MG's First Attempt at a Poor-Man's Pesto

Last week I also attempted a homemade pesto sauce, based on the recipe found here: How to Make Pesto like an Italian Grandmother. Of course, I had to improvise a bit, based on what I had in the house and what I could find at the local tegut. Thus, instead of pine nuts I used crushed walnuts, and instead of Parmesan, I used a German Hartkäse that I found at te gut. (However, word on the street is that you can actually get pine nuts now at Aldi for really cheap. Going to check out their prices on Parmesan as well when I go next week.)

The recipe called for the following ingredients:

1 large bunch of basil, leaves only, washed and dried
3 medium cloves of garlic
one small handful of raw pine nuts
roughly 3/4 cup Parmesan, loosely packed and FRESHLY GRATED
A few tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil

Now most people make pesto in a food processor, but I think the taste is so much richer when you chop everything yourself. (However, the lastest episode of NPR's "The Splendid Table" has made me consider purchasing a mortar-and-pestle the next time I make a spice run to the local Asia Laden.) However, if you plan to do everything by hand, you should set aside a good 20 minutes to make sure you chop everything finely enough. As the website points out, the trick is to "chop a bit, add some ingredients, chop some more."

I started by chopping the garlic. I then added some of the basil and chopped some more:

After chopping the basil, I added the nuts, chopped some more, and then finally the grated hard cheese. At this point, everything was starting to look good:


As per the website's instructions, I packed my chopped items together into a kind of "basil cake:"


At this point, I covered the "cake" with just enough olive oil to cover it and let it sit while I cooked the pasta. When I was ready to eat, I mixed the olive oil into the cake, and ended up with the pesto sauce below:


You will notice that my pesto is significantly less green than the sauce pictured on the website. I think this was my pesto's fatal flaw: NOT ENOUGH BASIL. I picked all the fresh basil my plant could spare, but I think that more was in order because the pesto itself ended up tasting a bit bland when mixed in with the pasta. I added tomatoes to the pasta and liberally salted-and-peppered everything to give it a bit more flavor, but that should not be necessary if the pesto itself is good. So next time, I am going to use a liberal amount of basil, and we'll see how it goes. I also want to try the following pesto recipe: A Classic Pesto of Genoa.

Does anyone have any further suggestions for making cheap, homemade pesto? I'd love to hear them!

Update: I mixed the remained of my pesto pasta together with the leftovers from my Tuscan Chicken for a great (more flavorful) combo-dish.