Happy New Year’s Eve, everyone!
This has certainly been one hell of a year. I could pull you aside now, and tell you all about the crazy year we’ve had at Yin and Yolk. I could gush about how proud I am of how far this little blog of ours has come. But I’ll spare you. Instead, I’ll just say that I’m thrilled that we’re still kicking, and that you (whether a faithful reader or a casual click) are here with us. We truly love you guys.
We’re going traditional, straight-up, full-frontal Italian with today’s recipe, because I have some very relevant news:
I’m officially going to Italy this summer!
In one month, I’ll be hightailing it out of Boston for a month-long adventure of smelling and eating and seeing all the things in Paris and then a bunch of cities throughout Italy. Even with all my tickets booked, Airbnbs reserved and regional food research completed, I still feel like I could wake up one day and find that all these plans were just a dream; something my travel-thirsty mind created to keep me from going totally insane. (more…)
Here’s a whole lot of green comin’ atcha! What better way to celebrate the weekend?
I always make big plans for my free days or weekends, with the best of intentions. I say I’m going to clean out my closet, finally perfect my brown butter croissant recipe, or spend a whole day prepping meals for the following week. I never, ever do these things. Who do you think I am, superwoman? I usually end up sleeping in, lazily making breakfast, and then I sit around spending way too much time looking at trending recipes, or dream places I could one day live, or fantasy jobs I could one day have. Right now my ideal job is to be a recipe tester at Bon Appetit (but, I mean, whose isn’t. It’s like the unicorn of jobs).
By the time I finally get around to doing anything productive on weekends, half the day is gone and I have to rush around just to get all my necessary errands done. On days like these, I’m always relieved to have a quick, healthy dinner recipe I can pull out of my back pocket. Enter the mighty quinoa bowl.
Basil is the unofficial herb of summer – at least in our books. We love using basil pesto with pasta, roasted vegetables, or even as a salad dressing with an extra bit of olive oil. The recipe is so simple that it is almost impossible to get wrong. Here, we’ll make it two ways: in a food processor, and using a mortar and pestle.
Creamy Pesto
For this pesto, a food processor does the heavy lifting. The garlic is slightly roasted on the stove top here, which gets rid of its bite and yields a much softer and sweeter flavor. Honey is the secret ingredient, but don’t let it weird you out – the sweetness perfectly offsets the savoriness of the pesto. The addition of spinach is great for sneaking more veggies into your kids’ diet, and ricotta really fills it out nicely. The result is a creamy, mellow pesto that’s not only great for picky eaters, but easy to whip up in a pinch. Enjoy!
-L.
