Anna's Famous Basil Pesto with Pecans

Jan 23, 2012 by

 

I used to make pesto with pine nuts. Pesto is a traditional Italian sauce or spread usually made of basil, pine nuts, cheese, garlic and olive oil. I love pine nuts, but the main problem with them is that they’re quite expensive.

Then I found myself living in Texas, with six pecan trees in my yard.  So I started making pesto with those pecans, and people loved it. Many cards and letters have come in requesting my pesto recipe, so here it is.

I recommend…

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The Better Breakfast: Cornflakes or Cardboard?

Aug 27, 2010 by

When I visited my son at college this spring, I ate in the dining hall several times with him and some of his friends. Let’s just say that the dining hall food is nobody’s favorite thing about college at the University of Dallas.

Noticing that Hannah and Helen were eating cornflakes, I told them about some research that had been done on cornflake-eating rats.

This group of rats was given only cornflakes and water. A second group was given only the box the cornflakes had come in and water. A third group got rat food and water.

The rat food group did fine. The other two all died. But the rats…

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Two simple ways to make foods you're already feeding your kids more nutritious

Sep 22, 2009 by

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Do you ever wonder how recipes and food processes were first developed? Take pickling, for example. Did one prehistoric day someone discover a stray cucumber that had fallen unperceived months before into some casual vat of brine or vinegar and say, “Say, this thing has been in here since the last harvest was brought in! It actually smells good! It seems crispy! Say, this tastes good!” Or what?

How did people first discover how to make dough rise? Or how to make cheese and some of the more surprising variations thereof? And how about those real-life dramas we’ll never hear about how early peoples figured out what was poisonous or not?

Fictionalized accounts of these accidental or ingenious food discoveries would fascinate me. Maybe that’s where my buried fictional talent lies: the untold imagined stories…

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Fat Phobia: Why are we so fat if we don’t eat fat?

Sep 11, 2009 by

Free hamburger tape measure

Did you know that human breast milk provides one of the highest proportions of cholesterol of any food?

Yet we prescribe nonfat yogurt and milk for young and old.

Did you know that the body is actually unable to absorb certain nutrients in vegetables unless they’re combined with some fat: olive oil, an avocado, some cheese, or some good animal fat with the meal?

Yet we prescribe fat-free salad dressing with our little pumpkins’ celery sticks. And we get fatter and fatter.

In the 1930s, Dr. Weston Price, a dentist, noticed a big increase in children’s teeth getting crowded, crooked…

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Why Milk in France is a Completely Different Animal from Milk in the U.S.

Aug 26, 2009 by

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THE FORMER MIGEON COWS produce milk in the Franche-Comte region of France for “Comte” variety of cheese.–photo by Anna Migeon

A nice big glass of cold milk—that’s something that’s pretty foreign to the French.

The typical French person of any age wouldn’t think of drinking a glass of milk with a meal. Even children hardly drink milk plain once they leave babyhood. Even coffee is generally taken black, maybe with sugar. At any age one might have café au lait or hot chocolate for breakfast or gouter, but that’s about it….

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