I never wound up eating most of the baguettes I made last week. I left them out in a paper bag and by the time I came back to have some I found that they were so dry that they crumbled upon being touched. So I decided to grind them up into breadcrumbs.

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I could use them to bread the chicken breasts I had in my freezer. And if I was going to fry chicken, it was a good time to make some pesto.

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My basil plant had gotten large enough to harvest enough basil to fill the bowl of a food processor, I had BellaVitano Gold, I had pine nuts, I had olive oil and lemon juice. I blended these together with salt and pepper* (no measurements, just however much tastes right– I added a lot more pine nuts and cheese than pictured) and a quarter of preserved lemon, because I might as well throw some of that into everything.

In the past when I didn’t have pine nuts, I’ve used walnuts and cashews instead. It’s also perfectly good without the cheese. You don’t have to add anything special to a vegan pesto to make it good as long as you have a lot of good, fresh basil.

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While boiling a pot of farfalle I dredged my chicken breasts in flour, then dipped them in an egg wash and rolled them in the breadcrumbs (mixed with some canned Parmesan and Romano) and fried them in Crisco*. I don’t have any photos of this process because my hands were covered in all of the aforementioned ingredients.

If you’re going to be refrigerating and reheating pesto, it’s best to keep it separate from the pasta because heating up the pasta will cook the basil in the pesto. I usually don’t bother, though, because it takes up less space in the fridge mixed together.

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*store-bought items