If you’re lucky enough to be expecting guests for a longer period of time such as, say, just before or after a major holiday, you’re probably looking for ways to minimize your time in the kitchen while maximizing flavour in the food. Anything you can make that will help you infuse flavour more than once is going to look pretty good. Mrs J recommends: Pesto.

Pesto, as you probably know, is a traditional Italian paste made from basil, garlic, pine nuts, parmesan cheese and olive oil. What you may not know, is that you can make a pretty useful pesto substituting the sometimes prohibitively expensive pine nuts and basil with other nuts or almonds. A pesto made with other leafy herbs (like parsley) can also be really useful.

Mrs J needed to make a monster batch of pesto, so she decided to splurge on a decent parmesan style cheese and honest pine nuts. She used basil, but substituted half for baby ruccola. Good basil taste and good green colour – and a little saving to boot.

Making pesto is dead easy if you have a good mixer. For each batch you need to get 50g of nuts, 2 cloves of garlic (peeled and roughly chopped) and 1/2dl of parmesan cheese (coarsely grated or roughly chopped) in the mixer bowl. Let rip until everything is cut down fine and well mixed. Then stuff down 2dl of your well washed green herb. Let rip again. Chances are it won’t mix fully but that’s ok because you’re about to add 1dl of good olive oil, little by little, until everything is mixed into a fabulous green paste. Give the mix a taste and add a pinch of salt and black pepper to taste. Transfer to a jar and rest assured this taste-grenade will last in the fridge for up to a week. Perfect or what?

Mrs J’s monster batch of pesto helped her make three great dishes over the space of a week:

Vegetarian lasagna – Grilled aubergines and ratatouille layered with lasagna sheets and a 50-50 mix of cottage cheese and ricotta flavoured with pesto.

Throw in some gratin cheese in the ricotta mix as well, and a bit more on top to get a truly cheesy bake.

Turkey breast roll – Cut pockets in the turkey breast and fill with pesto before rolling up. Add a thin paint of dijon mustard on the outside of the roll before rolling the whole thing into a layer of thin prosciutto ham. Secure with string. Cooks beautifully in the oven. Make a simple sauce by combining regular cream with a bit more pesto. Slowly let reduce to thicken. Serve with roast potatoes or potato gratin (unless you’ve just thrown that across the room).

Classic pesto pasta – Cook pasta. Drain, but save a little bit of the cooking water. Throw in as much pesto as you like. Stir. Eat.

Trying is loving. Presto pesto!