Mustard Green Pesto

This is a light and healthy pesto sauce from an easy to grow mustard greens which makes a great green meal for St. Patrick's Day.

For this recipe you will need:

one chump of Green Streaks mustard greens
garlic
1 cup of olive oil
pinch of salt

This recipe can be adjusted for whatever greens you have available in your garden. I have used Red Giant mustard greens, spinach, or arugula also. Green Streaks mustard gives a light and tangy taste to the pesto.

Step 1: Harvesting Your Produce

Go out to your garden and harvest the mustard greens and young mustard that you need for this recipe. Alternatively, go to a store and buy the ingredients.

Step 2: Clean and Chop the Garlic

Next, clean and chop the garlic. Since this is prepared in a blender how you chop the garlic is not important, I just chop it enough that it fits easily in the bottom of the blender.

Since it is St. Patrick's Day, I naturally choose to use my green knife for this job.

Step 3: Chop the Walnuts

Roughly chop a few walnuts, I added about one cup of walnuts to this recipe.

Step 4: Add All Ingredients Except Greens to the Blender

Add the garlic, walnuts, and oil to the bottom of the blender. Adding these first makes the blender go more smoothly, especially with a green as thick as this type of mustard green.

Step 5: Clean and Prepare Greens

Cut the base off of the mustard greens. You can use most of the stems in the pesto. Also be sure to carefully wash your greens and remove any yellowed leaves or other debris that may have fallen into the plant while it was growing.

There is nothing worse than gritty pesto caused by a bit of soil left on the greens!

Step 6: Add the Greens to the Blender

Now add your greens to the blender. I cram as much as will fit in my blender at a time. If you have more than one blender jar of greens, they will compress as you blend and you can open the blender and add more.

Step 7: Time for Blending!

Put the lid on your blender and start blending! I start on the lowest speed until the walnuts and garlic start to incorporate together with the oil and some of the greens towards the bottom. My blender has a stick that you can insert in the center to push around the greens as you blend. If you don't have this feature on your blender you may have to stop and use a rubber spatula periodically to push the unblended greens towards the bottom.

If  the greens are not moving down towards the blender blades you can also add additional oil to move the process along. Once the greens start to break down I turn up the speed to high and it usually takes about 2 minutes to completely process a blender full of mustard. You can see that from start to finish the volume decreases by about one half. When its finished it will all be a uniform color and smell delicious!

Step 8: Taste for Seasoning

Be sure to taste your pesto before removing it from the blender in case you need to adjust the garlic, salt, or other seasoning. You can add hot peppers too if you want.

Mine need a pinch of salt, so I added it and did a another quick spin the blender to incorporate it. I got a container of fancy smoked salt for Christmas so that is what I used.

Step 9: Serve and Enjoy!

Once the seasoning has been adjusted, serve and enjoy!

Pesto can used...

on pasta
as pizza sauce
as a dip for veggies or chips
on baked potatoes
in scrambled eggs