pine nut mouth & pesto

Last week I made this lovely pesto with a big handful of gorgeous fresh basil, a beautiful bunch of curly parsley, 2 cloves minced garlic, a few generous swishes of olive oil, some salt and pepper... and about a half cup of pine nuts (take note of this, it's what the rest of the story will be about). Blended it all very nicely in my sweet food processor, and served it a top some brown rice pasta, with a few halved cherry tomatoes and hot italian sausage. It was delightful. Absolutely wonderful... it is a perfect time to make pesto.

The issue came when I noticed about 3 days later that I had a strange bitter/metallic taste at the back of my mouth. When M came home from work I mentioned it to him... which to me meant that it was really something if I was bothering to remark. To my surprise, he had noticed the exact same thing... an odd bitter aftertaste that would happen every time he ate or drank anything. And, with all of my experiments in the kitchen... he was now convinced that I had poisoned him :). Soooo not the case here.

We also agreed that it was unlikely that we both developed diabetes on the same day with the exact same symptom... and thanks to google it was not to difficult to figure out what happened. We had contracted "Pine Nut Mouth". And, as it seems from our quick search that many others had too... especially from pine nuts from Asia. The ones I had "poisoned" us with came from Trader Joe's... so, I would not recommend those for your next pesto. If you want a medical opinion on the subject, click here.

As for my pine nut mouth... it is less and less as the days go by, working itself out of my system. Not too worried but it sure is weird. Hope you are well, xoxo tbone