Spaghetti Primavera

A plate of pasta with freshly made pesto is one of life's pleasures.
There are some decent jar varieties around, but if you made your own pesto once, you know the taste is so much more vibrant. Also a lot of brands do cheap substitutes: parmesan for some unspecified hard cheese, pine nuts for peanuts, olive oil for the sunflower oil.

Spaghetti Primavera
Ingredients:
spaghetti
200g baby courgettes
500g broad beans in pods (weight of beans is much less, of course)
2tsp olive oil
For pesto:
a bunch of basil leaves (I used all the leaves from a grow pot bought in Waitrose)
50ml olive oil
50g parmesan, grated
1-2 clove of garlic, crushed
40g pine nuts
a handful of edible flowers like daisies and clover (optional)

First make pesto: blitz the basil leaves with the olive oil, add the grated cheese and crushed garlic (1 or 2, depending on how much you like garlic). Mix well. You could blitz the pine nuts together with the pesto sauce, or just add them and mix with a spoon. I prefer whole pine nuts for an extra crunch and texture.

Cook spaghetti in the salted boiling water. I cooked the broad beans separately and also fried the sliced courgettes with the olive oil for  couple of minutes (slightly seasoned). Drain the pasta, add the pesto and vegetables. Scatter some flowers if using (only advisable if you have an enclosed garden and no animals around).

As I write this recipe, I know that Italy has lost today, which means it's a Goodbye from Italy. They were a bit of a disappointment in this World Cup.

Chris from Cooking Around the World has challenged the foodies to take part in a culinary-football-themed game this month. Read all about the rules of the game in his linky Bloggers Around the World.

As my pesto sauce is made from scratch, adding this recipe to Javelin Warrior's linky Made with Love Mondays.