Wild Garlic Recipes - Wild Garlic, Nettle & Vegetable Soup with Anchovy Bread Crumbs.

We are bang in wild garlic season. Any wooded areas that are damp and shaded you'll find it carpeting the floors in a sea of green. Also by all accounts the earlier on in the season you pick it the better before the leaves become too tough. We live in North London and even in our local woods there is tonnes of the stuff.

It's only my second year of actually eating wild garlic, and last year I only had shop bought stuff. This year though, inspired by an awesome Christmas present 'The Forager's Calendar' and a promise of a foraging trip as soon as nature allowed to my future mother-in-law, I decided to find some of my own.

A green garlicky carpet

If you're thinking about doing some foraging, not that I'm by any means an expert, it's worth having a good book guide and only pick something if you're 100% sure you know what it is (I think when it comes to mushroom picking season I'll be a paranoid mess!). But wild garlic is pretty easy to identify, not least for it's distinctive smell if you give it a good sniff. Take a small knife with you and cut just above the base so it will grow back. To be honest there is so much growing at the moment there is plenty to go around, and it's free! For those that haven't tried it before it is fairly punchy in flavour, a strong garlicky taste and you don't need too much for it to blow your head off in something like a wild garlic pesto. But for things like this soup it adds a lovely mellow garlic taste.

A sample of my bounty

To go with the wild garlic I'd also been hearing and seeing a lot about young nettles and how good they were in soups and pastas. To be honest I'd always thought of this as a bit hippie and had heard mixed things about the taste. But the more I read about the health benefits and recipes you could try them in the more I became curious! Donning some gloves to protect my sausage fingers I went about plucking some of the smaller, younger nettle leaves. These are the ones you want to go after rather than the thicker, tougher leaves. Bag stuffed to the brim, via some odd looks from walkers passing by wondering why I was picking nettles, the days bounty was given a good wash at home. Meal one we actually wilted some of the wild garlic into our homemade ramen. We were desperately trying to replicate the ramen recipe we had learnt when in Japan, it was close but no cigar.

As I've already alluded to wild garlic also goes amazingly in a homemade pesto. I made mine with a slight twist though (mainly due to what was in the cupboard currently). I used cashews instead of pine nuts, and subbed the basil out for the wild garlic, blitzed with lots of parmesan and glugs of olive oil and the folded it through some fresh cavatelli, my favourite eggless homemade pasta. It was a Monday night banger! I've posted a lot about cavatelli on my instagram page so I won't harp on too much more on here!

Wild garlic pesto, home made cavatelli and an anchovy breadcrumb, again I'm salivating whilst I write!

And finally we came to the soup, possibly my favourite of all three. Easy to make. Big on flavour and was the perfect sunny lunch sat in the garden (social distancing included). What starts off looking like a pretty standard vegetable soup transforms into the most vibrant green broth when the garlic & nettles are added in at the last minute. A dollop of creme fraiche on top and the scattering of anchovy breadcrumbs at the last minute make for a pretty sexy looking dish if I say so myself! In fact the anchovy breadcrumbs may well be the star of this, again super easy to knock up and I've still got plenty left in despite me snacking on them for most of Monday afternoon, the jar seemingly glued to my hand! I'll include the recipe for those as well.

Anchovy breadcrumbs in all their crispy, crunchy glory.

I'm whittering on again. To the recipe! The below veg are what I used, but you could get inventive or use whatever you've got in the fridge, root veg work nicely I find.

For the soup you'll need:

• 1 large handful of wild garlic, washed and roughly chopped

• 1 large handful of nettles, washed and roughly chopped.

• 1 carrot roughly chopped

• 3-4 large potatoes roughly chopped

• 1 onion roughly chopped

• 1 stick of celery roughly chopped

• 1/4 butternut squash peeled & roughly chopped

• 1 leek roughly chopped

• 2 bay leaves

• A couple of sprigs of thyme

• 1L of vegetable stock

• 1 tbsp creme fraiche/single cream

For the anchovy breadcrumbs:

• 3-4 stale/toasted slices of bread

• 8 anchovy fillets

• 1/2 tsp chilli flakes

• 4 tbsp olive oil

• 2 cloves garlic

Let's get cooking!

1. Begin by heating a large, deep side pan over a medium heat.

2. Add in a little olive oil and then add in all of your veg, apart from the wild garlic & nettles. Season with black pepper and then sauté over a medium for about 10 minutes until the veg just starts to soften.

3. Add in your thyme and bay leaves and cook for another 2 mins.

4. Add in your vegetable stock and simmer the whole thing for 10-15 mins until all the veg is tender and soft.

5. To make the anchovy breadcrumbs take your stale bread and blitz it up in a food processor with 2 cloves of garlic. Pulse until you have breadcrumbs, but you still want it to have some texture with chunkier bits in there. If you're using non-stale bread simply toast the bread and then blitz with the garlic.

6. Heat a large pan over a medium-high heat and then add your olive oil. Once hot add in your anchovy fillets and allow them to melt into your olive oil (trust me the smell is amazing!).

7. Add in your chilli flakes and then fold in your bread crumbs, coating them in the oil.

8. Remove from the heat and place the bread crumbs on kitchen roll to drain.

9. Pop your wild garlic and nettles into the soup and allow to wilt for 1-2 mins.

10. Stir everything well and then take off the heat. Make sure to fish out your bay leaves and then transfer your soup into a blender and then blitz until smooth-ish!

11. Top with your creme fraiche and a handful of breadcrumbs and time yourself how long until seconds! Store any left over breadcrumbs in an air tight container which go amazingly in salads, on top of pasta or soups.