Pasta with Spinach Pesto

At this point in the pandemic, even February feels like a great many years ago, but it truly was a great many years ago when I copied this spinach pesto recipe out of one of my mom's 37 cookbooks. It was during a period of my life so distant that I had extremely neat handwriting, and the leisure to consider how much monounsaturated fat vs. polyunsaturated fat was in my food, rather than whether the ingredients had been packaged by someone in whom a deadly virus might be incubating. Ah, those were the days.

Side note: I sometimes use the number 37 when I am exaggerating, as in "there were like 37 grammatical errors in that email," or "I drank 37 cups of coffee, give or take," but in this case I once counted the cookbooks, and there really were 37.

This recipe has at least three advantages over my standard basil pesto recipe:

1. The spinach makes it healthier, and yet it does not taste spinachy
2. One of my backup dancers is not wild about the all-basil version, but likes this version
3. This recipe features one-step processing: rather than adding the ingredients in stages, you throw them all in at once and then just hit "start" (You do mince the garlic and grate the cheese in advance, but that's simple enough)

We, um, use a lot of olive oil in our house.

Today I got in my car for the first time in 37 days (okay, 18, really) and actually went somewhere. I picked up and delivered pre-ordered groceries for my in-laws. It felt very odd and unsettling to be out.

One of my backup dancers is growing a quarantine beard.