Malunggay Pesto Sauce

Lately, I did a lot of cooking and experimenting and here is one of them. We all know how nutritious and beneficial Malunggay is specially to lactating moms. Did I mention it is easy to find too? This is the main ingredient of my latest experiment.

I first heard of the Malunggay Pesto Sauce in a TV show where they boiled the leaves first and used the broth as tea; and the boiled leaves were used to make the Pesto sauce. How healthy and cheap could that be?! This is a super saver specially when you have a Malunggay tree planted in your backyard or near your place like us. Without further ado, let me share with you how I made this fantastic Malunggay Pesto Sauce, which you can use in a lot of ways. I used it in different ways already.

Ingredients

• 1 cup fresh Malunggay leaves
• 4 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
• 1 cup grated Parmesan cheese
• 3/4 cup extra virgin Olive oil
• salt and pepper to taste

Procedure

To create this flavorful sauce, you can use a blender osterizer or food processor. In this case I used MIL’s osterizer since we don’t have a food processor.

Put the fresh Malunggay leaves in the osterizer and then grate it. When I was doing this, I had a hard time crushing the leaves into pieces because it was all dry. After a few tries and mixing, the leaves were already small. This time I included the garlic inside and do some more grinding and grating.

While the osterizer is still running, I slowly pour the olive oil into the mixture through the opening in the cap. And instead of grinding, I press puree. This time it was so much easier because of the liquid. I stopped the processor to get everything mixed together and pureed some more.

When I was happy with the consistency, I added the salt and pepper into the mixture, pureed a little more then I was done.

I transferred my Pesto sauce into a microwaveable container, tasted it and then placed it inside the fridge. Important: Do not add the Parmesan cheese if you intend to store your Malunggay Pesto Sauce. Simply add it before you use the sauce.

I brought some here at the office and let my friends taste my latest experiment thus the photo above. I don’t know where to buy crostini here so we settled with Rebisco crackers. It was like a tornado passed in my cube. We were able to finish 3 packs of crackers in a matter of five minutes with 4 people eating.

Some of the remaining sauce, I already used for spaghetti yesterday but I forgot to take a picture of my lunch as I was super excited to eat it. I’ll post it here hopefully next week.