from the garden: zucchini pasta with poached egg and arugula bleu cheese pesto

It seems like with breakfast I either go all out, or I'm eating shortbread cookies at work trying to convince myself that it's somehow healthy.  This morning though - I went all out. I woke up this morning with an odd craving for pesto (I don't know is it a being Mediterranean thing??) and using what I had, and what's growing in the garden - I made this! Zucchini pasta sauteed with arugula almond bleu cheese pesto and a poached egg on top.  

A decadent and still healthy breakfast.

The zucchini and poached egg aren't too hard.  You just take a peeler to a zucchini and collect the shavings (I used about half the zucchini, saving the core for later) and then saute them in olive oil.  I was at first sautéing the zucchini as you would with bacon, but then realized they would hold their shape if you gently swirled them around the pan.  Toss in the pesto and you have delicious zucchini pasta.  Since this is breakfast, I cracked an egg into boiling water (with a bit of vinegar) and layed the poached egg on top.  So delicious.

The pesto was a bit more of a creative process, as I wanted to make a classic pesto, but only had two of the ingredients.  So, I came up with:

 a r u g u l a   a l m o n d   b l e u   c h e e s e   p e s t o !!

makes about 8 ounces

1 big handful of arugula 

7 basil leaves

1/4 cup of olive oil

1 clove of garlic (I used 3 though for a super garlicky taste)

1/4 cup almonds slivers

6 oz bleu cheese or 1/3 cup bleu cheese dressing

salt and pepper

If you have a food processor, put the arugula, basil, garlic, almond and bleu cheese and pulse so that it's still chunky - then gradually add in olive oil - and - ah! pesto!

...I don't have a food processor, so I used my old blender and blended together the ingredients with olive oil and bleu cheese dressing all together, to help the poor blender out.  It still turned out incredibly delicious though!  The arugula adds a nice pepper-y taste and the almonds give it a good crunch, and you can never really go wrong with bleu cheese.  Plus the arugula and basil came straight from the backyard!