Pasta with fresh pesto sauce, Brussels sprouts

It's that time of year that I need to harvest my basil before frost kills it. We had a threat of frost a few nights ago, and I harvested all of my basil. Today, I made pesto - and was very pleased with how tasty it came out!

I first washed and dried the leaves, then put them in a food processor, along with maybe half a dozen small cloves of organic garlic. I added enough olive oil so that the final product wasn't grainy and wasn't runny, and used very good extra virgin oil - I finished a little bit of an artisinal imported Greek one whose bottles are hand-numbered, and broke open an organic bottle of oil that I brought back from Assisi in Italia - locally produced there. I also added a little salt, a few slices of roasted tomatoes, Eat in the Raw's Parma! vegan "Parmesan cheese", a little bit of freshly ground black pepper, and a big handful of walnuts. I blended it all together, made adjustments, and came up with a big batch of very tasty and fairly garlicky pesto!

I had a friend over for dinner; the only bad thing is that we had only a half hour to finish a meal we'd both much prefer to savor, but we had tickets to go to a play. I served the pesto over pasta, grilled some Brussels sprouts and added smoke flavor, and served a salad and some olive sour dough bread, lightly toasted. Gustoso! The pesto was so tempting that when I got home, before going to bed, I had to dip a teaspoon in and get an additional small, maybe 1/16 teaspoon, sample!