Hi there blog readers – sorry it has been a while. Don’t worry – the Cookbook Project will continue soon. But for right now things are a little hard. Bare with me!

Tonight I got home from being with Grandma a little after 7 o’clock. I was tired – but I decided I needed to dedicate a little bit of time to figuring out what Mom and I could eat for dinner the next couple of days.

I had a beautiful bunch of basil that I picked up at the local farmers market on Saturday. This whole bunch of basil was only $3! I thought it was the best bargain of the day.

The one thing on my cooking agenda for the weekend was to make pesto with this great basil. So on Sunday night I got to work. I toasted two tablespoons of pine nuts, I washed my basil, I smashed four cloves of garlic and the pesto was underway in no time.

Before coming home, I stopped by Whole Foods to pick up two chicken sausages and a bunch of kale – I had an idea in my head of what to do along with the pesto.

A new dinner came together in my head – orecchiette with chicken sausage, grape tomatoes, kale and pesto.

While I started the pesto, I put a pot on the stove to boil my pasta water, I cut my grape tomatoes, I rinsed and cut the kale.

The lemon juice that I put into the pesto really helped it turn a bright green. It did not taste complete until the lemon juice was processed into the rest of the mix.

I heated some olive oil in the pan, cut open the sausage casings. Once the oil was hot, I added the chicken sausage and started to break up the meat and browned it. Once the sausage was cooked (mostly) through, I added the tomatoes, kale and a little of the pasta water (a couple of tablespoons) to give the mixture a little liquid. I loved how bright the kale was as it cooked!

I actually did not add any seasoning to this dish as it was cooking away – because I had salted the pasta water, the pesto had salt in it and the sausage was hot and spicy! Once everything had cooked down (a few minutes) I added the pasta into the mix. Then I put two tablespoons of the pesto into the pan.

I was definitely keeping this meal on hand for quick, go to dinner this week. But I figured I had to have a couple of bites to make sure it had good flavors. I grabbed one of our small bowls (can you even tell this is a small bowl by the photo!?) and added a little bit of everything into it. I topped it with some pesto and freshly grated Parmesan cheese.

The recipe was a success – the only thing I would have done was add more kale (i’ll cook more up tomorrow) and I would have added more than the one cup of grape tomatoes – but that was all I had on hand. The flavors worked really well together! It was definitely hard not to have a cup of this stuff! I can’t wait to have this for dinner tomorrow.

And with that, I’m signing off to organize and get myself ready for a long week ahead.