Had some friends round for supper last night. Normally when I do this I take great delight in creating dishes using garden weeds and certainly lots of garden produce, but it’s been so cold this spring, even the nettles aren’t growing enough for a first harvest.
So instead of my signature nettle and wild garlic soup I had to resort to spinach and Babbington leek instead. Fortunately the Allium ampeloprasum babbingtonii (wild leek) that I love to grow and use from the garden, was just big enough to harvest four or five bulbs and leaves to give more than a hint of garlic flavour and the spinach? Well I’m sorry to say I had to buy some in. But just that act alone made me even more determined to grow more this year and save on supermarket bills.
The next course was a favourite Delia recipe, adapted (as usual) to make it even easier to cook – a wild mushroom risotto and for the meat eaters a free range, corn fed chuck, roasted with a handful of garden grown herbs. Both were served with a root veg and rosemary (garden grown) bake.
Dessert was a simple lemon posset or Greek yoghurt with raspberry coulis. The freezer supply of garden grown raspberries is very much depleted and the berries took some serious sieving to get the pips out. It was well worth it though - the flavour was simply divine. Mixed with a little icing sugar it was probably the best part of the supper and I have to admit to feeling slightly smug that despite the cold I had managed to at least flavour every course of the supper with something from the garden.
Maybe using frozen raspberries is cheating but I don’t care. Oh and I almost forgot – I used four homegrown tomatoes for some canapés, that were still perfect despite being picked almost FIVE months ago. I’d kept the last of the tomatoes in the greenhouse on a wooden tray to ripen and there are still some that are edible, ripe and delicious to be used. Roll on salads and spring.
