Penne al Pesto and a little bit more

Well, we've been kind of sick around here, so I haven't been able to try out the new recipes that I had so ambitiously set out to try.
In an attempt to somewhat meet my goal, I'll post the mysterious "fabulous dinner" that I previously wrote about. 
Liguria is one of my favorite regions of Italy not only because it's amazingly beautiful, but because of their cuisine.  It's different from what you would traditionally think Italian cuisine to be.  They have amazing focaccia (like nothing you've ever tasted, trust me), fruit tarts, ravioli in a creamy walnut sauce, seafood (which I admittedly haven't tried) and then there's their pesto.
They typically eat pesto with a pasta called Trofie and green beans and red potatoes.  I couldn't get enough of it and often use the combination.  Here's a picture of the real thing:

Oh yum yum yum.

Trofie is kind of hard to find out here, so this time I used penne and I just used a pesto paste and added olive olive oil.  Boiled up some green beans and potatoes and viola:

I know what you're thinking.....it doesn't look anything like the first picture.  Well, I'm certainly not going to argue with that.  First of all, pesto with pine nuts is expensive, so I have to use quite a bit less than the Ligurians would :) aaaand I use more green beans and potatoes to make it a healthier, more substantial meal.

So there you have it.  A tasty, meatless easy meal.  Ryan really liked it and wants me to make it more often.

Speaking of Ryan, he bought baby some caviar for his birthday because he wanted him to try it (and apparently develop expensive tastes, hehe) and had some left over.  It's pretty smelly stuff so he had to eat  a lot of eat and decided to share it with friends in the form of his new creation, caviar nachos:

I didn't try them, due to my seafood aversion, but he and the others said they were very good!