Italian Salsa Verde

Recipe modified from Dinner, A Love Story and Bon Appetit, which has many variations of salsa verde recipes.  This sauce goes well with chicken, steak, fish, or vegetables.  This sauce is easy and quick to put together at the last minute, if you need something to liven up your dish.

I decided to make this sauce since I already had everything in my fridge and it was a great way to not let all those extra herbs go to waste!  I had half a bunch of parsley left over from linguine and clams,  some mint that I don't remember what I bought it for, a bunch of lemons from someone's lemon tree that I am slowly working through, capers from a scallop and couscous dish, and anchovies from some pasta.  If you keep capers, anchovies, and lemons around then you also might be able to make some up using fresh herbs which were bought for another dish.

So I used a mix of parsley and mint; it was about 1/5 mint, since I had some left over mint from last week that I wanted to use up.  I really like the freshness that the mint gave, so if you have some mint around, I recommend adding some! I used about half the parsley bunch; there were herbs to lightly pack the bowl of the small capacity food processor that came with my hand mixer.

I left out the scallion because I didn't have one around, and also added lemon zest, since lemon zest was an ingredient in one of the Bon Appetit recipes and I had some since I was juicing half a lemon anyway.

I put my salsa verde in a clean ketchup bottle to make it easy to drizzle.

1 cup fresh parsley (or cilantro or mint, or a mix of these herbs)
10 - 12 large capers
1 anchovy
1/2 tsp salt
pinch of pepper
juice from 1/2 a small Meyer lemon (my lemon was about the size of a small lime)
zest from lemon half
1/4 cup olive oil

Put all ingredients into a food processor, and blend until it makes a pesto.  Alternatively, you can drizzle the olive oil in slowly to emulsify the sauce if your food processor has a pour spout (mine doesn't).  Or, if you like, you could use a mortar and pestle to mash everything but the lemon juice and olive oil, and then slowly whisk in the liquids to emulsify.