Monday's Menu:

Welcome back from the weekend! I hope everyone had a nice weekend. The days pass by much too fast.

Today I am sharing a recipe that I mentioned in a recent Friday Favorites post that failed me. My intentions were to recreate an old recipe I used to LOVE that used pesto, orecchiette pasta, goat cheese, Italian chicken sausage, and Brussels sprouts. All good things, right? Well, in my mind I thought I would make a Whole 30 / Paleo version in a snap but this time try a new pesto recipe using avocado. It sounded delicious.

The result was yes, everything was delicious. However, the flavor was no where near the original dish I was hoping to replicate. The pesto tasted a lot more like a cilantro pesto even though I used parsley and it made me want to wrap the dish up in a tortilla of some kind to make it into a taco. As I ate the combined ingredients I evaluated what I thought of the dish and if I would even share this meal. I did make the effort to take photos of everything, I broke my Spiralizer in an effort to spiralize an eggplant (not recommended, but possible), and separately the flavors were all great if my end goal was different. So, I think my comedy of errors deserves to not be wasted. This is real life. I'm not a "chef", I dabble in the kitchen with recipes, and sometimes they fail.

I've decided to focus this post only on the avocado pesto because the rest of the ingredients are simply sauteed and thrown together with a tiny amount of spiralized eggplant (so tiny it's hardly worth mentioning). You can see a hint of the pesto underneath the sausage and veggies, but overall look at those colors! It was a pretty and colorful dinner with a lot of flavors. I only wish the pesto didn't taste like cilantro pesto because I was going to Italian, not Mexican, and if I had gone for Mexican I would have seasoned the rest of the dish a little differently. But, enough rambling. Let's begin.

The menu (Whole 30 and Paleo friendly): avocado pesto sauce (that tastes more like cilantro pesto)

Shopping List:

1 small ripe avocado
1/2 cup fresh parsley (or sub in cilantro)
3 tbsp. olive oil
3 tbsp. lemon juice
1/2 tsp. crushed red pepper flakes
5 basil leaves (about 2 tbsp.)
2 garlic cloves

Directions:

Add all of the ingredients into a food processor and blend on high for 2 to 3 minutes until creamy. You may need to stop and stir the mixture a couple of times to push down the pesto mixture from the sides.

You can add a little more or less oil or lemon juice to get the texture you prefer. Additional options would be to add in pine nuts, Parmesan cheese if your diet allows for dairy, or substitute in cilantro for the parsley or avocado oil for the olive oil. The fun thing about pesto is that you can truly mix it up and still get great flavor!

I think this avocado pest would taste great over fish, chicken, skirt steak, tacos, etc. I ate the left over pesto over eggs for breakfast, too! Generally, it just doesn't have an Italian flavor to me.

The rest of the meal was simple as mentioned above. I bought Whole 30 aproved Italian chicken sausage and sauteed it in my Copper Chef pan. As it was cooking, I added in Brussels sprouts (halved), cherry tomatoes (halved, and just because I had them).

I hope you enjoyed this recipe post! I have plenty to share in the coming weeks that are incredible and I'm excited to share with you all! Just remember that while this pesto is delicious, it is better off used for Mexican dishes (in my opinion).

I hope everyone has a wonderful week ahead!

XOXO

Every Piece Fits