Kale Walnut Pesto

Do you ever eat a dish and feel like its nourishing every last cell in your body? Throw together kale, walnuts, lemon, nutty cheese, olive oil and that’s exactly what you get!

Oh, pesto. You make any leafy green taste good on top of pasta. Seriously, though, I had a lot of kale in the house that I didn’t want to go bad, and I wanted a quick, hearty dinner… So pesto it was!

Let’s break it down, because every part of this dish is packed with flavor and nutrients.

Kale: I fully enjoyed using kale for this pesto because it isn’t overly herbaceous. You can use a lot of it (aka, pack lots of nutrients) without feeling like you’re eating a literal bunch of kale. Kale also seems to have some umami qualities on my palet, so its ideal to create depth of flavor in the dish.

Parmesan: The grated parmesan gives the pesto a familiar, nutty, salty note and allows for variation in texture. If you’re dairy-free you could leave this out. Though, I might recommend adding some nutritional yeast and/or more nuts than the recipe calls for.

Walnuts: I grabbed for walnuts because they don’t take any additional cooking to incorporate well into the pesto and they have a good amount of fat. With all the kale in this recipe, fat is needed to keep things balanced.

Olive oil: The olive oil is important for emulsifying (make more creamy) the pesto and it adds healthy fat. You could use grapeseed oil or another somewhat neutral oil if you’d like to substitute.

Lemon: Lemon wakes up the flavor of the kale and is the ying to parmesans yang.

I serve the pesto over brown rice spaghetti and garnish with chopped walnuts. A quick whirl of my food processor and I have a really nutritious meal that I’m happy to serve my family. Even my 2 year old gobbles this up! Let me know what you think in the comments!