AyO Recipe - Arrugula-Parsley Pesto



Arrugula/Parsley Pesto

1 garlic clove
1/4 tsp. lemon juice
1/4 cup parsley
1 cup arrugula
1/4 to 1/2 cup of olive oil (preferably Azul y Oro's)
pint of sea salt
parmesan cheese
pine nuts

Place garlic, lemon juice, sea salt in blender (or food processor or use emulsification blending stick) and pulse, just to get the ingredients mixes.  Add parsley and arrugula, pulse again.  Begin to drizzle in olive oil until it begins to achieve a pesto-like consistency.  Add parmesan cheese and pine nuts.  Pulse once or twice more.

Serve with warm, crusty bread for dipping.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Central Coast Olive Oil Competition Results and Update

Image
We got word late last week that we received four awards from the Central Coast Olive Oil Competition.  We were awarded a Silver Medal for our Estate Extra Virgin Olive Oil, a Silver Medal for our Lemon-Infused Olive Oil, a Bronze Medal for our Orange-Infused Olive Oil, and a Bronze Medal for our Smoked Olive Oil. We are attempting, ourselves, to make sense out of the inconsistencies between the different judging panels.  The O/C member of our team reviews results with the plan of doing things better each year, and scrutinizes every fact provided but just cannot reconcile the results.  Some might suggest we ought to just celebrate the 12 awards we've received this year, with an additional two Best of Class Awards, but yet, we are left SOH (shaking our heads), as they say.  There are producers who submitted and did not win awards, so we are thrilled that, on the whole, all of our oils are award-winning. So, what mountain is left to scale this year?  One of the...
Read more

2018 Olive Harvest -- What Worked, What Didn't Work 😀😩

Image
AyO's 2018 olive harvest began at sunrise on Saturday, November 3, 2018.  While much of the world and California's olive market is suffering from a poor olive crop this year, for whatever reason, that is not the case here.  This should have been our alternate producing year (I was looking forward to a year which included some time off), but even with our ten largest trees not producing, we will eclipse last  year's production.  Of course, the worrier in me is thinking, "OMG, how many olives are we going to have in our big production year, next year???" 😱 We are so fortunate to not only have family and friends and neighbors help us with the sorting, but since olives must be milled within 24 hours to begin the EVOO certification process in the U.S., we do hire crews to come in to pick the olives, so between the crews and the sorters, in our minds, the entire pick was going to get done in one day.  We were even tracking the bins real-time. Our mill...
Read more

"Except the vine, there is no plant which bears a fruit of as great importance as the olive." Pliny

I've been mulling over what can be said about our first experience picking and pressing our olives. One always reads travelogues in which happy people are picking olives on sunny days in the Italian countryside, followed by a crush, and entire towns celebrating with a feast, in order to dip crusty bread in the olio nuovo, browsing from table to table to share every family's personal oil. To begin our saga on a positive note, we learned a lot -- always important. In hindsight, we now know our day was too ambitious. There were only two pickers and two trees, which yielded 40 quarts of olives, which took five hours to pick, bringing us to 4:30-ish in the afternoon, and it was getting dark. The average citizen might have called it a day at that point, gone in, warmed up by the fire with a glass of wine. Of course, we are not your average citizens. We were driven by a belief that we would just crush these olives, and in a few short hours, be sitting at the bar in our processin...
Read more