Pesto can be found everywhere these days, but making your own still yields the best flavour and best of all, you can customise the texture (or indeed the ratio of the ingredients) to your own tastes. There are no definitive recipes… just whatever tastes good to you.

I had planned to use my home-grown basil to make the pesto, but the current crop is pathetically small. So, to fulfil my desire for pesto I bought a few packs of the supermarket stuff and supplemented it with as many leaves as I could scrounge off my poor little plants. (I’ve since discovered that they were root-bound, so they now live in much bigger pots.)

One of the traditional Ligurian ways of serving pesto is on troife pasta. Troife is a simple, hand-rolled pasta shape that looks like little twisted spirals–also reminiscent of a unicorn’s horn–which cleverly catches pesto in its spirals and grooves. If you fancy trying to make your own trofie, directions (with photos) can be found here.

I don’t know who first had the idea of adding green beans and potatoes to pesto and pasta, but they are an unsung hero. This was such a great combination, and it could only get better if you leave your pesto coarse and get a different flavour combination with each forkful. So fresh and peppery from the pesto with smooth, almost buttery slices of potato and a nice crisp bite from the beans.

Absolutely delicious and so easy to do, too.

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Maro is a Ligurian sauce of fresh broad (fava) beans, mint, olive oil and Pecorino cheese. Like pesto it can be used in several ways. Here, I’ve used it as a spread on bruschetta, but it can also be used to dress pasta, stirred into soups or used as a condiment alongside boiled or roasted meats.

You’re supposed to use fresh broad beans for this recipe, but the ones at the supermarket looked a bit ropey so I opted to use frozen podded beans which were probably much fresher than the ones in the vegetable department, anyway.

Shelling beans was a new experience for me and I was shocked to discover how thick the skin surrounding the beans themselves were. I pinched at loose bits of pale green bean skin, tore, then popped out the bright green and tender beans into a fresh bowl.

Once I got into the swing of things it went quite quickly and I could almost picture myself doing this whilst sitting in the shade of an olive tree at a beautiful wooden table in Liguria. Alas, the sound of a bus driving past jolted me back to reality.

A quick blitz in the mini food processor with the rest of the ingredients and the maro was made. It tasted great straight away, but I decided to chill it for a while to let the flavours blend.

When hunger struck, I sliced up some pain de campagne–alas, no ciabatta–rubbed it with some garlic and olive oil then toasted it in the oven to form bruschetta. When cooled slightly, I piled the gloriously green paste on top of each piece, drizzled some extra-virgin olive oil all over and then tucked in.

The maro was smooth and creamy with an initial hit of garlic, then the fresh flavour of the beans. I was only going to have a couple of bruschetta but I wound up going back for more and more… The lasting impression on my palate was the cooling sensation of mint. I’m not normally a fan of mint in savoury foods, however, this worked somehow and I think it is the cooling/refreshing feeling after each mouthful that made the maro absolutely addictive for me.

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