Delicious Invasives ◇ Making Garlic Mustard Pesto
Though we had a bit more lunch than just that I finnaly made some garlic mustard pesto!
Alliaria petiolata is an invasive plant fron Europe. Apparently, most of the garlic mustard we find here is the same genome found in England. It has an interesting way of taking over native plant territory. I'm not sure how to explain it but the more there are garlic mustard the more deer are around... they'll eat the other plants and let the invasive take over. There was an amazing video from Adam Haritan's website that ypu can finde here. He explains this plant in a simple way.
Making pesto:
So I collected a bunch of plants, pulling the whole thing, including the root system when possible (I used them to make a wild horseradish style sauce).
I then pulled off enough of the leaves to fill a salad bowl, I cleaned them, dried them and in the food processor they went.
I added some nice olive oil, a little lemon and sunflower seeds because we didn't have pine nuts.
I added the oil a little at a time until the pesto reached the consistency I'm used to in store bought stuff. Also, no need to add garlic.
The first day, it wasn't that impressive but on day 2 this pesto was pretty delicious!