Wash the basil well and spin it dry in a salad spinner. Lay out a couple of kitchen towels and then place all the spinned basil out on them to completely dry.Toss them now and then to help dry them out.

In the mean time place your glass containers or bottles with their caps in a preheated oven to 100° (212°) for 10 minutes to sterilize them.

In a food processor place half the basil, oil, parmesan, toasted pine nuts, all the salt and pepper, and processes for about 60 seconds. This should make enough room in the processor to add the rest of the ingredients.

Process until all the ingredients have been finely ground into a paste, about minute and a half. Taking care not to process it too much - its pesto not basil baby food.

Take the bottles from the oven and fill with pesto and freeze.

See my notes below on how to use this pesto.

This is not the usual recipe for pesto. This pesto does not contain butter or enough oil or parmesan to use it directly from the freezer.

All the bottles in the photo are either 240 gr or 250 gr that is between 7 or 8 oz's which I have collected the most important for me is that they are glass with metal caps. That makes them easy to sterilize them in the oven quick and easy.

To use: Defrost the bottle of pesto.
Cook your pasta and drain as usual and return to the pot.
Dress the pasta with 1 msk. or 1 tbls. of butter per portion and enough olive oil to coat all the pasta well.
Place a heaping msk or tbls. of the pesto per portion of pasta into the pot and mix well.
Salt and pepper to taste and serve with a little freshly ground parmesan on top.

The recipe is made with as little cheese and oil as possible to so that when you use it you get as fresh a product as possible. Dress the pasta as you would normally with butter and oil before adding the pesto helps you produce something that tastes like it was freshly made. Parmesan frozen too long can get a stale taste so you use only the minimum that you can get a way with.

If you take my suggestion about walnuts which is a real cheat (pine nuts have a buttery flavor) you can find that the skins on the walnuts can make almost anything you put them into a bit bitter. Take a moment and brush off any skin that will come off easily. You can blanch them and a bit more of the skin will come off but its too much work for me.

I have made this recipe with walnuts and I thinks its fine. Italians will just roll their eyes!

See: Other Uses for Pesto!