Recipes with Wild Garlic
Early last year we met a couple of avid foragers and talented chefs. With their own amazing restaurant "Orwells" not too far from The Patch we have become friends over recent months based on mutual love of the raw ingredients that we grow or forage and the sheer joy of working with such bounty.
We have shared basket loads of wood blewits, oyster mushrooms, elder flowers, chickweed and last week, an everlasting heap of wild garlic.
Faced with such abundance I consulted Carl Legge, on whose website I had already spotted a number of delicious sounding recipes to be made with this early spring treat and vowed to try to make as many as I could.
Wild Garlic Foccacia
By Tuesday I had a fridge full of wild garlic pesto, mayonnaise, wild garlic butter (a massive hit with my most picky child!) Wild garlic focaccia (thanks to Liam of Orwells for that idea) We had eaten our Sunday roast stuffed with wild garlic leaves with the butter pushed under the breast skin. (idea courtesy of fennelandfern ) The legs and thighs eaten on Sunday the breast meat, deliciously tender and succulent thanks to the liberal daubing of butter was awaiting use in a risotto.
Wild garlic and nut pesto
But still the pile of silky leaves seemed to remain steadfastly the same size.
Soup then... made with roast chicken and garden vegetables stock, spinach, which is growing vast in the polytunnel, leeks, onions and potatoes from the garden and handfuls of wild garlic leaves.
Wild garlic and spinach soup.
3 leeks sliced (white parts only).
1 onion.
2 tblsps of olive oil and a big knob of butter.
3 large double handfuls of spinach washed and sliced (bunch up the handfuls and cut through the compressed leaves)
2 large double handfuls of wild garlic leaves rinsed if necessary roughly chopped.
2 large potatoes peeled and diced.
1 1/2 litre of good chicken stock seasoned to taste. (the garlic stuffed roast chicken made a fabulously fragrant stock)
A glug of milk or cream to taste.
Salt and pepper.
Gently cook the leeks in the butter and oil over a low heat until soft but not coloured. Add the seasoned stock and the potatoes and cook for about 20 minutes until the potatoes are tender to the point of a knife.
Add the spinach and the garlic leaves and wilt into the stock for about 3 minutes or so.
Blend well with a stick blender seasoning and tasting as you go.
Add milk or cream. Once the cream/milk is in do not let it boil or it may split.
Serve with wild garlic flower buds or a swirl of cream.
You could easily swap the spinach for a pile of washed nettle tips if you were feeling adventerous and remembered to wear gloves!