Leslie Lennox, co-founder of Hope’s Gardens, releases a new pesto-based cookbook.
After Leslie Lennox and her husband took their homegrown pesto from their local farmers market to national grocery giant Whole Foods, Lennox set out to write a cookbook with recipes as creative as her basil-based sauce. Her new cookbook, titled Pesto: The Modern Mother Sauce ($26, Agate Publishing), is a collection of more than 90 delicious, pesto-based recipes from risotto and ramen to chicken fajitas and swordfish kebabs. The New Yorker doesn’t just provide the basics of pesto-making but also teaches readers how to go beyond basil to invent their own pesto combinations using seasonal ingredients. The cookbook also includes a guide to growing basil at home and worksheets to keep track, tweak and make notes on your own flavor combinations. “Unlike those early mother sauces, this one can come from your backyard, reduce food waste and deliver healthy, nutritious vegetables into your diet in delicious and surprising ways,” Lennox writes in the first chapter of Pesto. “Now, I invite you to create your own Modern Mother.”
Photography by: © Leslie Lennox from Pesto: The Modern Mother Sauce
