w.c, thurs- broccoli and walnut pesto pasta w/ tofu

happy thursday! this week has been disaster after disaster at school but once i finally get home on thursday i know that means cooking a real meal and de-compressing from the "real" world. this week's menu included broccoli and walnut pesto pasta with tofu and roasted acorn squash (impulse buy at the korean grocery store b/c the autumn squash looked strange).

we recently bought a Bella little food processor thing (which i used to make persimmon cheesecake...i will have to update on that one day...). suffice it to say i did not enjoy making the cheesecake w/ the Bella but the recipe book that came with the machine said it would work. but i decided to give it another go. i was making a couple of servings (i can't resist toasted walnuts, they are addictive) so i figured i would process all the ingredients separately and then mix it all together in a bowl. lets just say everything at the bottom of the processor keeps getting grinded (have you ever tried walnut butter...i can now check that off my list...it's also not too bad). the same thing happened when i tried to grind the broccoli up, so then i just gave up and whipped out our regular food processor and all was right in the world again.




the recipe comes from 101cookbooks which i haven't used in ages. i cooked my broccoli in a skillet with a splash of olive oil and two small scoops of frozen garlic (we food process up the fresh stuff and freeze tons of it). i forgot to buy a lemon so no lemon, chard/spinach and olives so we were short of that but i didn't mind the loss. i also didn't really measure how much i was making but i did have 2 heads of broccoli and about 3/4 to 1 cup of toasted walnuts. i kept splashing olive oil into the food processor waiting for a more liquidy pesto but after awhile gave up and figured i would be healthier with less olive oil :) the tofu was my "meat" for the dish so i could get a very nice well rounded meal. the tofu was cooked in a skillet with just a bit of olive oil.

if you run out of pasta (which i did after M & D gobbled all that) you can spread some of the pesto between the tofu and top with parmesan and broccoli (totally delicious!)

the acorn squash were looking mighty cute at the korean grocery store so we took one to try it out. tossed in some olive oil, salt and pepper the squash tastes good but it doesn't get that baked fry kind of texture i was looking for. probably excellent for a puree of some sort.