The WHS Foods class learned how to cook a savory pesto pasta using fresh basil from the local school garden before the harvest season ended. Family and Consumer Sciences teacher, Mrs. Quatrano, presented to the students why locally-grown produce is more nutritious and delicious than store-bought products. As she creates the dish, she demonstrates and explains the ingredients and why it is crucial for making pesto.

Mrs. Quatrano tells her students that pesto is an easy and quick meal to make, and a meal that can have variations of ingredients, letting them make it their own recipe. Below is the step-by-step recipe of Mrs. Quatrano’s delicious pesto.

To begin the recipe, she starts with boiling the water for the noodles to cook in while she blends and creates the pesto. In the pesto mix, she adds pumpkin seeds (a replacement for nuts in case of nut allergies), fresh garlic cloves, roasted garlic and salt to add a lot of flavor to the pesto, parmesan cheese, and the fresh basil from the garden. She then pulses the mix while slowly pouring in olive oil to liquidize the dry ingredients. The noodles, which have been cooking in boiling water, are then drained to be mixed with the pesto created before, then finishing off the meal for the students to taste and try.