Here you can see my cutting-edge way of dealing with the stinging problem: oversized flannel shirts are great for many things including the prevention of stings. What I’m doing here is preparing the nettles to be used in a stew. I’d already made a bunch of nettle-mint tea, which C. had made at her house as well – except hers featured local honey and goat milk. Let’s just say it was amazing.

Ooh look at the glass jars full of homemade rooting solution (steeped willow) and cuttings of fruit plants!  Someday our orchard will take over the world and I will take baths in homemade jam.  Maybe.

Anyway, the stew! When you cook nettles, the little stinging hairs lie flat and cease to be problematic. I sauteed them with garlic, asafoetida, coriander, and mochi curry powder – then dumped in water, Dr. Bragg’s Liquid Aminos, some barley and most of one can of cheap beer. Finishing touch was a whole ton of potatoes that had grown soft and sprouted a ton of roots, plus some salt and pepper.

The finished product was savory and delicious. The potatoes were super soft and the nettles were nice. I’m really happy that I’ve reached a point where I can successfully improvise recipes. Call it a hippie soup, but it was greatly enjoyed by all present – including our new roommate R. who is new to the whole “Cooking with Moosewood” scene. Potato stew is a safe bet, I guess, no matter how weird the ingredients really are. Anyway, here we all are at a recent masquerade party:

This is how we always pose for pictures, pretty much.

And one last use for nettles: they’re traditionally used to treat joint pain and problems. Old timey folks keep a potted nettle next to the potted aloe plant in their kitchen, apparently: the aloe for burns and the nettle for arthritis and so on. I had to try this one out on my stupid wrist issue, which is mostly not a problem but acts up from time to time.

It blistered and stung, but did seem to help. You can blame the placebo effect if you want, I’m just happy it worked. And when I get that potted plant for my own kitchen, I’ll make sure to put a warning sign on it. Nettles can be therapeutic, but surprise stings are brutal!

When we convened at friend C’s house last night and baked potatoes were made, I volunteered to make a yogurt sauce for them.  It involved garlic, salt, paprika, cumin, a tiny bit of cayenne and apple cider vinegar, and a lot of nutritional yeast and was absolutely delicious.  (That is what usually passes for a recipe around here, by the way.)  The potatoes had a perfect papery skin and we were all a lot hungrier than we’d realized.

And cookies were also made.  We adapted a recipe from Beyond the Moon Cookbook to the ingredients on hand, although there was debate on carob v. cocoa powder.  In lieu of sour cream, yogurt.  For half the butter, margarine that C. needed to be rid of.  Buckwheat honey (the “tall dark stranger of honeys,” according to the Google) as the only sweetener.  And a bunch of ginger thrown in for good measure.

Last minute cookies for hungry barn raisers adapted from “Dream Cookies” in Beyond the Moon Cookbook

1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) butter or margarine, softened

3/4 cup honey

1/2 cup yogurt

1+ T grated ginger

2 1/2 cups flour (your choice)

1 t baking powder

3 T cocoa powder

1 cup chopped almonds

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Cream butter, honey, and ginger; beat in sour cream.  In separate bowl, mix flour, cocoa, and baking powder.  Add to wet ingredients gradually and stir to combine, adding almonds.  Drop onto greased cookie sheet and start checking at five minutes.

It’s getting colder in these parts.  Time to bring out the slippers and long underwear.  We run with a crowd that lives in old houses, so temperatures tend to be a little chillier indoors than once might expect.  Including our house, which is usually around 63 because I am cold blooded (or at least from the South) and if it’s below that temperature I have trouble functioning unless I’m wearing a winter coat.  I’m not proud, but it’s a fact.  Do snakes hibernate, or what?  Every day I remind myself that there’s so much to learn.

And this is Pretty Girl, the coolest cat in the world. I used to be totally indifferent to cats, then I disliked them because of Miss Kitty, my grandparents’ cat who would suddenly and without warning turn into a raging jerk. Now I love them, or at least the cool ones like PG. If we end up on the West Side there’s probably a cat in our future, although it’ll have to be a very cool and self-sufficient cat that likes being outdoors and dislikes having a crappy attitude and peeing on furniture. Because I refuse to subsidize that behavior, you know?