Rocket Pesto

Last year, in an attempt to battle our inability to get to the allotment, we transformed our meagre front garden into a little veg patch.  We grew a hand full of onions, had three courgette plants and trailed runner beans up the fence.  The majority of the space was reserved for lettuces.  We eat lot of salad so growing our own is a really good way to save cash.

Along with a couple of red lettuces* we grew a small amount of rocket.  We didn't buy a single bag of rocket last summer, it kept growing just as fast as we could eat it.  It grew so well that it was only in the depths of winter that it finally died down.  As the snow fell we forgot that it had ever been there.  A year on and we are now getting to the end of salad season again, only this year we didn't sew any.  The rocket returned from it's wintry grave and, where we had had six varieties of salad leaf, it has taken over.

With so much rocket we are widening our horizons away from salads and will be having a pop at rocket soup over the weekend.  Before that though, I have made the slightest dent in the rocket patch to make some fresh pesto.

Rocket, garlic, pine nuts, olive oil and cheese are combined to make a delicious peppery sauce that we had over pasta.  Parmesan is the traditional cheese for pesto but, for tonight's version, I added a good hand full of the Ribblesdale unpasteurised goats cheese that I bought for Thursday's Yorkshire Cheese night.  There will be more rocket inspired dishes soon, all ideas are welcome.

*it is a scientifically unproven fact that slugs and aphids do not attack red lettuce.  We have never had so much of a nibble on any or our reds, whereas standard green varieties get munched all the time.