The Joys of Wild Garlic

All about wild garlic: your new favourite herb

Known officially as ‘Allium Ursinum’ and colloquially as bear’s garlic, wood garlic and ‘ramsons’, the wild garlic plant is a delicious free addition to the larder at this time of year. You can find them growing all over the country, especially in woodlands and by roadsides, and even in parts of London!

They have shiny, dark green leaves shaped like a pointed oval and, as the season progresses, beautiful, star-like white flowers. More importantly, however, they smell very strongly of onions – you’ll be able to locate them in the woods just by following their smell.

Unlike domestic or cultivated garlic, wild garlic leaves are much more widely used than its roots or bulbs, as these are much smaller than those of cultivated garlic. However, the whole plant is edible, so if you want to give the roots a go then do! The flowers are also edible and look wonderful sprinkled onto salad.

How to pick

When you’re picking, try to leave some buds so that the plant can reproduce, and there’ll be some around for you next year! If you’re after the leaves, pinch the leaf off at the stem, leaving the root in the ground if you can – the leaves will often grow back a second time if you leave them enough stem.

When I picked my lot a few days ago, the buds were sprouting but hadn’t yet flowered (they look a bit like pointy seed pods). These ‘pods’ are absolutely delicious pan-fried in butter and olive oil and sprinkled with a little salt – crispy and soft, and tasting mildly of roast garlic. I thoroughly recommend you pick some if you’re out and about.

You need to take a little care when picking wild garlic as there are a few plants that look similar but aren’t edible, notably Lily of the Valley. There’s freely available advice on the internet about telling them apart, but the main clue is the smell – you’ll notice an oniony scent anywhere where wild garlic grows, and it’s really pungent when you crush a leaf between your fingers. Don’t worry: it doesn’t taste nearly as strong as it smells! In addition, the flowers of Lily of the Valley are bell-shaped, rather like snowdrops, and its leaves grow from one central stem, whereas wild garlic leaves each grow individually on one stem.

Eating it

The younger leaves of wild garlic are best for salads, as they’re a little more tender. When picking, you’ll sometimes find them towards the edge of a cluster, or underneath the larger, older leaves. They’re also wonderful chopped into ribbons and added towards the end of a stir-fry, especially with some julienne of ginger. You can add the younger roots to stir-fries as well – treat them a bit like spring onion. Don’t leave out the older leaves – they’re great for soup, since you’ll be pureeing it anyway, and you can also blanche them in some boiling salted water until they wilt and eat them a bit like spinach.

So that’s old leaves, young leaves, roots, flowers, buds; soup, salad, stir-fries, blanched leaves, pan-fried buds. You can even make wild garlic pesto (no joke – the recipe’s below). This could well be the most useful plant in the universe. Now cook with it!

Wild Garlic Soup

Ingredients

Knob of butter

1 large onion

1 large potato

Medium-sized mixing bowl full of wild garlic leaves

50ml white wine

1 litre chicken stock – preferably homemade, but stock cubes are fine

2 tbs crème fraiche or cream

Salt and pepper

Method

Roughly chop the onion and potato and wash the garlic leaves well. Sweat the onion in the butter until it’s translucent and soft, then add the potato and sweat for another minute or so.

Deglaze the pan with the white wine (just pour it in and scrape the yummy bits off the bottom), and let it reduce to a light syrup, then add the chicken stock and let it simmer for 20 minutes or until the potato is well cooked through.

Once the potato is cooked through, add the garlic leaves and cook for another two minutes once they’ve wilted. Purée the soup until it is a consistent colour and texture, then add the crème fraiche or cream if you’re using it, and stir it in well. Taste it, and season to taste with salt and pepper. Then pour into a lovely big bowl and enjoy!

As a garnish, you have a few lovely options. You can set aside a few leaves of garlic, and slice these into really thin strips to top each bowl, with a spoonful of cream. Or you can make up a little bowl of pesto from the recipe below and serve the soup with a blob swirled in. Again, this looks fantastic with a bit of cream swirled in too!

Wild Garlic Pesto

Ingredients

A couple of large handfuls of wild garlic

1 small shallot

50-60g hard, salty cheese such as parmesan

50-60g pine nuts or shelled, peeled walnuts

80 ml olive oil, plus enough to cover the pesto in the jam jar

½ tsp salt and ½ tsp pepper

1 tsp sugar

Method

Wash and thoroughly dry the garlic leaves, grate the cheese, and very roughly chop the shallot and nuts. If you need to peel the walnuts, blanche them for a few minutes in rapidly boiling water and try to peel them while they're hot: it's a fiddly job at the best of times, but this makes it a little easier.

