Recipes Ideas for the Season

Make the most of nature's larder by using wild garlic and three cornered leek to make these pesto pinwheels! Get the recipe below.

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FORAGED FOOD

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Once you open up to the world of foraging you’ll never look back. There’s an abundance of wild plants in the UK that can be enjoyed all year round. Each year we try to learn one or two more plants to identify in our local parks and woodland. The one that I’ve recently discovered is Three Cornered Leek and we are so pleased to add this to our cookery book!

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WHAT IS THREE CORNERED LEEK?

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Three cornered leeks are a stunning plant with beautiful white flowers which can be enjoyed in a wide range of different recipes. You may occasionally hear it called three cornered garlic, onion weed, angled onion or even snowbells.

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The name is a bit of a giveaway. These pretty plants have a garlic / onion smell and taste a bit like baby leeks, spring onions or chives.

All of the plant is edible. You can pull up the full plant and treat it like a baby leek or spring onion. The leaves and flowers are perfect for adding to salads, stir fries, soups or stews. If the plant is more mature, use the roots like you would onion or garlic.

The flavour does become more mild when it is cooked, so for maximum flavour eat the leaves raw, or add them near the end of cooking.

Much like wild garlic, you can also pickle the seed pods.

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HOW CAN I SPOT IT?

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If you want to go foraging, make sure you do so with care. Always go foraging with good identification books and if you’re unsure, leave it be! (Check out my foraging book recommendations at the end of this post.)

Three cornered leek plants are beautiful. You’ll first notice their long, thin leaves and their delicate white flowers.

The leaves are quite distinctive, they are long, thin and green but if you look closer they have shallow ‘V’ shape. The flower stem is like the leaves but more triangular in profile than the leaves and is where the name “three cornered” comes from.

The flowers are very similar to white bluebells as they hang down in clusters, each flower having six petals and a green stripe. They are one of the easiest ways of identifying the plant but the flowers only last from April to June.

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WHEN IS THREE CORNERED LEEK IN SEASON?

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You’ll find this tasty plant growing between February and October. Because it has such a long season you can enjoy it for much longer than wild garlic which seems to disappear as fast as it takes over the forest floor.

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WHERE CAN I FIND IT?

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Three cornered leek grows in hedgerows, on verges, along the edges of woodlands and field edges and it may already be popping up in your garden in your flower beds!