Wild Garlic Focaccia

As anyone with even a vague interest in wild food knows, spring is the season for wild garlic - a pungent wild allium which grows in woodlands, and which has become very popular in recent years. A couple of weeks ago, I was out walking and found a vast sea of wild garlic stretching as far as I could see into the trees. I picked a bag full, stuck it in my rucksack and carried on walking. I spent the next few days making pesto with it, chucking it in a stir fry, mixing it through ragu, and anything else I could think of. A week later I went walking with my Mum and she turned up with a very full carrier bag of wild garlic, and I had to think of more ways of using it. I made a wild garlic focaccia, which was delicious.

A sea of wild garlic...

First pickings from the asparagus bed

A couple of years ago I wrote a post about planting out an asparagus bed. I was very excited about the prospect of picking my own asparagus. However, we had to be patient. The asparagus crowns need to spend a couple of years establishing themselves before they can be picked. This year, the bed being in its third year, we were finally able to pick some asparagus. It was with great excitement that in early April I spotted the first spears poking through the ground. Several days later they were tall enough to pick and we had our first harvest. On the first picking there were only a couple of spears. Delicious but not quite enough to satisfy the appetite. By the end of April we were able to pick enough for a plateful. They were delicious!

Our first asparagus spears

Hop shoots

Wild hop plants can often be found growing in the hedgerows and field margins of Kent and Sussex. These plants are a legacy from the time when hops were a common crop in South East England. Sadly most hops used in the UK beer industry these days are imported, often from as far afield as China, though the craft beer movement is spawning a renewed interest in English hops.

Hop shoots

DIY Smoked Mackerel Paté

For Christmas, my parents-in-law gave me a hot smoker. It is a great kitchen toy. It looks like a mess tin - one of those metal things that survivalists like Ray Mears eat from at picnics. You put some wood chippings in the bottom of the smoker, place a tray over the top and pop your food in. Shut the lid of the tin, and put the smoker on the stove, and leave it to smoke. You can buy a hot-smoker from any decent kitchen suppliers, and I've heard it is possible to make one out of a biscuit tin, or even a wok and some wooden chopsticks.

Wild garlic soup

Wild garlic soup

This is another recipe that is ideal if you have picked or otherwise acquired a large quantity of wild garlic (or ramson) leaves. Despite the abundant use of wild garlic leaves, the soup has a relatively mild flavour and lacks the pungency of raw wild garlic. It has a vivid green colour, and a pleasant earthy flavour, which reminds me of woodland in spring. The method is pretty simple, and can be adapted to make soup with watercress, nettles and other fresh green leaves. This recipe will serve four.

Wild garlic pesto

Visiting my parents at the weekend, we decided to go for a walk in the woods. My mum was keen to see bluebells. I was keen to pick wild garlic. My dad is an artist, and there’s a wonderful little wood near his studio that we thought would fit the bill.

April is a lovely time of year for a walk in the woods. The trees are just starting to put on leaf growth, and lots of light floods onto the forest floor, which is a riot of verdant green and wild woodland flowers, primroses, wood anemones, forget-me-nots and bluebells, all of which put on their show before the trees’ leaves shade the forest floor for another summer. By the end of April, wild garlic is coming to the end of its season, but is particularly easy to spot once its starry white flowers appear. 

Crab and Samphire Linguine

Crab, samphire and other ingredients

At the weekend I went down to my local fishmongers, Brighton and Newhaven Fish Sales, and was excited to see the first of the new season’s samphire. I couldn’t resist. I also bought a crab, and decided to make crab and samphire linguine. It seemed the perfect supper on a sunny spring day.

Samphire is a sort of succulent, which grows in salt marshes. It is in season from about mid spring to August, and has a pleasant slightly salty flavour. It is delicious lightly steamed with a little good quality olive oil, and a twist of pepper, and works well with fish. In the spring it is great raw, but tends to get a bit woody as the season goes by.  It can be foraged, although most of the places I know where it grows tend to be on the side of rivers with heavy marine traffic or in nature reserves. I avoid picking the former because of the risk of pollutants and the latter because, well, foraging from nature reserves seems to be frowned upon, for good reason.

Planting an asparagus bed

Asparagus is one of the classic spring vegetables, available for a couple of months from about early to mid April. These days asparagus can be found in the shops all year round, much of it imported from Peru. Imported asparagus rarely has the flavour of English asparagus in season. Sadly, English asparagus always seems to carry a hefty price tag, even in the middle of the season. I saw a bunch of English asparagus for sale in Borough Market recently, right at the beginning of the season, for £6. I counted the bunch, there were 7 spears. Much as I like asparagus, I am not really willing to pay almost a pound a spear for it.

Veal chops, Marsala and wild garlic

Veal used to be one of those meats that, like foie gras, one was not supposed to eat. It was pretty tasty, but the way it was produced was not very humane. Happily, welfare standards are much better than they used to be for veal calves, at least in the UK. I have to say I am pretty pleased, being partial as I am to a nice bit of veal now and then. English rose veal has grown in popularity in recent years, and in many ways it is an ethical choice for us carnivores who like to know that our meat lived reasonably decent lives before hitting our plates. One of the sad facts of the dairy industry in this country is that on many farms, male dairy calves are of no use and hence destroyed at birth. If more people ate veal, more of these animals would be given some kind of life and a useful role in the food chain.

