t sure how they would work on bread as a sandwich spread.
I finally found something like what I was looking for on a website called Kalyn’s Kitchen.
You need fresh parsley and basil. The recipe didn’t specify, so I used curly leaf parsley. Is there a big difference between varieties of parsley?
Here is where I admit that I am not at all used to using fresh herbs. I have no idea what the best way is to chop, dice, mince, tear, or otherwise properly process them. And to tell you the truth, I am a little afraid of them. So I just kind of roughly chopped them up and figured I could put them in the Cuisinart a step ahead, with the garlic, and let the food processor do the processing. That is, after all, its job title.
Here’s my six cloves of garlic:
And here’s everything chopped up.
At this point, I added the sundried tomatoes. I just threw the whole jar in and didn’t bother draining the oil.
One did not want to join the group, but was eventually persuaded.
Sundried tomatoes may be my favorite kind of tomatoes.
Added two cups of parmesan cheese. I used the cheap stuff, because two cups of the good stuff would have cost $40.
I needed some lemon juice, which I squeezed ineptly by hand.
And then I processed it all up.
This made a ton. I will have to remember to halve this recipe in the future.
In the meantime, if anyone I know would like some sundried tomato pesto spread, you are welcome to come over to my house with a container and take some. It is supposed to be good for up to a month in the refrigerator. You can put it on sandwiches, or pasta, or eat it on crackers. You could probably use it to top some meat products, but I wouldn’t know anything about that.
I put it on sandwiches. This is store-bought sourdough bread (since my sourdough weekend experiment was not successful), brushed with olive oil, with mozzarella and the sundried tomato pesto spread on the inside. And it was good.
