Spring is here! And with spring comes some of the best foraging opportunities! Spring is full of fresh leafy greens and flowers, especially suitable for salads and pesto!
So let's venture into the wilderness to see what we can find.
Today we are in inland Spain, near a lake.
What we find most in this terrain is wild mustard!
Wild mustard is recognised on it's bright yellow flowers, rucula shaped leafs and spicy flavour. They have slightly rough leafs
Oh and look here's some wild fennel
Some dandelions
And also some beautiful wild asparagus
This type of wild asparagus is recognised on its spiky branches and leafs.
The edible shoots are found by looking carefully down at the base of the plant. These are young shoots still a bit small to be picked
And this is perfect size!
This time of year you can get a big bunch quite quick when you learn how to look
The asparagus we safe for the meal together with some dried mushrooms we picked in the autumn and some beans soaking
And here's for pesto and the salad
The pesto is made by adding olive oil, garlic (bought since there were no wild alternative around today!), salt and some almonds that we picked from some abandoned almond fields in spain plus a bit of hazelnuts we picked in italy. Roberto took some very nice photos of the process on the camera while I was out picking asparagus, but as i have no way of getting the pictures on to my phone you must do with this picture until i get battery and WiFi on my laptop!
It is blended in our very useful Eva hand blender (pictures again on the camera.. 😑)
Thank you for reading! Hope this can inspire you for getting into the wild yourself! I think eating from the wild is beneficial for us in multiple ways! It sharpens our senses, makes us connect to nature and is super healthy for our bodies! Did you for example know that hunter-gatherers got more protein and calories than early settlers? And they had a more varied diet and got up to 5 times more vitamin C than modern people today!
Here is the final meal - bean puee, fried mushrooms and asparagus, cabbage, pesto and salad all wild apart from beans and cabbage.
Thank you for reading and please follow me for other wild edible adventures and recipes and the whole process of the pesto with pictures!!