Aunt Carla’s Green Sauce

This sauce is the stuff dreams are made of. My auntie Carla used to bring it around every Christmas for us to spread on succulent slices of boiled tongue. It is delicious with meat, but I think nothing beats it on a picnic blanket, with a fresh baguette, giant green olives and boiled eggs. It is also unbelievably easy to make, if you have a food processor or are swift with your mezzaluna.

Ingredients

2kg fresh parsley

1 egg

300 ml of extra virgin olive oil

½ cup white wine vinegar

salt

pepper

1 cup of pine nuts

¼ teaspoon grated nutmeg

if you like spice, 1 chilli pepper.

Put all the parsley leaves in the food processor and turn them onto a densely aromatic, green sludge. Add the oil a little at the time until the leaves acquire the creamy consistency of a sauce.

Boil the egg, but it in half and scoop the yolk out. Add the crumbled whites to the food processor and blitz again until they are merged in with the sauce. Add the vinegar and the chopped up chilli. If you want a uniform tone you can use a green chilli, but I like my sauce to be speckled with little bits of ground red chilli pepper.

Take it out of the food processor and add the pine nuts, the nutmeg and salt and pepper (you can make this as salty as you like).

I would eat this all by itself. It is a great way of getting little girls to eat boiled eggs and boiled meat without a fuss, and it is absolutely delicious with crunchy peppers and on bread.

It also makes a very nice present. A fun idea would be to give it with a baguette and one of those 6-egg carton containers, filled with boiled eggs on which you have written a message or drawn little faces (you can draw on the shell with a thick tip marker, the ink won’t get to the egg). Or with quail or duck eggs, if you are felling more fancy, and a jar of spicy chilli jelly.