What to do with bolting lettuce

I'd blogged before that our Kagraner Sommer lettuce was not being very resistant to actual summer weather and was bolting away despite being watered every day.

I read around the internet and discovered that people recommended turning it into a green soup. I lifted 4 bolted lettuce heads and tried the bolted stalks -- a little bitter, and possibly not so nice in soup, but the leaves were alright so all I had to do was make sure not much of the stalks went in. OH rootled around our freezer and found a bag of frozen leeks from the plot harvested earlier this year and gave me chicken stock from this week's chicken. I set up my laptop with Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert in the background and began the long work of cleaning 4 heads of lettuce, destalking them and making sure I would not boil any slugs.

So this is my recipe for Random Bolted Lettuce Soup:

1 litre of chicken stock
1 litre freezer bag full of chopped leeks
skim some of the chicken stock fat off the top and use it to fry off the leeks. I threw them in straight from frozen

Found 3 homegrown garlic bulbs -- they were tiny but very garlicky nonetheless and I used them all.

The internet recipe said to use potatoes but I'd run out so no potatoes.

I ended up having a salad bowl full of lettuce -- I didn't end up using all 4 of them, just 2 plus the bolted tops of the other two but put the hearts of the 2 remaining ones in the fridge for sandwiches and salad because they still looked and tasted alright, not bitter.

Threw the washed lettuce in the big pot with the leeks and let that boil down. Added the stock (ours is always jellied). Boil it up but not for long. Add water where required. Liquidise the lot. Season to taste. Ours needed more salt and pepper. Pour through a sieve into another pot.

Now, our liquidiser left quite a bit of greenery as solids and that left about a soup bowl full of guacamole-consistency seasoned leek-and-lettuce mush in the sieve. I didn't want to chuck that out after trying it on its own -- but I didn't want it in my soup either: I wanted a relatively light, thin but tasty green summer soup, to be slurped, not chewed, with a buttered roll and a drizzle of olive oil.  I put the pulp in a bowl, covered it and refrigerated it.

The soup was very nice by the way, and since I've got another 5 bolting lettuces on the plot, there will be more.

What I did today was that I mixed the green pulp with 1 egg, lots of herbs (3 sage leaves, some dried oregano, some dried rosemary -- all from the garden or the plot), and plenty of fine semolina and some ground almonds and grated emmenthal cheese. Mixed this up to quite a firm consistency and formed this mixture into gnocchi, which I boiled in salt water until they floated to the top.

The gnocchi went into the bottom of the soup bowl, and the bowl was then filled up with the remaining leek and lettuce soup plus some olive oil. And that was my and OH's absolute favourite combo -- really nice, very tasty but also light enough given the warm weather.

Our late evening dessert: our own strawberries from the plot, with some sugar and double cream. Ohhhhh.... very nice. Summer's definitely here.