How to make Healthy Pesto

My most prized fancy-shmancy dish is my healthy avocado pesto pasta. Why, you ask? Its pasta which is fancy enough for a vegetarian with staple Indian diet like me, and it incorporates the goodness of healthy ingredients. Throw in the ease of how well this fits in any meal prep obsession and we have a triple whammy! All because it uses this healthy pesto. And if you don’t like avocado, we can’t be friends. But you can reap similar benefits subbing the avocado (or going halfsies) with steamed broccoli. You get the goodness of broccoli without having to deal with the whole tree in your food!

Ask husband to buy:

This is to make roughly 10 servings of penne pasta
– 2 ripe avocados
– 1 bunch fresh basil.15 gms is the packet I get
– peeled cloves of garlic as per taste and size of the cloves. I love garlic so I add like 10 giant cloves to this quantity
– parmesan cheese or yeast flakes as per taste and preference. I prefer the yeast flakes for additional nutritional value
– green chilli because Indian taste-buds need them chillies!
– Nuts: almonds, walnuts/pecans, cashews, pumpkin kernels and pine nuts. I have added all or only some from this list depending on my ration in the pantry.
– Salt
– water

This is how you do it:

• Put avocado pulp, and all ingredients into a mixi-jar and add just enough water to aid in grinding.
• You could also add a tiny bit of olive oil if you miss the traditional pesto taste. I do not miss it so I am happy with just adding water to thin it down.
• No need to over-grind the mixture. You want the nuts to be chunky. The avocado will turn into a paste pretty quickly so you could choose to add the nuts a little later and then pulse the grinder to give them the right consistency.
• If you want to use the broccoli, just steam the broccoli and then grind it instead of or in conjunction with avocado.
• You could also add boiled spinach and add that before grinding however, it will change the taste noticeably if you add a lot of it.
• Enjoy this as a spread in your sandwich or as a dip for your chips if you add some hung yogurt to it.

Obviously, the pasta recipe will follow after this in just a few days!
So, watch the space.

Where’s the hygge?

The store bought ready-to-add sauces might save you time but just this tiny bit of effort will save you a lot more in terms of health and even taste! The nuts add so much flavour and enjoyable crunch. They are the best part of this pesto! Demolishing the pasta made in this pesto without any guilt is as good as it gets to give me the true hygge.