Spinach Walnut Pesto-ey Pasta

One of my favorite all time foods is pesto, so imagine my delight when I found this recipe on eat me, delicious who adapted from Quick-Fix Vegetarian. Walnuts, spinach, and flax seed? I couldn't have been happier. I love fixing my family healthy delicious food and this recipe looked (and absolutely was!) amazing. We recently unearthed our food processor too, after years in hibernation, when I made baklava. The food processor is great, especially for finely uniformly chopped foodstuffs. Ours is super tiny, but it makes cooking so much easier! I digress, back to the pesto: my dad said it could have used parmesan cheese (it's vegan as is) and my brother said that reducing the amount of olive oil made it a lot drier than normal pesto but that he thought normal pesto was too oily, so next time I might add somewhere between 1/4 cup of olive oil and 1/3 cup of olive oil.

Serves 4-5

makes about 2 cups, serves 4 with pasta

Ingredients
3 cups fresh spinach
4 cloves garlic
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup firmly packed fresh parsley leaves
1/3 cup walnut pieces
1 cup fresh basil
2 tbsp ground flax seed
(whoops! looking over this I realized I didn't grind the flax seeds.)
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil or walnut oil
(I might add more oil next time, the pasta was a little drier than normal pesto)
1 block of baked tofu (mine was 7 oz)
(I couldn't find smoked tofu, which the recipe originally called for, at either TJ's or our local health food store. Where do you get smoked tofu?)


Meanwhile, steam the spinach over boiling water for 1 minute, or wilt it in a covered bowl in the microwave for about 3 minutes.
(I really struggled with this step for some reason. I've made gyoza before by frying then steaming them but for some reason, without a special steaming device, I felt like I needed a solution that wasn't provided above. Does this ever happen to any of you- where you have a cooking block that you just can't seem to get past? I didn't want to blanch all the flavor and nutrients out of the spinach, but I also wanted to have a good consistency for the sauce. What I ended up doing was really ridiculous: I rinsed baby spinach in a colander, and then dipped the bottom of the colander into the boiling water I was preparing for the pasta for about two seconds. Then I tossed the wilted spinach with the fresher spinach while still in the colander).
Mince the garlic with the salt in a food processor. Squeeze any moisture from the spinach and add to the food processor along with the parsley, basil, flax seeds and walnuts. Puree until smooth. Add the olive oil gradually and process to a smooth paste.

Cut up baked tofu into squares or small strips. In the pot that you cooked the pasta in, add the pesto and the tofu. Heat over low until tofu is hot.


so healthy and tasty!