So I've been messing about with vegetarian recipes and someone mentioned foraged food to me recently. As is only to be expected this resulted in me picking some dock leaves and creating what you see below.
So I removed the stalks and washed the leaves before simmering in white wine for about 20 minutes using a pan as seen below?
After this had turned the leaves to a murkier green colour I decided they must be cooked, so I fished out the dock leaves and chopped up some mushroom and fennel. Notice how the leaves have shrunk quite a bit cooking in the wine, maybe I should have bought more.Not pictured below I cut up a carrot. Use your imagination or google images to work out what chopped up carrot looks like if you're confused.
As I still had the Dock leafy wine I used this to (re?)hydrate some soya mince. This is the fake meat stuff they put in pot noodles and it's actually quite nice. This takes around 20 minutes to complete.
At the same point in another pan I mixed together butter, onion, flour, milk and fennel to construct the white sloppy sauce pictured below.
I roughly chopped up the dock leaves before mixing everything together in the same pan, to create what one of my greatest culinary masterpieces to date. Add some pasta and the meal is ready.
So how well did this turn out? To put it simply OK. The dock leaves aren't bad (for something I picked off a road side at least) but do have a fairly strong bitter taste. To combat this I added a little honey whilst cooking although I haven't got balance right yet (if it is indeed possible). To do this again I'd simmer in a sweeter wine or maybe some different sweet liquid.
