Yesterday I posted my contribution to #fruitsandveggiesmonday, a competition initiated by @lenasveganliving. I made a wonderfully refreshing tea from fresh gathered wild herbs and blooms. And I gathered some wild herbs I planned to use for dinner.
This is the post I am talking about: Let's go wild for FruitsAndVeggiesMonday 🌿🌱🍃🌿.
Here is the recipe for the pasta with wild herbs pesto:
Ingredients:
- a mixture of wild herbs of your choice (or what's available). Mine was stinging nettle, dandelion leaves, ground ivy, ground elder and garlic mustard.
- pasta (mine was gluten free chickpea fussily
- 500g asparagus
- five carrots
- some cherry tomatoes
- one or two shallots
- olive oil
- two tablespoons of nutritional yeast
- sunflower seeds
- peacan nuts or walnuts
- salt, pepper and raw cane sugar
Preparation:
I peeled the asparagus, the carrots and the shallots. I kept the peels and put them in a pot with some salt and water and heated until the water was cooking and let it simmer while I was preparing my dinner. I planned to use this vegetable broth the next day for a soup.
I washed the wild herbs and dried them with a kitchen towel. I plugged the leaves from the stems or chopped the leaves roughly. I put the leaves in a mixing cup together with the sunflower seeds, the nuts, the nutritional yeast, the olive oil and some salt and pepper. I blend everything with my hand mixer and added as much olive oil until the mixture had the texture I wanted.
I chopped the shallots, asparagus and the carrots and fried them in a pan with hot oil. I added a Tablespoon of sugar and let it caramelize. I seasoned with salt and pepper to taste.
In between I cooked the pasta. Legumes pasta has a very short cooking time so make sure it doesn't get too tender.
I cut the tomatoes into halves and stirred them together with the pesto and the vegetables under the pasta. Done! That was quick and easy, wasn't it? I served it with more sunflower seeds.
I hope you liked my recipe and I could encourage you to try to cook with wild herbs too one time. If not, herbs or leaves from the green market like parsley, fresh baby spinach, the fresh greens from carrots, beetroots or cabbage turnip work just as fine for the pesto. No limits being set to your imagination ...
Ahh, i want to eat so badly.... !!! :-)
Looks really good !
Thank you sweet cat! I didn't know you liked asparagus and wild herbs. Or is it the pasta? 😋
It is all of it together dear ! ;-)
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Outstanding! This looks so delicious. I hadn't thought about green alternatives. What a great idea! I'll be trying! Thank you!
Thank you! Tell me how you liked it! 😊
I am glad you posted the recipe, so I can take a closer look at it...........the pasta.looks absolutely marvelous my dear 🌸💖🌸
Thank you! It was very good! I love pasta and asparagus and the combination with the herbs was really delicious.
That combination must be delicious, I just thought about it and my mouth watered. And Pesto seems very original to me.
Thank you! I am glad you liked it. It was indeed delicious.
Looks very delicious
I'm excited to do it
I guess you have to modify this a bit and choose vegetables and herbs available in Iraq. Do they sell fresh asparagus there?
Unfortunately I did not see him in Iraq But I will tall to my mom
to search him on market and i will see if is available in Iraq
Maybe you get the green asparagus because that's more common in many regions of the world especially in the asian cuisine. The white asparagus is only typical in the middle of Europe - Austria, France, Germany, Belgium ...
Love the idea to continue the processing of gods apothecary in a follow up post :)
I first thought of making just one post but that turned out too long ... so I decided to split it ... Thank you! 🙏🏻
I like the continuity, it's like a TV series i can binge read :)
... another wild herb/flowers tutorial is coming soon. I made something sweet. Very sweet! Definitely nothing for the sugar free community ... 😜
Sugar is not as bad as some make it seem, it's the combination with fat that makes it disastrous. So looking forward to another episode of your herbal journey:)
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Finally! I invite you to my next herbal related article - you know, the sweet sweet one ... The story of the busy bee and the wild herbs "honey" 🐝.
Enjoy! You will lick your fingers ... 😜
I feel hungry and I love your pasta ;)
I totally understand! It was very good!
another delicious recipe from you, i seemed to have missed! love how you are incorporating the wild herbs as much as possible!
I liked the results as well! Thank you!
What a lovely pesto - looks delicious! :)
Thank you! I really liked it a lot!