Vampire Repellant

Wild Garlic

I've already written a bit about wild garlic, as it is my first and hence most exciting forage of the year, and January includes last year's recipe for wild garlic butter.  However, it's well and truly up again, and, as mentioned, several months earlier than last year.  In fact, it came up before our mini-winter.  It was going great guns, pushing its head bravely above the surface and stretching out its leaves, when suddenly, much, no doubt, to its surprise, it got snowed on:  

The sub-zero temperatures and considerably thicker covering of snow than illustrated above didn't appear to do it any harm, however.  The ransomes seemed to just regard it as some large-scale cosmic game of grandmother's footsteps, and just kept VERY still for a week or so before resuming charging ahead with gay abandon as usual.  Needless to say, they are now just begging to be picked and eaten. 

Home made wild garlic butter is never going to be unwelcome in this house, but I thought I'd try something different, so decided to have a bash at some wild garlic pesto.  Here's the recipe - I'm sure you all know how to make pesto, so feel free to mess around with the quantities and ingredients to your hearts' contents, but this is what I did, this time.  Next time, it will be entirely different.  Probably.

Pick a good handful of garlic leaves.  Place in a food processor - mine's a manual one, which I love, as it feels like I've got better control over how finely processed things end up.  Sometimes when you blitz mixtures, you can end up with more of a, hmm,  sludge than you intended.

Add a good glug of olive oil and a decent sized pinch of Malden sea salt.  I don't particularly add the salt for the flavour, and do please feel free to leave it out - I just superstitiously feel that it helps grind down the mixture.  I'm quite sure this is utter nonsense, now that I've written it down, but I do it anyway.  

I always add lemon juice to pesto, unless it's a basil pesto, in which case I think it completely buggers up the warmth of the basillyness.  In this particular instance, it was the juice of a whole lemon.  

I'd usually add some parsley (as it's very good for counteracting the - ahem - breathiness of the garlic) but a) this year's parsley's not come up yet, b) there was none in the fridge and c) I don't really care about breathiness.  However, I did have a bunch of mint looking a little unloved in the fridge, so I shoved a couple of sprigs in to freshen it up a bit.  

If you're feeling virtuous, by the way, you can replace a fair bit (but not all, please) of the oil with water.  Or you can just stick to the oil and jump up and down a bit, which would be my approach.  

If I'd had some blandish nuts of any description in the house, I'd have added half a handful at this point - pine nuts of course being traditional, but macadamias, unroasted hazelnuts, brazils - any of those would have done.  I didn't have any so had to resort to a handful of cooked brown rice (VERY hippyish, m'loves) which I happened to have lying around. 

 Wham wham wham with the manual food processor, and Bob's yer uncle - a nice bit of wild garlic pesto.

Here it is stirred into some wheat-free pretend-pasta.  If I can figure out how to forage for wheat-free pretend-pasta, I'll be a happy bunny.  Meanwhile, a trip up the veg patch for a spot of potato harvesting, followed by mash with a dollop of this pesto chappie on the top is sounding rather appealing, next time I'm hungry....