Pesto recipes

Pesto is a quick way to add flavour to everyday cooking, as it already contains herbs, cheese, oil and salt. Pesto shouldn't be heated for long: stir it into the warm dish at the end so the basil keeps its aroma.

Pesto is far more versatile than a pasta sauce: it works as a marinade for chicken, a spread for bread, a base for salad dressing with Greek yoghurt and as the fat for roasted vegetables. For pesto pasta, about a tablespoon of pesto per serving is enough when you loosen the sauce with a couple of spoonfuls of the pasta cooking water.

Popular pesto dishes include oven-baked pesto chicken, pesto pasta bake, pesto-seasoned roasted root vegetables and tomato and mozzarella salad. Basil pesto can be swapped for red pesto or a homemade version where sunflower seeds replace the pine nuts.

An opened jar of pesto keeps in the fridge for about a week if you cover the surface with a thin layer of oil. You can also freeze pesto in an ice cube tray as single portions to melt straight into hot pasta or soup.

In Ruokaboksi's pesto recipes, the ingredients come in portion sizes, so no half-used jar of pesto dries out at the back of the fridge after a single meal.