Weed Pesto. Fat hen, dandelion and plantain.

Pesto I found out can be made from pretty much anything green leafy and edible. Jack Monroe writes a superb food blog called cooking on a bootstrap, and a few weeks ago put up a recipe for pesto from a bag of reduced salad. It works brilliantly even though it doesn't contain any of ingredients you would expect to find in pesto. My recipe for the wild food version is as follows




200gms fat hen, plantain leaf, baby dandilion
60ml sunflower oil
pinch of salt
two spoonfuls of lemon juice
3 small garlic cloves
a bit of fake aldi not parmesan cheese.

My salad onions were in a sorry state, lots of fat hen and baby dandelion had sprouted up. Onions do not like competition so I needed to weed the area. The marvellous thing about using garden weeds for the table is that weeding that can feel like a fixed fight against an ever victorious mother nature, suddenly feels like harvesting. This budding jungle was simply pulled up and careful placed in a basket with the roots all facing the same way. The weedy harvest was then cleaned up with a pair of scissors snipping the tough roots and stems off to the first set of leaves. The leaves were then thoroughly washed.


I simply put all the ingredients in the blender until smooth. The baby dandelion leaves gave the pesto a strong bitter taste, so I popped out to the garden and picked some ribwort plantain leaves. Plantain has a very bland flavour that balances dandelions nicely, so does daisy leaves.

I tend to allow plantain to grow within reason. It is far too useful a plant to totally weed out of a garden. The unopened flower heads can be used to create a truffle oil substitute when left in a jar of olive oil. The leaves are used on itchy bites throughout the summer and the seeds are harvested and stored for making into medicinal cakes for gut problems and piles.

I finish the weeding job by adding a moisture retentive mulch of grass clippings. I took this photo just to prove there was salad onions in the first picture.