Spending so much time outside over the last few sunny weekends has totally renewed my passion for eating from the garden. As has the plentiful supply of purple sprouting broccoli.
A couple of months ago my PSB was looking so healthy, I was already anticipating a March glut. Planning bruschetta heaped with PSB and drizzled with chilli oil, PSB with pasta, anchovies, pine nuts and garlic, piles of lemony PSB alongside simply cooked fish. Then it snowed and was cold. And snowed and was cold some more.
I love the wildlife in and around our garden and this year it seems as if a dearth of easy food has made lots of creatures more daring in daylight hours. We have an almost daily visit by a barn owl very early in the evening, which is lovely. When the greedy pigeons and muntjac start nibbling my PSB it isn’t quite as lovely. I netted it carefully, then it snowed and the weight of the snow played havoc with the nets. The PSB was looking decidedly sorry for itself.
Which is why coming back to the kitchen with baskets of the stuff is making me quite so happy at the moment. I’m loving spotting parsley that seems to have self-seeded itself from last year; chives are starting to really flourish, sorrel is being picked for salads and the lovage and angelica seem to be growing by the minute. In my head I hardly need to go to the shops.
The reality of course is that it’ll be a while until there’s a plentiful supply of cultivated veggies from the garden. Much as I loved cooking the Anchovy, Parmesan and PSB tart from Louisa at Chez Foti and am still not bored of PSB pasta, we can’t really eat PSB for EVERY meal.
Thank goodness then for weeds. The nettles and ground elder are growing twice as rapidly as anything I’ve planted of course. So how great that they’re both so nutritious. Full of iron, vitamins and natural histamine, stingers are perfect for cooking with at the moment, still young and tender.
I’ve added them to ricotta for a cannelloni filling and, inspired by Italian uses for wild greens, made torta verde. You need to wear long sleeves and gloves for picking nettles of course, but you’ll find that once cooked they lose their sting. And for anyone who’s suffered lots of nettle stings in the past, eating your enemy isn’t exactly sweet revenge, but very tasty.
Anne from Life in Mud Spattered Boots has a great recipe for nettle soup and I love Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s ideas for making nettle tea as a Spring tonic (sweetening it with honey and adding a squeeze of lemon) or just adding a knob of butter, a pinch of nutmeg and seasoning to cooked nettles to serve simply as a green vegetable.
This time though, I made wild greens pie. I used a mix of nettles, parsley, spinach, beetroot tops and sorrel but if I’d been able to venture further than the garden yesterday, I would’ve added wild garlic too. Must have a walk in the garlic woods soon, especially as Liz Knight of Forage Fine Foods has inspired me to be more inventive in cooking with it. I used cultivated garlic and Egyptian walking onions for my allium fix here, but again, this is a recipe that you can adapt according to what’s good in the garden or hedgerow.
I would use this ricotta and greens mix to fill ravioli too, in fact I think it’s inspired by Italian recipes, as well as by a Greek Courgette Pie in Sarah Raven’s brilliant Garden Cookbook.
Wild Greens Pie
Ingredients
A colander full of wild greens/greens from the garden (can include nettle tops, spinach, chard, sorrel, wild garlic leaves, parsley, ground elder)
Egyptian walking onions or a few spring onions or young leeks, chopped
A garlic clove chopped, or wild garlic
150ml olive oil
1 pack of filo pastry
1 tub of ricotta
2 eggs, beaten
Preheat oven to 200C. Fry the garlic and onions in a little of the olive oil for a few minutes. Wash the greens well, then add to the pan with the garlic and sweat gently until wilted. If you have large leaves/clumps of greens you can snip with scissors.
When cool, mix the greens with the ricotta, eggs and season with salt and pepper. Separate out 6 filo sheets and brush them with oil. Place 3 of the sheets in the base of an oven tray, one oiled sheet placed on top of the next (I’m very clumsy at this sort of thing, but a few torn sheets honestly don’t interfere with this pie looking and tasting lovely).