Pulse the nuts and shallot in the food processor until broken up somewhat, then add the garlic leaves and oil and continue to pulse until the garlic is chopped up very small and a consistent texture is achieved.

Fold the cheese into the mixture, then season to taste with salt, pepper and sugar. Pour it into clean jam jars, then top up with oil until the pesto is totally covered (this is important to keep it fresh and green).

Keep your pesto in the fridge; it’s at its best up to a week after making it. It’s great with meat, particularly chicken and sausages; with soft, mild cheeses or salads; and with the soup recipe above. It’s also yummy on pasta!

A final note: I've just looked out of my kitchen window into the crummy, bin-filled yard that counts as my garden, and guess what's growing in all the corners? You got it: wild garlic. It's probably closer than you think!

A Lunchtime Puff Pastry Treat

After a long absence (Please Don't Kiss The Cook has been hitting up London!), we're back with a quick but nevertheless wonderful lunch-or-snack-time treat based on puff pastry, which, although a devil to make, is the easiest thing in the world to buy at your local supermarket and doesn't suffer too much from the 'non-homemade' stigma.

This recipe is not only delicious, but benefits from a great deal of flexibility - you can change it up from day to day, making it a fantastic way to keep your lunchtimes varied. The method below is the version I made recently, but I'll give you a few ideas for variations as well.

Ingredients

A dusting of flour
Puff pastry - about a quarter of a standard 'Jusroll' pack
Tomato puree - about a teaspoonful
A red onion, finely sliced
One garlic clove, crushed
A small, ripe tomato, sliced
About 25-50g of the cheese of your choice (I used Taleggio, which may smell like feet but tastes delicious)
A tiny bit of butter or egg wash
Basil to finish (optional, and not with the Taleggio I think)


Method

Preheat your oven to 200 C. Dusting the table and your hands with flour first, roll or press out the puff pastry to about half a centimetre thick, or until it's around 20cm long and 10 thick. Make sure you keep it reasonably well-floured or it'll stick. You can also buy it ready-rolled if you like. At the same time, sweat the onions and garlic in a small frying pan and allow them to begin to turn golden at the edges.

Now lay your pastry flat and cover with the tomato puree, leaving an edge of at least one centimetre all around. Top with the onion, tomato, and cheese. Wash the pastry edges with a little melted butter or egg. Bake for 10-15 minutes in a hot oven until the pastry has risen and turned golden brown, and the cheese is bubbling. Finish with chopped basil if using. Delicious hot or cold, and lovely with a salad.


Some Variations

You can see how easy the basic method here would be to vary - it's sort of a high-class pizza, and enjoys the same breadth of variation. Just don't insult it with plain tomato puree and cheddar cheese. It's worth more.

Here are a couple of ideas:

Goat's cheese: Cut out the tomato and tomato puree, and use caramelised onions instead of plain red onion. Replace the taleggio with goat's cheese. Top with a little chopped thyme, and serve with a cherry tomato salad.

A fresher option: Leave the tomato and half of the cheese out of the basic recipe (use cheddar or similar, not blue cheese here), and top the finished tartlet with fresh ripe tomatoes, chopped and tossed with torn basil, balsamic vinegar and olive oil, and a sprinkling of torn-up fresh mozzarella.

Salad-on-a-pastry-plate: Use olive oil, rosemary and crushed garlic instead of the puree, and leave out the rest. Bake like this, then top with lightly dressed rocket salad, cherry tomatos, slices of cured beef (bresaola), and shavings of really good quality grana padano.

Meatier Munch:  Sprinkle with some crispy-fried pancetta or some thin slices of cooked chicken before topping with the cheese and baking.

Experimenting with herbs: It's definitely not just basil you can involve here. Some chopped parsley rarely goes amiss for a garnish, a bit of tarragon would be lovely with the tomatoes (you could even sprinkle a tiny bit of tarragon vinegar on before the cheese), thyme or rosemary are both an option. Go wild.

Puddin': Why not? Puff pastry is just as much a dessert as a savoury taste. Try strawberries, honey and a dash of lemon juice to bake, with a dollop of creme fraiche to finish. Or, even naughtier, some very good quality dark chocolate and a generous sprinkling of chopped nuts. Eat sparingly!


So there you are, food fans. Fun with puff pastry. Incidentally, smaller versions of this recipe can make a nice canape idea, as the pastry base makes them easy to grab with a drink in the other hand. Just be sure to make them bitesize!

