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I know I know I know. Where have I been? Well the truth is - I've been out of town. September started our traveling and now we have a trip every couple of weeks or so. We got back in last night and it's been almost a full week since I've cooked last. I mean, sure, I could have cooked last night - but there was this restaurant I've been dying to try and it's on the way back from the airport....so we stopped there instead. And I'm already looking forward to bringing friends back to the place - always a good sign.

Of course the beauty of my profession is that there's no such thing as a vacation, which means I bring piles of work with me and still have mountains to do when I get home. So I got home especially late from work tonight and my plan of creating a vegetarian meatloaf was dashed to bits. Stay tuned for that tomorrow since it's in the oven right now so Thatboy can actually eat dinner tomorrow at a normal person's hour. Instead I came home and decided we'd have to do pasta since neither of us had eaten and it was too late for anything else.

I decided that at least I could make a homemade sauce while the pasta cooked, and since we'd been doing a lot of marinara lately I thought I'd throw together some pesto. Normally I use parsley in my pesto - but since I wasn't home last week to go shopping, and I wasn't expecting to make pesto, we had no parsley. We did however have spinach - which works just as well.

I like to think of myself as a good neighbor, which means I don't like using my loud appliances late at night. So instead of using my food processor, I just mixed the ingredients together. It creates a very chunky pesto, but it's still garlicy and delicious. Just remember to take something if you're a heartburn sufferer.

Spinach Pesto

• 1/2 cup spinach, finely chopped
• 1 Tbsp basil, finely chopped
• 1/2 tsp salt
• dash of pepper
• 4 cloves garlic, crushed
  
• 1/3 cup olive oil
• 1/2 cup grated parmesean
• 1 Tbsp boiling pasta water
• 1 Tbsp butter
• 1/4 cup pinenuts, finely chopped

1. Combine all ingredients in small bowl and stir with a fork until combined.

Serves 3.
Each serving has:

Calories		353.6
Total Fat		35.3 g
	Saturated Fat	8.8 g
	Polyunsaturated Fat	6.8 g
	Monounsaturated Fat	18.0 g
Cholesterol		23.5 mg
Sodium		703.3 mg
Potassium		134.8 mg
Total Carbohydrate		3.7 g
	Dietary Fiber	0.6 g
	Sugars	0.5 g
Protein		8.9 g