Giada De Laurentiis' Gemelli with Kale Pesto and Olives | Giada At Home | Food Network.

It's time to make my gemelli with kale, pesto, chicken and pecorino. And I'm starting by seasoning the water for the pasta. And this is my pasta. They're little gemelli. Two strips of pasta that have sort of been twirled and spiraled together. So like two twins, which is what gemelli means in Italian, is twins. And they're super cute, short pasta. Jade loves them. The time it takes to cook the pasta is the time it takes to make the sauce. Stir the pasta so it doesn't stick to the bottom of the pan. We're going to start with some walnuts. And it's a half a cup of walnuts. And I'm going to sort of do a mixture of walnuts and kale. Which is a little bit of a departure from a traditional pesto, but super yummy. And hearty and I think works really well with this pasta. Then we're going to add one garlic clove. Then we're going to grab our kale and an orange, which we're going to zest and juice in a minute. But this is baby kale, and you can pretty much find it at the grocery store. I really like it because it's more tender than regular kale. And it's great on salads, it's great on pestos. I use it all the time. All of those things make it a plus in my book. So what we're going to do is run the food processor for a minute. Just to kind of break up the garlic, the walnuts, and the kale. Now, we're going to zest an orange. And then we're going to juice it as well. And we're going to add some orange juice. Add a little salt. A little bit of red pepper. Again, you can make this pasta dish as spicy as you want. And we're going to add two-thirds of a cup of olive oil. Gotta have some really good extra virgin olive oil. You're not cooking this sauce, and it's important for the pesto. And then we need Parmesan cheese. Nutty, buttery, and salty. The other cup we're going to save and add to the pasta once it's cooked. And just going to add all the pesto into the bowl. Nice and creamy and cheesy. Smells really good. So now that the pesto is done, we're going to start chopping our olives. So I've got a combo of different olives here. I've got some kalamata olives that you can usually buy in the grocery store. Kalamatas are very rich, which I really like. We're going to chop these up. So we'll add the kalamatas right in there. Then, I found these red cerniola. And these are Sicilian olives. They come green, they come red. If you can't find them, then you can just buy green cerniola olives, which are really yummy. They have a nice, vibrant bite to them. Cut them right off the pit. So we put those on top of the pesto. Let's grab our chicken. There we go. You've got your meat, you've got your pasta, you've got your veg. That's pretty great. When you're trying to cook for a family, it's really great to have all of the flavors and all of the ingredients that you're looking for in one dish. Alright. So we're going to add all of the little gemelli. See how cute they are? I like the shape of this pasta because it kind of mimics the shredded chicken. So they're both like the same shape. And, for the last cup of parmesan cheese, right over the top. We're going to grab another spoon and we're going to toss away. Yeah. There we go. Now, let's taste it to make sure it tastes just right. The pesto is so bright with the orange and the olives. I love it. Every bite is perfection.