Foraging for wild garlic
Quinoa and wild garlic burgers, wild garlic pesto, quick pickled beetroot
Makes: enough for 4 people (3 burger patties per person)
Takes: around 45 minutes
Ingredients
Quinoa and wild garlic burgers
200 g white quinoa
200 g wild garlic leaves
100 g feta
2 eggs
100 g breadcrumbs
30 g rolled oats
salt and pepper
1/2 t chili flakes
1 T sunflower oil
To serve: radicchio leaves, wild garlic flowers, a spare wild garlic leaf or two
Wild garlic pesto
30 g wild garlic leaves
30 g basil leaves
2 cloves garlic
40 g roasted almonds
100 ml olive oil
juice of 1 lemon
salt and pepper
Quick pickled beetroot
200 g beetroot
1 red onion
200 ml cider vinegar
1 t salt
1 T dark muscovado sugar
1 t sumac
1/2 t tumeric
1/2 t fennel seeds
1 cinnamon stick
2 dried chillies
Method
Burgers
Cook 200 g quinoa in 250 ml water in an instant pot/pressure cooker for 5 minutes. Remove from heat and leave with lid on for a further 5 minutes to allow it to fluff up. Then remove lid and leave to cool slightly.
Wash the wild garlic and then blanch in a pot of boiling water for around 30 seconds, before transferring to a bowl of ice water. Remove from bowl, drain and chop finely.
If making breadcrumbs yourself, toast the bread, then place in the food processor and blend to a fine crumb.
Add all burger ingredients to the food processor: breadcrumbs, oats, feta, 2 eggs, salt and pepper, wild garlic and quinoa. Pulse for 1-2 minutes until it is bound together in a stiff mix that holds its shape.
Shape the mixture into burger patties. It will make around 12. Shallow fry these in a frying pan with some sunflower oil, pressing them down into the pan and turning over so that each side becomes well browned. Blot on paper towels before serving. These are sufficiently robust that they could easily be reheated on a barbecue.
Pesto
Using small pot of a food processor, blend up the roasted almonds, or pound in a mortar and pestle.
Wash 50 g wild garlic leaves, dry, then chop them, along with the basil leaves (or parsley or coriander if preferred).
Add the herbs to the almonds, along with around half of the oil and the lemon juice. Then slowly add additional oil as needed until the consistency is quite smooth, with only a few small chunks of nuts left. Season and adjust lemon juice, oil and salt to taste.
Quick pickled beetroot
Chop the ends of the beetroot, then slice thinly. Slice the red onion thinly.
Place beetroot and red onion into a pan along with all other ingredients. Add enough water until the vegetables are covered. Bring to a boil and then allow to cook for around 15 minutes.
To serve, remove the onion and the beetroot slices from the liquid.
To keep, while still hot, pour into a sterilized, recycled jam jar. As it cools, the lid will click down, sealing it. The pickled beetroot will keep for at least two weeks in the fridge once opened. It also makes a great addition to sandwiches or salads.
The story behind the recipes…
I’m walking around Park Frankendael in Amsterdam on a Sunday morning with some friends. We walk past the tall man-made platform where a stork is almost always nesting, past the restaurant inside a greenhouse where we once went to eat for my birthday years ago, they grow most of their own food and even offer Dutch wine from the tiny wine region in the South near Maastricht. It is a cold morning and the sun is unreliable, wavering between clouds. Then we spot him. A man bundled up in coat and scarf, walking towards the entrance briskly, furtively even, a thick bouquet of green leaves in hand. A few moments later, we enter a shaded, damp area and we are hit with a heady, powerful aroma. A patch of wild garlic. It is an allium and tends to carpet woodlands once it is established. It is already in flower and the delicate white flowers have shot up out of the vibrant green leaves, some of them still enclosed in their gossamer cocoons. That man was foraging, I realise, with a jolt of recognition.
At the right time of year, in the right place, New Zealand can be a forager’s mecca. Many local councils have planted fruit trees on public land and it is almost always permitted to pick the fruit. One year, visiting my Grandfather in Motueka, I went out for what I thought would be a short walk with his dog, and came home laden down. I turned my sweatshirt into a makeshift basket, gathering figs, lemons, apples, pears, plums. Another year, I picked tiny black olives from olive trees planted on the side of a road in Devonport, taking them home and preserving them in brine.
Of all the food memories I have, some of the most powerful involve the places I have found or grown my own food. The same way that an elephant never forget sources of water, there is something deep inside of us that remembers the places we have found food. There are the dried rosehips I picked in the foothills in Esquel, Patagonia, after a long hike in which my food supplies had long been devoured. I tore the rose hips open with my teeth, emptying the downy seeds onto the ground before eating the hips. They tasted of dusty, fragrant herbs and fruit leather. It was more than a decade ago, but it feels like yesterday.
There are the tiny round potatoes that sprouted at the edge of the first compost heap I kept, at the back of a garden on the wrong side of a hill, that was almost perpetually in shade, as so many Wellington gardens are. They were like tiny moons, dense spheres of creamy flesh, I ate them in a salad.
There are the tiny wild blueberries and raspberries we collected while hiking in the Pyrénées last Summer. Berries that were so extraordinary that it seemed like sacrilege to do anything except eat them by themselves, by the spoonful, drinking their juices up. I am confident I could find that valley again, find it in a heartbeat, walk confidently up the track to the place where it opened out into the low blueberry bushes, dotted among the rocks.
Part of making my home in The Netherlands is to make those memories here, to make places in this landscape hum with the same resonance. There is the community garden where I kept a plot for years. The sprawling sage bush in the corner of the plot, the eggplants I grew in the summer, more purple basil than I could eat. And while the options for foraging may be less plentiful than New Zealand, I have slowly found my places. There is a meadow edged with flowers where I sometimes collected baby nettle leaves. And then there is the place where I pick wild garlic. It is not too far from our house, on a small, wild corner of land surrounded by trees, that is fast being encroached by new housing developments. Importantly, it is a good distance from the road (and exhaust fumes), and from any paths (which carry the inevitable risk of dog pee). Here’s a picture:
A quick word on the recipes this week. There’s no need to make the pesto and/or the beetroot as well, but they are a rocking accompaniment to the burgers. You could also just make a straight pesto and have it with pasta. I’ve called the patties “burgers”, and you can also eat them in bread buns if you’d like, but they do just fine without. Also, having thought I’d invented the quinoa/wild garlic combo, a quick google revealed that Ottolenghi got there first. Of course he did! Give his recipe a try as well if you like. I didn’t have any, but if you’re thinking of dialing up the flavour profile in the burgers, then some chopped sundried tomatoes would be a great addition.
Thanks for reading this week. Let me know if you try any of the recipes. Also, we’re in the process of designing a new kitchen and I’d love to hear from anyone who has been through this recently and has tips or tricks to share. So far, the main theme we’ve heard has been storage, storage, storage.
Amelia.