Simple Onion Gravy for Sausages

We were going to have rack of lamb for supper tonight. I won't lie, I was seriously looking forward to cooking it, since rack of lamb, as well as being a bit flashy if you get it right, is one of the first things I learned when I was first taught to cook. There was definitely a bit of showing off on the horizon.

Well, karma got its own back: when we opened the pack, the lamb smelled absolutely putrid, despite being well within date (that's what you get for buying your meat vacuum-packed at Costco, folks). Sad faces all round. We'll have to have sausages instead.

Cue my onion gravy.

I made it up one day not so long ago (as far as you can 'make up' a recipe for onion gravy...) and since then it's become one of my staples. I eat sausage and mash a lot more often than I used to! It'll jazz up the saddest of bangers and it does wonders for your mash as well (I'm biased, I LOVE mash with gravy). Don't forget to salt your mash a lot more than you initially think you need to though - it's the difference between creamy spud joy and bland failure. But back to the gravy. The best thing of all is that it's as easy as pie. A lot easier, in fact. Pie can be quite complicated.

Here it is, then; not the most glamorous of recipes, but I bet you find it useful!

Ingredients
(for 3 or 4)

One medium onion, sliced
Olive oil
Port
Beef stock
Redcurrant jelly
Salt and pepper
The pan you cooked the suasages in

Method

While your sausages are cooking and your potatoes are boiling, pop the sliced onions in a frying pan with some olive oil (not too much though, kids) and leave them on a low heat to cook through and turn that lovely golden brown particular to the white onion when it's done just right. When your sausages are done, remove them from the baking tray or frying pan onto a serving dish. Put the pan on the stove on a high heat, pour in a really good slosh of port (about a wine-glass's worth, if not more) and de-glaze it (that's when you scrape away at the sticky its on the bottom until they all dissolve into the port).

Pour the port and sausage juices into the onion pan, and add around a pint of beef stock. Obviously, you all make your own delicious beef stock and only use that in your cooking, but if you didn't, stock cubes would be fine. Let the gravy simmer for a little while, then add the redcurrant jelly. Allow the whole thing to reduce gently for five or ten minutes (this is a good time to get your mash ready). Finally, taste, season, and serve up with your champion sausage and mash. Peas or maybe some buttered leeks are a good vegetable here.

Enjoy Good Old British Bangers and Mash with the Finest Onion Gravy.

Risotto!

General chatter:

I LOVE a good risotto. By which I don't mean basmati rice overcooked with some sad looking peas added, but a proper Italian-style dish with arborio rice or similar, which takes time and attention to get right. Once you've got the basics of a dish like that, it'll repay you a thousand times by acting as a delicious blank slate on which you can draw up the exact meal you feel like eating. It's reliable in its basic ingredients, which are almost all things you have lying around in the average kitchen, and in its timing - my risottos always take at least 40 minutes, and never more than an hour. It's great as a starter or a main, if you're eating alone or with friends. If you haven't already, I hope you'll give risotto a good couple of tries, and come to love it every bit as much as I do.

A light risotto makes a lovely lunch, say with crayfish, crab, chilli and coriander (I ate this while out for lunch last week, and it was fantastic). A big bowl of risotto with bacon (pancetta if you've got it) and peas, liberally sprinkled with parmesan shavings, is my best friend when I'm curled up in front of the telly with a glass of white wine after a long day. Somehow it feels like more of an achievement than spaghetti and tomato sauce, although it takes about the same amount of effort (if maybe a touch more time in the kitchen)!

For a big dinner, I always think risotto makes a stylish accompaniment to your main dish - if you're sick of potatoes as a side, give risotto a go. Try something like thyme and wild mushroom risotto with lamb, perhaps, or a chilli-based one with asian braised pork belly. Pork belly's very trendy at the minute too, and it's quite a cheap cut. If you're serving your risotto as a side dish, it might be best to dole it out yourself - and think 'less is more'. You want the risotto to be a partner to your meat or main dish in this instance, rather than the main event - although, of course, it can certainly hold its own as a centrepiece if necessary. Try serving it in a roasted, scooped-out half of butternut squash.

Pre-cooking risotto (for dinner parties) 

Another little tip, which I learned from the Food Guru, is that you can actually part-make risotto in advance. PLEASE bear in mind when I say this that I don't mean days in advance - if you leave rice for too long before re-heating and eating it, it can harbour various very nasty little stomach bugs, which anyone who's picked at an ill-advised morning-after Chinese will vouch for. They don't just stop at a dodgy tummy either, and your life is (hopefully) worth more than a couple of grains of rice.

Bleak warning over.

