When a kitchen trick makes something both better-tasting and easier to cook, you have to wonder which came first. (Or don't wonder, and just send your fork a-twirl in a mess of pesto-speckled noodles, which is what you came to do.)

On first glance, this recipe could have been any other pesto pasta recipe on the internet (there are — oh — 3.1 million of them), but, for a few reasons, this one caught my eye. For one thing, I implicitly trust what now has to be my favorite Food52 Hotline thread of all time, in which readers shared the best thing they'd cooked all year. I also admire the recipe's maker, Nancy Harmon Jenkins — the olive oil expert and cookbook author who we have to thank for popularizing the very notion of the Mediterranean diet.