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Wild Garlic Pesto

This time of year, a treasure is to be found in our woodlands. Look for some shady area in a deciduous wood. Then just follow your nose, because I'm talking about wild garlic, also known as ramsons. This stuff can be used in salads and soups but also makes a great pesto. One small caution: wild garlic can look a little like lily of the vallley, which is poisonous. However, the wild garlic flower is typical of the onion and garlic family and almost dandelion-like. Also, if you just rub a leaf between your fingers, the smell of garlic will confirm you've found the right stuff. For this recipe you'll want to collect the leaves. Five minutes foraging, will yield at least three jars of pesto.

Back home, pull the stalks off the leaves and weigh out how much you'll need. About 80g per jam jar. Sterilise some jars in a low oven and then let cool. Wash the leaves to remove dust and dirt and then dry between two towels. The other ingredients in this pesto are 40g each per jar of unsalted pistachio nut kernels and finely grated parmesan, good olive oil and a little salt and pepper.

Place the wild garlic and pistachios in a food processor and whizz until a nice consistency has been achieved. I like to leave it quite coarse, so you still get plenty of small pieces of nut. Then add a couple of tablespoons of oil and fold in the parmesan. The pesto will still be quite dry, so add more oil until you get the consistency you want. Season with sea salt and freshly ground pepper. Be careful with the salt as the parmesan is already quite salty. Pour carefully into the jar(s) and press lightly with back of a spoon to get rid of most of the air bubbles. Then pour more oil to completely cover and seal the pesto. At this stage, put the lids on but don't tighten up fully. After half an hour or so, take a skewer and poke out any remaining air bubbles. If necessary, top up with olive oil. Now you can close up the jars properly. This will keep a couple of weeks or so stored somewhere cool and at least a month stored in the fridge. If you store it in the fridge the oil may solidify but just take the jar out a while before using and everything will be just fine.

By the way this pesto works really well with the Aubergines Slices with Walnuts and Garlic recipe. Just replace the garlic, olive oil and most of the parsley with about 100g of the pesto. You might just need a little olive oil to get a good spreadble consistency.

Obviously you can stir this into pasta to make a quick and tasty meal, but that's not all. The other day, I had some new potatoes left over. I crushed these lightly, took some (light) creme fraiche mixed with a little cream, added a good rounded dessert spoon of the the pesto and seasoned with pepper and a little salt. I then put the potatoes in a buttered fairly shallow ovenproof dish, covered with the pesto and creme fraiche, sprinkled with some grated emmental and some pancetta cubes. After 20 minutes at 180°C I had a scrumptious dinner.

Back on the air

Hi Folks,

We have been off the air for a short time due a hacker attack, which turned the website into a Palestinian propaganda tool. After upgrading our blogging package, we hope that these problems are behind us.

Still the upgrade has knobbled one or two modifications to the the original package: for example, the Pot Luck feature no longer jumps to the recipe, but hopefully I'll figure that out over the next day or two. Also the formatting is slightly different than before so the layout of articles is a big hit and miss. Again, I hope to address that over the next while.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Gavin

Gortnanain Vegetarian Guesthouse and Organic Farm, Co. Cork

Some very good friends kindly gave us a voucher for Gortnanain Vegetarian Guesthouse and Organic Farm, which we used last weekend. This guesthouse is situated in the rolling countryside just outside Kinsale in Co. Cork and consists of the small guesthouse itself and around 9 acres of land given over to growing a staggering array of vegetables and to a lesser, but increasing, extent fruit. The bulk of this produce is used to supply a handful of restaurants in Cork city, including one of the world's great vegetarian restaurants - Dennis Cotter's Cafe Paradiso.

Not only do Lucy and Ultan tend the crops, they also do a great job as hosts and chefs for dinner and breakfast. After arriving, we were given a nice cup of tea and had a great chat. We also got to meet the house's other permanent residents, Snapple and Bramble - head rabbit catchers on the farm. There was one other couple staying that night: Michael and Lorna from NYC. Everyone - guests and hosts alike - sits around the big kitchen table for dinner.

The dinner menu is fixed, but Lucy did ask when we booked, whether we had any preferences or allergies; and they work out the menu based on that information and whatever is available in the garden. Gortnanain has no wine licence but provides a glass or two on the house and you can, of course, bring your own. Dinner was excellent, especially the tomato salad, which completely changed my views on the merits of beefsteak tomatoes. These were ripe to perfection and bursting with flavour. The conversation was great and continued after we retired to the lounge for tea and coffee. Lucy and Ultan's take on organic was very refreshing. They are committed to local organic food because being near, it's in peak condition, and organic farming is so much better for the environment. They made no claims that it's necessarily better for you: for that they'd rather wait for conclusive scientific evidence. Mind you, I think it's obvious that they believe it.

Next day, after a delicious breakfast, Ultan gave a tour of the farm. It was quite astonishing, what could be produced from a small plot. As we wandered up and and down drills of various vegetables in glorious sunshine, with Ultan weeding as we went, it was quite obvious the amount of work that goes into producing such great vegetables. You must need huge commitment to be doing this on the many rainy days we have.

I can't recommend Gortnanain highly enough and would urge you to spend a night or two if you're ever in the area. I know we're looking forward to our next visit.

New Season Garlic

Early summer gives us a chance to experience one of the kitchen's stalwarts in its fresh form. Fresh or wet garlic can be found readily and allows dishes to made with lots of garlic taste, which at the same time don't overpower everything else. There are many things you can do, but here are a couple that I tried this year. The first is a fantastic quiche and the second is a great marinade for a steak.

More ...

Food Report: Korea

At present, I'm spending a few weeks working in South Korea, near Seoul. This report is still in its infancy but by the time I'm finished I hope to be able to give a fuller report of the cuisine here. So far I'm still a novice, having eaten bulgogi (marinated beef) and galbi (beef short ribs) on the barbeque. There looks to be a great variety of street food. Some of most interesting stuff so far is the food I'm served up with in the workers' canteen in the steel plant. I don't know what any of it is called but some of it tasted pretty good. There is a definite spicy theme but it is tempered by a portion of plain steamed rice, which helps put the fire out.

So, after a total of 12 weeks here, I've come to the conclusion that Korea is never going to make it to the top of the culinary tree. That's not to say that there isn't some very tasty food, but not enough variety to make a top class cuisine. Kimchi is served with almost every meal, but it's not always cabbage-based. The Korean barbeque is tasty and great fun with a group but makes no concessions to non-meat eaters. There were some nice soups, based on clear stocks. My Singapore friend, Edmund, would probably say they were too tasty, meaning they're loaded with MSG. I liked the bibimbap and pajeon. The former is rice mixed with vegetables, chilli paste and sesame oil. You mix things at the table. The meal is sometimes served in a hot stone pot, in which case it is called dolsot bibimbap. This helps to crisp some of the rice.

Pajeon is a type of pancake made with scallions (spring onions) and eggs, sometimes with seafood or kimchi added. They can be a bit heavy but I had fantastically-light ones at a restaurant called Won Chon near the university in Pusan. This is quirky courtyard restaurant, complete with resident monk. Pusan, incidentally, has a phenomenal fish market at Jagalchi. Bindaeddeok are something similar but made from a mung bean batter.

There are also lots of noodle-based dishes (udon, ramen etc) and as mentioned above lots of street food such as chicken or squid on skewers, or hotteok, which are little honey and cinnamon filled pancakes. The beer is mostly lager-type and the local hooch is soju, which is made from rice but tastes similar to vodka, if only half as strong. There is also a rice-based wine/beer called dongdongjiu which is refreshing and packs quite a punch.