Anyway, to pre-cook risotto just do the basics the hour before your guests arrive rather than the hour after they get there, when you're busy trying to be a star hostess (or host...). Make up the basic recipe (which I'll stick below in a bit - apologies to all who know it back to front, some people aren't so lucky!) to the point where the rice has nearly absorbed enough stock, which you'll know by tasting and feeling the hardness of the rice in your mouth. 

So you've got your risotto base and any other extra bits ready, and when zero hour comes you just need to mix it all together and reheat, adding extra stock and a bit of wine if necessary: it tends to thicken as it cools. You can do that after you've seated your guests, and they'll all be SO impressed that you whipped up a risotto by magic in five minutes.

Enough chatter. Here's a basic recipe, with tips on how to start making alterations:

Ingredients
(For one)

A small onion
Risotto rice - three small handfuls for a generous serving. Or three big handfuls, if you have small hands... Remember that it increases 3x in size while it cooks. Arborio rice is the easiest to get your hands on, I'm pretty sure they sell it in Tesco!
Glass of white wine
Stock - 500ml or so. The type depends on your flavours - chicken for a risotto involving chicken or other pale meats, vegetable for vegetarian risotto. I've never heard of risotto with beef stock before, but I suppose you could try it...
Grated cheese - cheddar is ok, but parmesan or really nice peccorino is best.
Salt and pepper


Method

This method will make you the absolute blank canvas of risottos. To alter them, you just put whatever ingredients you're adding in the following categories, and add them when I mention that category in the recipe. A lot of things, including all meat and vegetables like butternut squash, which makes a fantastic risotto by the way, need pre-cooking - just cook then however you like them most.

Category 1. Hard-stemmed herbs (thyme, rosemary, any whole or freshly-ground spices); onion-style ingredients (garlic and chilli are the most common here)

Category 2. Herbs which can be tough (mint is the main one, as it needs a bit of extra cooking time. Possibly also tarragon is you use it, but add some chopped leaves at the end too); dried herbs (All of them. But please don't use them if you can help it, they're honestly gross); vegetables which barely need any cooking (frozen peas, which you can add straight from the freezer by the way; spinach)

Category 3. Pre-cooked additions (pieces of chicken, beef, pork, fish or shellfish, vegetables with a long cooking time or which you want to roast before adding - No1 here is butternut squash, which makes a yummy risotto when oven-roasted in small chunks and added last-minute); soft herbs (for mixing through; examples are coriander, parsley (lovely!), dill)

Category 4. Finishers (a knob of butter just before serving makes it nice and shiny; some cheese, preferably shavings of parmesan or peccorino, is essential, either mixed through or scattered on top - or both; fresh herbs to scatter on top for a nice final presentation)


Bearing all that in mind (phew!), here's your basic method:

Finely chop the onion to about the same size as your grains of rice. Don't panic, it can be bigger if it must be. Sweat the onion and any ingredients from Category 1 in some butter or olive oil until softened and translucent. By this point your stock should also be ready and within reach. Add the rice, raise the heat a little, and mix around until all coated with the oil. Add the wine.

From now on, your rice is going to absorb liquid until it's cooked through, which will take around 40 minutes. During this time, don't just leave it to spoil, keep a close eye on it. For the next 40 minutes, this thing is your baby. Your job is to keep adding stock in small amounts, so that there's enough liquid there for the rice to absorb, but not so much that the risotto will be runny when it's finished absorbing. It shouldn't be swimming in liquid, but it shouldn't be sticking to the bottom of the pan either. It's a delicate balance and will probably be a bit scary the first time, but you'll get the hand of it!

The mixture will thicken gradually as the starch in the rice cooks. Just how thick it should be is up to you - various different regions of Italy have their own traditions. My favourite way of describing traditional risotto is "all'onda", which literally means 'like a wave' - the risotto should make little waves on the plate as you tip it up. This is traditionally achieved by adding cold butter and cheese at the end of cooking, but you don't need to worry too much about that with this basic recipe.

The most important thing is to keep on tasting. You know how pasta is best al dente, with just that touch of bite left in it? Well, when your risotto rice gets to al dente stage, it's about ten minutes before it's ready. This is the time to add your Category 2 ingredients. Be very careful with stock from now on - do add if it needs it, but beware of adding too much at once. If you do, you'll end up with rice soup, not risotto.

This point - just on al dente - is also the time to remove your risotto from the heat if you're pre-preparing it. Carry on from this point in the recipe later, once you've brought your pan back up to heat. You may need to add a little wine or stock to loosen it up a bit if you've let it cool.

When the rice reaches the texture you like best, add your Category 3 ingredients (they should be at room temperature, don't add chicken and so on straight from the fridge) and combine, cooking for a minute more just to heat them through and allow the flavours to combine.

