APRIL: What I've been cooking
Uses for wild garlic and nettles; and a bright lemon cake with hot honey and whipped ricotta
Hello beautiful friends,
Feeling stressed or overwhelmed of late? A good bowl of soup tends to soothe the areas my deep breaths and kitten cuddles cannot reach.
A soup recipe that requires a walk in nature? Even better.
So that’s what I’m sharing with you today, as well as a hunky dorey lemon cake with stacks of fibre and fire. Something to burst through the dark clouds, and rain sunshine through your veins.
Wild garlic might just be the new blueberry.
This doesn’t mean we’ll be licking garlic lollies anytime soon. It just means that this extraordinary little leaf has cartwheeled its way up the superfood chart on account of its impressive antioxidant muscle. And its juicy smack.
Plus, it’s free!
Wild garlic and young nettles are everywhere in Spring, and this recipe calls for freshly foraged leaves folks. Get your gardening gloves on and bring a carrier bag on your next hike or countryside trot (the smaller the leaf, the sweeter the taste). Foraging for food will have you feeling more virtuous than an Olympian goddess.
For the hikers; wild garlic is generally located in wetland areas around rivers and lakes, like the video below. Be sure to clean your freshly plucked treasures thoroughly at home. Roadside nettles tend to be drenched in dust and fumes, so it’s best to find a quiet place of leafy heaven and reverence.
I’ve kept this recipe souper easy (har har). Grab a bag of frozen petits pois, some freezer stock or mushroom tea, an onion, and your freshly foraged cargo. Very basic, but bloody delicious.
Then there’s a scaldingly good lemon cake to rock your weekend. It's a zippy tray-bake recipe that is, at once, sweet and sour with a spicy swoosh of ricotta.
In place of flour, we are recruiting ground almonds and psyllium for an inimitable richness and a crazy-delicious crumb. Swapping out nutritionally void white flour with nutrient-rich alternatives always seems more sensible to me (and my skin). Almonds have a hulk of vitamin E to feed my skin cells and vanity. (By the way, Dunnes Stores own brand stock the best, or your local four-letter German supermarket).
The addition of fibre-rich psyllium negates the need for eggs or gluten, so the cake recipe remains vegan and coeliac-friendly. Think of psyllium as an Ultra Fibre.
My vegan and dairy-free queens can leave out the topping. It is still mesmerizingly tasty served in simple squares. Go ahead and freeze half the squares, to decorate and scoff another day.
Both recipes have harnessed so much joy this week. They have offered a steady hum of happiness in my kitchen.
Love, light, and wild adventures,
Susan Jane
x
If you are enjoying my posts, hit the ❤️ and get a telepathic high five back!
