Todays diner: pasta with tomato-orange pesto

Citrus fruits are fantastic. Some zests of an orange or lime spice up most dishes and make you forget about winter and cold. Today I ate a very simple pasta with tomato-pesto. I got inspired by a tv-show, but I changed some of the ingredients to suit my taste and kitchen supplies. I spiced the pesto with some orange zests and chilli. Something I never did before was popping garlic. I loved the very soft taste, so different than the sharper taste of garlic.

The recipe:

Preparation:

• wrap 1 garlic bulb in aluminum foil. Place it in an oven at 180 °C and pop it in about 45 minutes. The garlic becomes soft and gets a subtile, delicious garlic taste. You will only need a few cloves for this recipe.
• Weld 4 dried tomatoes in very hot water. Leave it for an hour or so.

Cooking:

• Chop about 1/4 of a large chilli very small.
• Heat about a teaspoon of fennel seads and crush them.
• Make some orange zest (use the zest of about 1/4th of an orange) and chop the zests very fine.
• Mix the dried and welded tomatoes, the chopped chilli, the orange zests and the fennel seeds in a food processor untill it becomes one substance. Add the flesh of 2 popped garlic cloves and put on the food processor once more.
• Add some extra virgine olive oil and orange juice according to taste. Mix thoroughly.
• add some grated parmezan cheese according to taste and mix the pesto again.
• If needed, ad some pepper.

I mixed the pesto with some tagliatelle pasta and served it with spring onions. Very nice on toast or a crostini too!