Cheese, salt and pepper, and any Category 4 ingredients in, and serve straight away, topped with more cheese. Even the plain risotto needs some cheese stirring through before serving, and make sure you check your seasoning before you finish cooking.

With the babble removed, that's:
'cook chopped onions, rice in, stir, wine in, stir lots and add stock slowly (c.40 minutes), finish with cheese and seasoning.' 
That simple. When you've sorted that out, you'll have all the wonderful world of risotto at your fingertips. 

Happy exploring!

Creamy Chicken Pasta with Caramelised Onions

First, an apology. I've dropped the ball. There has, I admit, not been a post for...yes, it might be three days. This is because I've managed to escape the grim northern wastes for a while (getting out hours before the snow closed the roads completely...) to stay with the Boyfriend, where there have been interesting things to do which have distracted me from blogging. Enough said, I think.

In addition, I will be gallivanting off for some skiing in France this week, hammering the last nail into the blackened coffin that is my overdraft, so there will be a week-long hiatus from tomorrow until next weekend. My sincere apologies to my dedicated followers. As a reward, though, for your patience, I'll write an extra-long superblog next week and tell you all about the cheap and cheerful ways I attempted to feed myself in snowy Europe, as opposed to snowy Northumberland. So at least you've all got something to look forward to.

And so to recipes. This week, I've been attempting to teach the Boyfriend to cook - and to be fair to him, he's not doing badly. His enthusiasm reminds me of me, back when I first learned to cook pasta! We made ourselves supper one night this week, nothing too sophisticated but just a bit yummy nevertheless.

A bit of a note on shopping - I've found that student shopping always ends up more expensive than you'd expect, even if you're trying to save. My theory on this is that a lot of students end up having to buy things like flour, spices, tinned tomatoes, pasta and so on which the average family house might expect to have in their store-cupboard. If you're a student or trying to save money, I'd remind you that dry goods keep for a long time in your cupboard, so if you do a big 'store' shop at the beginning of the term or the year, you might end up saving more in the long run, especially if you try to pick your recipes based on what you've got in your cupboard.

Also on shopping - I had to look around a bit, but eventually I did find some free-range chicken breasts, which worked out about a pound more expensive than the battery ones. To my mind, it's really worth the money, because if you're going to kill and eat a chicken you ought at least to make sure the bird has had a decent life first. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has done a lot in this direction. Of course, if you can't afford it, you can't afford it, but you might want to have a bit of a think about where you stand.

Boyfriend and I used chicken breasts with the skin on and pan-fried them (the skin keeps them moist and stops them from burning before they're cooked through). We ate them whole, but after eating our supper we decided the dish might be nicer if you chopped the chicken fairly small, cooked it off, and mixed it with the pasta just before eating.

It was utterly delicious, though, and simple as anything to prepare. We sliced an onion and popped it in a pan with butter and olive oil on a low heat, along with a couple of sprigs of rosemary and some chopped garlic. Let it sweat for quite a while, until it's really soft and caramel-y, then we whacked in some marsala or balsamic vinegar and reduce the mixture down until it caramelises fully. At the same time we cooked off the chicken and boiled some pasta and green beans in the same pan (saves on washing up!)

Finally, we deglazed the chicken pan by pouring in some marsala and scraping away at the delicious sticky bits on the bottom of the pan. These are absolutely the best bits and their flavour should never be wasted! We combined the reduced marsala and onions (take out the rosemary sprigs first) with cream and the chicken juices, poured that over the drained pasta and beans, and ate with the fried chicken. Very creamy, totally dreamy.

Here's the recipe, which is based on one from Nigel Slater's Real Cooking:

Ingredients (for two):

2 chicken breasts
Some green beans
A few handfuls of pasta
Olive oil
Butter
An onion
Some Marsala, Madeira, or Balsamic vinegar
Some garlic cloves
A bit of rosemary


Method:

1. Chop the onions and garlic and sweat in a pan with butter, olive oil and rosemary until very, very soft. This may take a while. At the same time, fry the chicken (either chopped or whole, your choice) in some olive oil.
2. Ten minutes before the chicken is done, pour some Marsala over the onions (turn up the heat a bit, as well) and put the pasta and chopped green beans in boiling water.
3. When the chicken is done, deglaze the pan by pouring over some Marsala and scraping at the sticky bits over a high heat, then add this to the onions. Remove the rosemary from the onions
4. Let the alcohol boil off, then add some cream.
5. Drain the pasta when it's done, then add it to the sauce and mix well.
6. Either stir in the chicken or serve it with the pasta to the side.
7. Enjoy.