Creamy Wild Garlic Mash with Spring Onions and Mustard

Flavourful wild garlic leaves are excellent tossed in salads (both warm and cold), swirled through soup, made into pesto, and blended with mash, as in the wild garlic mashed potato recipe below.

Whether you've found a glut on a foraging trip or you're a city dweller lucky enough to find some for sale, wild garlic is a seasonal wild food not to be missed. More akin to a sort of cross between garlic and spring onion, this chive relative blankets woodlands from March to June. And unlike its more pungent namesake, the broad leafed plant won't leave you ponging for days.

Oftentimes food purveyors throw flowers into their wares for good looks or in a bid to be clever, but with little regard for whether or not they complement the dish. In contrast to perfumed petals, however, wild garlic flowers won't overwhelm other ingredients with unnecessary aromas; the flowers taste like the leaves, only with a more intense flavour. And hence you can use them in any dish, including this mash recipe, where the flavour is desirable.