Categories for Gardening

Tonight, the last Sunday night of March, there is another Pot Luck evening at the garden. I’m making soup. Last Wednesday i picked a whole bag full of wild garlic (daslook in Dutch). I love it. The oniony garlicky taste. The fact it only grows in spring. The way it looks, the beautiful green leaves. Soon the white flowers will pop up, now you can only see the buds coming up.

This is a basic soup. First i had the idea of making it with nettles and wild garlic. I found this recipe on the BBC Good Food website. It turned out i had picked more than 500 grams of wild garlic, so i’m settling for a wild garlic soup. Just leaving out the nettles.

Ingredients

• 2 tbsp sunflower oil
• 2 onion
• 1 fat leek
• 4 celery sticks
• 1 large winter carrot
• 2 potatoes
• 2,5l good-quality vegetable stock
• salt and pepper, fennel seeds
• 2,5 vegetable broth cubes
• 500g wild garlic leaves (keep any flowers if you have them)
• 200 ml milk – i used oat milk

I took spring onions with me to the garden, to slice them up finely and put on the soup once it was served.

Method

1. Heat the oil and butter in a large saucepan. Add the onion, leek, celery, carrot, potato and a good pinch of salt, and stir until everything is well coated. Cover and sweat gently for 15-20 mins, stirring every so often to make sure that the vegetables don’t catch on the bottom of the pan.
2. Pour in the stock and simmer for 10 mins. Add the wild garlic leaves and simmer for 2 mins.
3. Remove from the heat and blend using a stick blender or tip into a blender. Return to the heat and stir through the milk, then taste for seasoning. Ladle into bowls and drizzle over a little extra oil, then top with a few wild garlic flowers, if you have them.