I love foraging and I also like to avoid food waste. I am most comfortable foraging when I am completely confident that the berries, leaves, funghi or whatever I am taking home is edible. Last year we were given a top tip on a place to forage locally for wild garlic, so we have made return visits this year. I have since been told by many people that the leaves in the basket above are in fact three-cornered leek, not wild garlic. No matter, it can be used in exactly the same way so I am happy to pick it. I even call it wild garlic usually, as it is snappier off the tongue!
I have made pesto and garlic butter with the results of my foraging. I had the idea of freezing garlic butter for use later in the year for making garlic bread to go with barbecue food. The pesto is lovely mixed into risotto, made into a dip with Greek yoghurt or added to pasta dishes. I make mine without measuring anything at all. I use a food processor and blend the garlic/leeks with olive oil, toasted pine nuts, shaved parmesan, a splash of lemon juice and plenty of sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. Sometimes I use a different variety of nut, and in fact on this occasion I used almonds. Of course you can leave the nuts out if you have allergies or just don’t like them.
Today I decided to make spicy carrot soup for lunch, using some beautiful local carrots with tops still on, from Henley-on-Thames weekly market. When we had pet rabbits, we used to save the carrot tops for them, which they loved. I started looking into cooking with carrot tops a while back, as they look so beautiful and it seems a shame to put them in the compost if you don’t have hungry rabbits to feed. I found that the most common use is to make pesto. The tops are quite tough, so I went along with the advice in one recipe to remove the toughest stalks and use mainly the leaves. There was also a recommendation to blanch the leaves for about 5 minutes, so I always do this too. I then blitzed the blanched carrot tops with some of my three-cornered leek pesto, adding some more olive oil, lemon juice and seasoning. I also mixed in some Greek yoghurt to a portion to use today for dolloping on our soup.
I made my carrot soup with half a dozen chopped carrots, which I did not peel, but it does depend on the carrots; some really do need peeling if they look very bruised and the dirt does not lift off easily when you wash them. I cut my carrots into dice, as I like to semi-blitz my soup, and for this method it is nicest to have neat pieces of carrot which are not blitzed, rather than being too random and chunky. I also added a stick of celery, a chopped onion and some left-over rocket, tomato and beetroot salad (but this is purely optional!) I fried everything in olive oil and added freshly ground coriander, cumin seeds, harissa powder and a couple of knobs of grated ginger. I then added enough water to cover the vegetables and have about 6 inches of water over the top of the mixture – very unscientific but I rarely measure anything when I am making soup. After bubbling away on the hob for about 20 minutes, the vegetables were tender and I half-blitzed the soup with my stick blender.
We had this for lunch with some of the yoghurt pesto drizzled on the top. We also had home-made sourdough bread and home-made chicken liver pate. The pate was a gift from my mother and I just wanted to try it right away!
