As you guys know, I have had COUNTLESS blunders in the kitchen, only a few of which I have shared with you. Well, one of the blunders that stands out in my memory was watching Rachel Ray one day as a young married gal and watching her make basil pesto. I had actually never heard of it and I LOVE Italian food so this looked so yummy and easy. I immediately went out and bought all the ingredients and was so excited to come home and share this exquisite new dish with my (not Italian-food loving) new husband. I made it in our extremely bad, cheap blender and since that was having a hard time blending up about the easiest thing it could possibly blend (worst blender EVER!), I was using a plastic fork to shove the ingredients down in the whirling blender vortex. Well, oopsies! Somehow, I accidentally dropped the fork down into the blender and it started blending up the clear fork into my "beautiful" pesto!! :( I probably shared a tear or two and then attempted to pick out all of the fork pieces. I was so excited about this pesto and did not want to waste this since it was quite pricey with the pine nuts. I served it over spaghetti noodles and let's be honest, there is no nice way to put it, it was terrible! My sweet husband was trying to be nice and act like it was no big deal that he had to pick out 10 shards of fork before giving up, while not even liking the flavor of this pesto anyway. It was an epic fail if I ever saw one! Imagine that terrible crunch of plastic in your mouth when you are supposed to be eating soft, smooth pasta. Needless to say, I (somehow) fell in love with pesto and use it all the time! I want to share two of my favorite recipes with pesto that do not involve pasta. I'm not sure you're convinced you want my advice in that department :)

The first is a lovely pesto grilled cheese. My friend made this one afternoon for me and I was hooked instantly! I think the key for the wonderful, bold flavor for this sandwich is using sour dough bread. You can also use French bread, which is really nice too. You take your bread and butter it one side and place the buttered side on your hot skillet. Next, spread pesto on the other side of the bread then layer that with mozzarella. Top that with your other buttered slice of bread, butter side up, and if you really want an extra punch of flavor, add some parmesan cheese to the top of that buttered side. Grill on both sides for a couple minutes until your cheese is all melty and perfect inside. I love pairing this with some creamy, delicious tomato basil soup, which is the perfect compliment. It is really easy to remember this recipe, but I will post the recipe for your Cook'n at the bottom of this article.

The other recipe is one of my very favorite, easy lunches or dinners. It is a salmon patty covered with a layer of pesto and topped with a nice piece of mozzarella. Just follow the regular instructions for cooking your salmon patty and you should be good to go. I apologize I do not have a picture of this and I do not have any salmon handy to take a picture myself, so you will just have to trust me that this is so amazingly good and easy!

Just a side note, if you are a member of a nut free family like I am, there is a lovely pesto you can buy at the store that doesn't have pine nuts in it by Classico, next to the spaghetti sauces. It looks like this:

Here are the files to open the recipes for pesto sauce and the grilled cheese in Cook'n so you can save them :)

Basil Pesto Recipe

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Pesto Grilled Cheese Recipe

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