Video: Vegan Pesto

I produced my first "cooking" video over the weekend: making Isa Moskowitz's "Classic Pesto" from Vegan with a Vengeance. It was a clumsy effort, but it accomplished its goal: eliminating the surplus of basil from my herb garden.

Here's the recipe straight out of the book, republished here with permission from the author:

Classic Pesto

1/2 cup walnuts

3 cups packed basil leaves
3 cloves garlic, smashed and coarsely chopped
1 1/2 teaspoons coarse salt
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil, or more to taste
1/4 cup nutritional yeast (optional)
2 teaspoons lemon juice

Toast the walnuts in a toaster oven at 350 degrees F for 5 minutes or on a baking sheet in a conventional oven for 10 minutes, turning once.

Combine the walnuts, basil, garlic, and salt in a food processor or blender and process while you add the olive oil in a slow, steady stream. Add the nutritional yeast and lemon juice, and pulse to combine. The sauce should be the consistency of a slightly grainy paste, not a puree.

I learned a lot about DIY cooking video production. Some key lessons being: don't mix wildly different cameras in multi-camera shooting; don't bang shit around so much; keep your whining, over-heating laptop as far from the microphone as possible; don't say "um" so much; and rehearse before shooting.