Hey everyone! I hope you all had a lovely Mother’s Day… if you didn’t celebrate with your Mom, maybe you celebrated with a Mom of some sort (pets count! I’m a Mom! 
), or maybe you just got down with your bad self. I hope getting down with your bad self included either pancakes, waffles, or doughnuts/donuts… because there’s no better way to celebrate ‘Day’s’ then with SWEETS!
Speaking of sweets… I drove down to Tucson to spend the weekend with my parents, and on Mother’s Day, Dad and I took Mom out to breakfast and made her pay! Just kidding… not really… Dad paid for himself and Mom paid for me and her. We’re precious, aren’t we? (Don’t worry, Mom, I promise to make it up to you once I start getting a paycheck!) Anyway– I had waffles. That’s pretty much the best part of the story. Also, Mom got flowers, a card, and delicious See’s candy from Dad and me, which I’m sure she loved as well 
Dad didn’t really do the best job of holding the phone still to take a photo, so this is the best we’ve got. Yay! And clearly, we dress fancy…
Anyway, on to the stuff you were promised!
No, not Molly!
Good try to distract me, but I’m not here to talk about the dog (even though she’s the best puppy everrrrrrr!)
Instead, Avocado Pesto Pasta , recipe from Chloe Coscarelli! We actually ended up halving the Coscarelli recipe and mixing it with Simply Organic’s Sweet Basil Pesto sauce mix. We also made one tiny change in the Coscarelli recipe, which you can see below…
Ingredients
- 1 lb. dried linguini (we used the pasta we had in the house– angel hair. Whatevs, it’s pasta (Italian-foodies, please don’t beat me!)
- 1 bunch basil leaves
- 1/2 cup pine nuts (okay, so check it: pine nuts are crazy expensive. I read online that you can actually substitute raw plain cashews for pine nuts, so that’s what we did! Same amount.)
- 2 ripe avocados, pitted and pealed
- 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
- 3 cloves garlic
- 1/2 olive oil (we used coconut oil, because we’re out of olive oil and we heard it’s just as good of oil as olive)
- Salt to taste
- Black pepper to taste
- 1/4 cup chopped sun dried tomatoes (once again, we have a million tomatoes left over from the Market, so I chopped up 2 whole tomatoes and threw them in)
Directions (hint: it’s so easy!)
- In a large pot, bring water to boil. Cook pasta according to package directions.
- While pasta cooks, in a food processor, blend basil, cashews or pine nuts, avocados, lemon juice, garlic, and oil. Season with salt and pepper.
- Drain pasta. In a large serving bowl, toss pesto with pasta and garnish with basil and tomatoes. (This is also the point where I quickly brought the Simply Organic mix to a boil, stirred it, and threw it in with the Avocado Pesto.)
Pesto in the processor.
So my photo skillz (and phone) aren’t the best, so this looks gross, but I promise you, it tastes amazing! Also, since I have a tiny food processor, I had halved the ingredients… if you have a regular-sized food processor, you can blend up more pesto at once!
Yummm!
The finished product! I have to say, speaking as unbiased as possible, I liked Chloe Coscarelli’s Pesto recipe much more than just the packaged Simply Organic pesto, but that’s probably because a) the CC recipe was creamier and b) the CC recipe was fresh. I think if you substitute cashews for pine nuts, you could make this pesto really affordable… so do it!
yummy! i made something very similar for my mom on mother’s day except i added chicken breast, peppers and kale.
Yum!! How did it turn out? I never would think of adding kale… I like it! I hope your mom liked it too