Unusually for Jack, the Lazarus pesto wasn’t costed but I costed mine.
• Fresh thyme - 55p
• Fresh rosemary - £1.50 (didn’t have any in packs so I had to buy the plant)
• Fresh parsley - 55p (Jack’s recipe describes her parsley as
some sticky soggy parsley but Tesco didn’t have this, even in the yellow sticker part, so I opted for curly instead of my usual flat leaf)
• 2 cloves of garlic - Jack’s recipe doesn’t suggest which size but as many of her recipes call for big fat cloves that’s what I’ve gone for. These were free as I had them at home. Jack’s recipe also calls for 4 cloves but as i wouldn’t mind a bite in the neck from Christopher Lee, I went for two.
• Cashew nuts - 100g - 58p
• Lemon - I had this in, so of course it means it was free
• 50g Hard cheese - cheese not specified so I went for provolone as I had this in. Of course, this means it was free.
• 100ml oil - Jack suggests a variety of different oils but as I wouldn’t normally use them either in cooking or in pesto, I went for my usual type of organic olive oil. This is 74p per 100ml
Jacks method suggested I should either blend my herbs, with the stalks, or use her favourite method of chopping them in a mug with scissors. As I went for the harder herb pesto, I was concerned that I didn’t have the time to chop thyme in a mug so I went for the blender
I then moved on to rinsing the cashews. This broke my heart as I really like cashews, but we are where we are.
knowing Jacks knife skills, I attempted to finely chopped garlic the way she would. I put this in the blender too. The method doesn’t say whether, once finely blending the herbs whether I should then blend them again when doing the cheese, nuts and garlic. So I took the herbs out of the blender and done the nuts, grated cheese and garlic separately.
as you can see, despite putting my blender on turbo, there were still large stalks from the thyme.
^finely chopped my garlic to a similar size to half a cashew.
ETA:
The cheese. Recipe calls for 50g. I cut mine to 49! Who am I to quibble over J1g?
once blended, the cheesy garlic nut mix looked like this. It doesn’t look like any pesto I’ve ever eaten or made before, but she’s now on her 7th cook book so I have to assume she knew what she was doing with this.
next step was to mix the nut, cheese, garlic and herbs together. As you can see, it’s an odd looking mix but I still had faith.
100ml of olive oil follows, using the pub measure thing I had at home, so this was also free.
100ml felt like a heartbreaking amount of oil to use but surprisingly the cashews could take it because they made everything else so dry.
As you can see, they’re quite absorbent.
Once fully mixed through, I identified a number of stalks but I’m sure this will be fine.
Jack hasn’t suggested how the Lazarus pesto with rosemary and thyme should be eaten. She has suggested a sage one, which I won’t be trying, would make a nice base for a pasta dish, but is silent on this one. I can’t imagine why.
Using my own autonomy I’ve decided to plate it up and eat it as one standalone meal. I’ve served it up on a plate, where, as demonstrated, I’ve made a well - a sort of hole.
I was unsure what to fill this hole with, and wasn’t sure what would compliment the overwhelming dryness yet wetness of this ‘pesto’.
in the end, there was only one choice.
An inexplicable egg. These are Tesco organic eggs but as I had them in it was free.
On a scale of 1-5 I’d mark this as 1= dire. The dish is expensive to produce, it’s wasteful, it’s untested by Jack and it wouldn’t really work well as a pesto. The nuts, despite having an unbelievable amount of oil, made the rest of it really dry. With 4 cloves of garlic, it would be inedible for my taste, but Jack’s the expert, not me.