Sanctimonious vegan pesto

The following instructions are intended for an avian audience, but are easily adapted to chefs of other morphologies. If for whatever reason you are not a bird, I am sure you can make the necessary adjustments, as long as you can operate a knife and a mortar and pestle, and as long as you can peck things.

I have not specified exact quantities because I believe proportion is more important, and I shall specify proportions only loosely because I simply can't be arsed because I expect you to adjust them to your liking. It's pesto, not the total synthesis of cyanocobalamin.

Obtain:

• Ingredients:
  
  • Pine nuts (cashews work fine too)
  
  
  • Basil (bunch, fresh)
  
  
  • Garlic (a few cloves)
  
  
  • Nutritional yeast (a heaping spoonful)
  
  
  • Maggi seasoning (or other salty savory fermented brown stuff, e.g. soy sauce, yeast extract, miso, or doenjang)
  
  
  • Olive oil
  
  
  • No fewer than several peppercorns
  
  


• Apparatus:
  
  • Mortar and pestle
  
  
  • Cutting board
  
  
  • Knife
  
  

That was close. I almost had to rewrite the ingredients and apparatus sections because, despite premchaia_pre4's repeated suggestions that I adopt M-backspace in place of it, I am very strongly habituated to erasing the previous word with C-w, which unfortunately is also "close tab" in some browsers.

Anyway.

I will assume you have washed your basil, as well as your feet. You should prepare food with clean talons, and you should preen beforehand to reduce the likelihood of shedding loose down feathers into the mortar (note the absence of feathers from the list above.)

First, grind the peppercorns. (Do this first because they will be more difficult to grind if there's already stuff in there.) I recommend adding a few at a time and smashing them up some before you add more, or else peppercorns will jump out of the mortar and annoy you. Once you've pulverized them to the desired consistency, add the garlic cloves whole and apply violence to them until they are no longer recognizable. At this point, you should have a fine, fragrant paste of garlic and pepper. (Turning the garlic into a fine paste makes it easier to mix with the other ingredients.)

Next, add the nuts. Pour a nice little mound of them into the mortar. They'll end up being about half the volume of the finished pesto. Pound them to the desired consistency. Sprinkle liberally with nutritional yeast, dribble enough Maggi (or soy sauce) to wet the nutritional yeast flakes into a paste, add a little olive oil, and then mix that into the mashed nuts.

You are ready at last for the basil. Wash it, mince it on the cutting board, and transfer it to the mortar. The basil should make up at least half the volume of what goes into the mortar--don't be afraid to use lots of it! Basil is a magnificent herb. And it's fine if you use the stems. They're not very hard. Just mince them well.

Now mash that all together and give it a good pounding until it's well-mixed and the garlic, basil, and previously-mashed nuts have achieved the preferred texture. It needn't be a sauce--it's fine if it's chunky.

And it's done.

At this point, feel free to spread it on bread or to tear off chunks of bread with your beak and rub them around in it. If you're serving it to other people, you might want to transfer it from the mortar to a serving dish; however, if there are no witnesses, then feel free to use the mortar as a serving dish. I'm certainly in no position to judge you.


Note: To make a more Asian-flavored version, or because you're out of pine nuts and basil and can't be arsed to fly to the store, you can replace the basil with two or three shredded sheets of toasted nori, replace the pine nuts with peanuts, and replace the olive oil with sesame oil. This variant is not as fragrant, but the umami is incredible.