Place the ricotta/greens mixture in an oblong in the middle of the sheets, then fold the sheets around it, brusing with oil as you go. Place another filo sheet on top and brush with oil, and repeat with 2 more sheets. Brush with oil, and scatter with sesame seeds if you like. Put the pie in the preheated oven and cook for about 1/2 hour until the pastry is golden.
Great with a tomato salad – although faced with my normal reluctance to get in the car, rather than spend more time in the garden, we ate this with a salad of herbs yesterday.
After planting potatoes, making paths, weeding and planting seeds we were very hungry. Which is my excuse for totally forgetting to take a photo of the finished pie, before there was only one slice left!
Gardening certainly is hungry work! I was eying up a patch of nettles earlier with a view to making some soup, I think I may be attempting something a little more interesting now, your pie looks delicious!
Thinking of dishes to cook with them definitely makes you feel better about all those patches of nettles doesn’t it.
Well, you have certainly inspired me to be a little more adventurous with all the wild garden ingredients we have growing right now.
That’s great – harvesting these pesky perennial makes me feel better about being a tardy weeder!
Hungry or not, it’s always a good sign if the food gets eaten before you get a chance to take photos! Would this mixture work as a pizza topping too (daughter doesn’t like filo pastry…)
I’m not sure about it as a pizza topping but torta verde is a bit like a pizza, sort of dough base including olive oil with this as the topping.
Sounds good – thanks!
This sounds fantastic! I’d love to give it a go!
Thanks Caroline.
I’m full of admiration for your obviously very verdant garden – mine is something of a wasteland at the moment!
Only verdant with weeds at the moment! My head is full of ideas for cornflowers with parsnips, carrots and nigella, but the current reality is mainly mud and weeds.
So much greenery! My Cotswoldian veg patch is a bit sparse in comparison. Re your pizza topping discussion: I made nettle pesto to go on pizza the other week and it worked a treat. I’m going to try your pie next.
My veg patch pretty sparse too – which is why I’m eating the weeds! I bet nettle pesto good on pizza, I used parsley pesto on a pizza last week with goats cheese and it was good.
Dear Andrea this is so inspiring!!!! I want to try nettles soon. I love the idea of combining spinach nettles and ricotta cheese for a good pasta/torta filling.. I always have been scared of using nettles as ingredient. Ciao
Thanks Rita. I’ve also seen nettles mixed with mascarpone and potato for a pasta filling, which I think would be great. But there are lots of wonderful Italian recipes for wild greens aren’t there?
Oh how delicious! And what a wonderful use for all the freebie foraged goodies – something I really must get around to trying out with half a garden full of dandelions, nettles and wild garlic….and still plenty of chard that’s begging to be used in the patch. We’ve also still got plenty of PSB which is featuring in about five out of seven meals a week at the minute – risottos, pasta dishes, pizzas, crostini toppings, tarts – luckily I still haven’t tired of it! Thanks so much for my Tart mention.
Sounds as if you have lots of great stuff to eat, how fab having wild garlic in your own garden – you have woodland don’t you? My trusty chard is having another burst of life too. I loved your psb tart, will definitely be enjoying it a few times during the psb season.
Your pie sounds lovely, I make something very similar with greens here – usually chard but my version has feta as well. I really must try nettles – they are everywhere at my mum & dads I just haven’t ever harvested any.
Chard is a great idea in this – I just haven’t got enough until it grows a little more. I make this with feta too, it’s good.
Your pie looks delicious. I saw something similar made with feta that I thought I’d try to recreate but I’ll try your one first, especially as I want to try making ricotta.
Thanks Anne and I think ricotta would be great in it too. But making ricotta sounds interesting – look forward to hearing how it goes.
This is so great. I have just seen the first few signs of ground elder in my garden and the allotment will provide the nettles and chard and spring onions. I must pull them out and put them in a pie for bank holiday weekend!
Fantastic. I’ve just seen hairy bitter cress springing up everywhere in the garden and whereas it once would’ve reminded me of my shoddiness in the weeding department, now I’m thinking salads!
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