One of the things I miss about summers are tomatoes; lush, juicy, plump, just-off-the-vine and bursting with flavour tomatoes, there is nothing quite like it.
The sombre grey clouds and rain make it easy to long for summer tomatoes, but I do love the calm this time of year offers, there’s cool gentleness to autumn that is comforting.
Tomorrow our neighbours to the south celebrate Thanksgiving, and with that begins the rush of the Christmas season. I’m a little unprepared for the season, I feel like it just crept up on us, how are we at the end of this year?
I remember getting a bag of pepitas (pumpkin seeds) early this past spring at the Trader Joe’s in Bellingham, uncertain but eager to try them. I sprinkled a handful over a quinoa and corn with roasted tomato salad.
Months later I spied the neglected pepitas in the cupboard and thought about the roasted cherry tomatoes, and the idea for this rosemary and pepita sun-dried tomato pesto was born.
We love pesto around here!
The first time we made this pesto we used slow roasted tomatoes; it was wonderfully savoury and rich, and tasted good on almost everything.
It’s a handy sauce to have in the fridge for quick weeknight meals. It’s fast become a household favourite, we use it on pasta, as pizza sauce, with roasted new potatoes, and it’s amazing on crusty bread and in sandwiches.
I prefer sun-dried tomatoes to slow roasted tomatoes for this pesto; it’s heartier and rustic with a much more intense and sweet tomato flavour. I get freshly dried sun-dried tomatoes that are soft and moist, but oil-packed tomatoes will work too or you will have to reconstitute very dry tomatoes.
I used the last of my pepitas a month shy of its expiration date. I guess time has passed; we tossed some into our granola in the summer and kept sprinkling them over salad, but mostly we made pesto.
[Tweet “A delightfully savoury pesto bursting with rich flavours of sun-dried tomatoes and pumpkin seeds”]


- 1 cup (packed) sun-dried tomatoes
- 1 cup toasted pepitas
- 1 tablespoon fresh rosemary
- 2 cloves of garlic, chopped
- 1 teaspoon Aleppo pepper
- 3/4 – 1 cup olive oil
- 1/4 teaspoon salt (or to taste)
- In a food processor, add sun-dried tomatoes and pepitas, and pulse to combine
- Add rosemary, garlic, Aleppo pepper and salt and pulse into a chunky paste
- While the food processor is running, gradually pour in olive oil until desired consistency is reached, make it as smooth or as coarse as you want it.
- Taste and check for salt and pepper, adjust seasoning as preferred
- Use immediately, or store in a jar or airtight container covered in a thin layer of olive oil
- I used dry-packed sun-dried tomatoes that were soft and moist.
- Pepitas are toasted pumpkinseeds, you can get them at the nuts or bulk section of most grocery and natural food stores.

6 Comments
You know you are always going to have me at pesto right. Looks really good. I really need to try using more seeds as well as my bestie is allergic to nuts so cant eat my normal pesto
27 November, 2014 at 6:28 amYou know us pesto lovers have to stick together:) Your poor bestie! definitely try seeds, they’re wonderful in pesto. I do sunflower seeds too.
27 November, 2014 at 10:43 am