Pasta with Deconstructed Pesto

This is a great pasta dish to make for a late night supper in summer, when you have really fresh basil. So it is without irony that I made this dish last on a cold and rainy february evening.

The concept of this dish, is that it contains all of the same ingredients as pesto, but rather than blending them, they are added to the cooked pasta individually and the flavours are allowed to meld for a few moments.

The great advantage of this dish is that it takes no time to prepare, you can literally prepare the ingredients for the sauce while the pasta is cooking.

Start by cooking your pasta, I prefer to use macaroni for this dish, but you could also use penne or fusilli. While the pasta is cooking roughly chop some fresh basil and sprinkle it with salt. Peel and chop or crush 2 large cloves of garlic.

Drain the pasta when it's cooked and return it to the hot pan off the heat, add the basil and about 2 tablespoons of good quality olive oil stirring to combine, add a small handful of pine nuts to the pan and grate in some parmesan, stirring until it combines to form a cohesive sauce.

Serve steaming hot, preferably curled up on the sofa, topped with more parmesan and some freshly ground black pepper.

Ingredients

150g pasta
30g fresh basil roughly chopped
2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
4 tablespoons of freshly grated parmesan plus more to garnish
a small handful of pine nuts
salt & pepper to taste