The Great Scapes

You don't often come across garlic scapes, so we wanted to make something that really let them shine.  We put a little twist on your traditional pesto, and rather than use basil, we used the scapes.

We started by cutting off the scapes from the garlic bulbs.  Then we pulled off the outer greens so we could just use the tendrils within.  The outer greens kind of reminded me of green onions.  But once you peel those off, you have the more garlicky scapes.

The scapes have a definite garlic flavor, but is much milder than the actual cloves.  So in this pesto, it acts as the herb and the garlic, though we did add a little bit of basil that we had laying around.  We tossed the scapes into the food processor with some pistachios, rather than the traditional pine nuts.  And to make it Paleo-friendly, we just excluded the cheese.  If you want to add cheese, then you'll want to make sure your pistachios are not salted.  The cheese itself is salty, so if you have salty cheese and salty nuts, you'll end up with salty pesto.  That said, we didn't have to add any additional salt to ours...just a few pinches of pepper.  As with any pesto, you'll want to process the dry ingredients before you add the olive oil.  Once the garlic scapes and nuts are all chopped up nice and fine, you can start to stream in your olive oil until it reaches your desired consistency.

And then you're done.  That's how simple pesto is.  We tossed ours with some chicken, and just served it up with some roasted cauliflower, tossed in brown butter and lemon juice.  It made for another quick and tasty weeknight meal!