True confessions: “I couldn’t face my last hamburger.”

Graham Hill is the founder of Treehugger.com. So he’s about as green as it gets, right? “Knowing what I know,” he asks, about all the reasons not to eat meat—budgetary, environmental, emissions, water consumption, animal cruelty, and health among them—“why am I not a vegetarian?… Any of these angles should have been enough to convince me to go vegetarian…. So why was I stalling?”

Long story short, Graham couldn’t face his last hamburger. But he came up with a great solution called, simply: Weekday Veg. Here he explains how he’s stuck to the plan for a year:  http://www.ted.com/talks/graham_hill_weekday_vegetarian.html (Thank you, Maggie Fellner Hunt, foodie and smartie, for sharing this video.)

Maybe the conversion to Weekday Veg will go more smoothly with a recipe to love. Here’s the dish my family asks for no matter what day it is, Sunday or Thursday, meat or no meat: Pesto. It’s made primarily of leaves. I’m always happy to comply–the inebriating basil aroma probably has something to do with this. I can’t think of an easier vegetarian recipe: easy to make, and easy to adore.

How to make Pesto:

2 cups fresh basil leaves: washed and patted dry

2 cloves garlic

1/3 cup pine nuts

½ tsp salt

¼ cup evoo

Put the first four ingredients in a food processor. Press the button to chop and blend. Add the evoo in a trickle. Taste. Adjust. Store in an airtight container until ready to toss with freshly cooked pasta. Add grated cheese and ground pepper as you wish. Keeps in the fridge for a week. If you don’t already include pesto as a staple in your diet, you might want to consider it. Have it on pasta, of course, but also have it on crackers, on apple slices, on celery sticks, slathered wraps, drizzled into omelettes, on tomatoes, mixed into soups and sauces – or even by itself, in obscene spoonfuls. The pesto pasta dish can be served with steamed vegetables – sliced zucchini, asparagus, peas, or broccoli are some excellent options. If you’re short on basil, swap in parsley, spinach, cress, or arugula.

For further culinary inspiration, check out Edible: A Celebration of Local Foods, from the creators of the ubiquitous regional Edible magazines.

Frankly, we thought we already knew of every veggy/yummy/local/sustainable/practically green cookbook in print, but here are five we missed. They all won prizes at the 2010 Green Books Festival last week.