Ground elder frittata

We recently did that thing, the one where you decide to move out of South London to Brighton, or to be more accurate, Hove. (I hesitate to conform to stereotype and use the word 'actually'.) We have a new garden. It is sunny, and a good size - a little overgrown, but full of potential. We have started clearing the garden, but with the onset of spring I noticed the appearance of ground elder. Ground elder is a fairly invasive, fast-growing plant, which can be hard to clear from a garden. It is a member of the carrot family, and has leaves that look a bit like celery leaves. Ground elder is edible, and I have heard that in the spring it makes good eating. I picked a young sprig, and gave it a nibble. It had a mild, pleasant flavour - somewhere between celery and parsley (both of which it is related to). Surprisingly tasty for a plant that can be the bane of many gardeners' lives. The flavour gets stronger and less pleasant as the plant gets older, particularly once it has set flower. Its edibility is in fact the reason why we have ground elder in the UK. Apparently it was introduced here by the Romans as a food plant.

Ground elder in the border

Salad leaves

The salad bed, looking a little wild!

We've all bought those bags of mixed salad from the supermarket before: they look interesting, but most of the leaves are fairly tasteless, and once opened, the contents of the bag rapidly turn to mush in the fridge. Many salads are easy to grow, and even a few pots on a balcony can produce enough salad leaves to brighten up a shop-bought lettuce. Given a bit more space, and some judicious sowing, you can be picking home-grown leaves from mid-spring until well into the autumn.

Radishes

The first radishes of the season

When I was a child, my parents had a vegetable plot. When I was about seven or eight I became interested in actually growing things, rather than just digging in the dirt of the veg plot. One of the first things I was encouraged to grow was radishes. For many children (or adults) taking their first steps into the world of growing vegetables, radishes are a good place to start. They are relatively easy to grow, provided they get enough water, and the time between sowing the seed and harvesting the bright red roots is probably shorter than any other veg.

Asparagus fritto misto with saffron mayonnaise

English asparagus is one of the great treats of mid to late spring. It can be grown in the back garden or on the allotment, but requires some hard work before one reaps the rewards. First a bed needs to be well-prepared during the winter, with plenty of organic matter added. In about mid-spring, shallow trenches are dug, into which asparagus crowns are planted. The trenches are then back-filled around the crowns. No asparagus can be picked in the first year, and only a few spears in the second. After that, asparagus can be picked for about 6-8 weeks from about mid-April onwards.

Elderflower Sorbet

The elder is a slightly scrubby tree commonly found in hedgerows and on waste ground. In late spring it is covered in white flower heads. The flowers have a pleasant taste, and are often used to make wine and cordial. They can also be used to flavour cakes, jellies, ice creams and sorbets.

In praise of the turnip

For many years the turnip has been a deeply unfashionable vegetable - more likely to be found as the butt of a joke on Blackadder, or as cattle fodder, than on a restaurant menu. It is, in my view, a useful vegetable, ill-deserving of its down-at-heel reputation. I suspect that harvesting when too large and over-cooking are both, at least in part, to blame.

Wild garlic

Until a few years ago, wild garlic grew relatively undisturbed in woodlands in much of the English countryside, picked only by a few aged foragers clutching their battered copies of Richard Mabey's classic 1970s book 'Food for Free'. Suddenly wild garlic is on nearly every restaurant menu at this time of year. I'm a fan of the stuff, and have been picking it for years. It's great it has now become so popular.

Swiss Chard

Swiss Chard is one of the stalwarts of the veg patch. It has a spinach-like flavour, if a bit more robust. Unlike spinach, which runs to seed quickly, chard can be picked over a long period, and, once established, grows in abundance. With its multi-coloured stems, it makes an attractive feature in the veg garden.

Purple sprouting broccoli

Purple sprouting broccoli

Brassicas seem to adore the heavy clay soil in my veg patch. And when I say adore, we're talking monster, shoulder-height plants. I grow a range of brassicas - cavolo nero, brussels sprouts, curly kale - but my favourite is purple sprouting broccoli. I prefer an early variety that starts to produce florets (which are immature flower buds) towards the end of February, and which can usually be picked through to the end of April. As the season goes by, the florets get more spindly, as the plant tries harder and harder to flower. As well, as tasting great and being reasonably versatile in the kitchen, purple sprouting broccoli provides an abundant harvest at a time of the year when precious little else can be picked from the veg patch.

Growing globe artichokes

Globe artichokes are one of my favourite vegetables. Often in the UK we can only buy them when they are old and large. We tend to boil these whole, and then tear of the leafy sepals and eat them with hollandaise or (as my mum does) with melted butter sauce. I do enjoy eating them this way, but what I really like is cooking them when they are much smaller as an ingredient in a stew, or preserving them under oil, which makes a delicious accompaniment to cold meats. In the last few years smaller artichokes have appeared on the British market, but they are often expensive, and seldom look as good as those one sees for sale in Italian and French markets.