Pasta with pesto and peas

Well, I finally did it. I bought a food processor. Here's my little baby:

For the uninitiated, that's a KitchenAid 12-cup chrome processor. It has all kinds of blades, slicers, graters, and an extra mini prep bowl. How cute.

Food processors are expensive and notorious for gathering dust after purchase. I never registered for one for those reasons, but I've been getting a growing itch to purchase one.

1. I have been getting serious about Indian cooking, and many of their curries want you to make a vegetable paste or puree rather than using chopped vegetables.
2. My blender, which I have been using in place of a food processor for purees, is a pain in the ass to clean, and I feel I've been taxing it by improper use.
3. I make my own dough, but I feel I can get a better distribution of butter in pastry dough by using a food processor.
4. I found out I can make my own nut butters.

Dave got a Groupon for $60 off at a local appliance store, so we decided to pull the trigger. And boy, I am impressed with the first dish: pasta with pesto and peas.

This is an Ina recipe from the first book of hers that I ever owned: Barefoot Contessa Parties! I've been contemplating this recipe for a long time, but I've been hesitant because the blender does not really like making pesto, and I wasn't sure if I liked peas all that much. But I have some frozen peas, and now I have a food processor, so I went for it. I guess you could say that this recipe is seven years in the making.

First, I used my processor to grate some Romano cheese (which I used in place of Parmigiano Reggiano). Reserving that, I processed walnuts, pine nuts, and farmers' market garlic until fine, then added basil, olive oil, and finally added back in the grated cheese. The final result was a beautiful green pesto, very even and tasty.

That's Ina's pesto, but the sauce for this pasta also required some lemon juice and mayonnaise (it is sort of a pasta salad, after all, rather than a hot pasta dish). Blending that in, the pesto became very creamy.

Meanwhile, I was cooking the pasta, which was sort of strange. 3/4 lb. bow tie pasta, 3/4 lb. curly pasta (I used cavatappi). So I had to save 1/4 lb. of bow ties and quite a bit more of the cavatappi, being that my package was 500 g rather than 1 lb. I guess that's what I get for buying my pasta at the local European produce market.

Anyway, toss the somewhat warm pasta with the pesto sauce, then toss in more grated Romano cheese, toasted pine nuts, and lots of thawed peas.

It was very, very good, but I have a completely epic amount of pasta in my fridge right now, so I guess we'll be eating this for a while! Yay food processor!