I’ve spent my Easter holidays in Cork, dog-sitting Tosca and Bear, two of the loveliest dogs in Ireland!  Because the weather was so good, we’ve been doing a lot of walking in the field, and it was there that Tosca brought me to a lovely patch of fresh, young nettles.  On our next walk, I brought a pair of scissors and a pair of rubber gloves and picked a lovely bunch.

I remember, when I was young, my father used to make nettle soup and it stands out as one of the most delicious things.  Initially, I was reluctant to try it because I was worried that I’d sting my mouth.  Luckily, cooking the nettles removes the sting.

After consulting Rachel Allen\’s Home Cooking for a recipe, I de-stalked the nettles and was ready to go.  To make two generous bowls of Nettle Soup, you need:

• a bunch of nettles – destalked & chopped.  (I couldn’t tell you exactly how much – about 10 stalks)
• a good-sized knob of butter
• a medium sized onion, chopped
• a medium sized potato, chopped into small cubes
• 300ml chicken stock
• 300ml of full fat milk
• Salt and pepper

And the method is dead simple and quick.  Simply fry the onion and potato in the butter, seasoned with salt and pepper for 8-10 minutes (lid on).  When the onions and potato are soft, pour the stock and milk into the pot and bring to the boil.  Add the nettles  and cook uncovered on a high heat for a minute or two.  Don’t cook them for long as they’ll lose their greenness.  Remove from the heat and whizz it up with a hand blender.  Yummy greeny goodness! 

And photos of Tosca and Bear:

Stephen Powell

Enjoy a Garlic Festival in the wilderness of the beautiful Brecon Beacons.

In our bones, we all know the stories that take us right back to the dawn of human history. Two of these stories are surely forest and foraging.

We intend to celebrate these age-old themes in a new festival. Llwyn Ffranc, a community forest farm in the Black Mountains, invites you to the first wild garlic festival, a celebration of woodland and wild food. The festival, on Saturday April 16, will include a chance for you to hone your foraging skills and eat freshly picked food. We’ll be serving a wild garlic and nettle soup, a pesto and a wild salad.  

The idea of this festival took me over in the spring of last year, but somehow I didn’t find the courage then to actually launch it into the world. This year I decided to cast any doubts aside and go for it.

The 50-acre woodland at the farm clothes the lower slope of the Skirrid, revered locally as a holy mountain. On the forest floor is a great carpet of wild garlic and the pungent smell from the leaves fills the air. So we really can do what it says on the tin and give you a wild garlic experience!

50 - acres of woodland.

We’ll also have people on hand who know a thing or two about forests and foraging.

Gareth Ellis from the Brecon Beacons National Park will lead a walk into the woodland and share his knowledge of what to look for.

Dan Butler, a professional guide of mushroom forays into the Elan Valley, will tell us about Britain’s foraging calendar – what can you pick when? Dan will be just back from Turkey’s third annual morel mushroom festival, so he can also give an international perspective on the wild food scene.

Liz Knight of Forage, a food company, will be bringing her culinary expertise to the feast, guiding us in the hunt for ingredients to go into a wild salad.

For more information visit: http://www.communityforestfarm.co.uk/rules_of_llwyn_ffranc_ltd.phtml

RECIPE FOR WILD GARLIC AND NETTLE  SOUP AND PESTO

Serves: 4
Ingredients

For the soup:

50 g butter

100 g onions, sliced

200 g potatoes, peeled and chopped

400 ml hot vegetable stock

100 g fresh wild garlic

50 g fresh young nettles

pinch of nutmeg

1 bay leaf

2 tbsp double cream

For the pesto

Three handfuls of wild garlic, chopped

Rapeseed oil

50 g toasted hazelnuts

50 g Parmesan

Method

For the soup: melt the butter in a saucepan. Add the potatoes, onions and bay leaf, lightly frying, season with salt and pepper. Cover the pan and cook for 10 minutes. Pour in the stock and bring to the boil. Add the nettles and cook for a further five minutes, then add the wild garlic. Take off the heat after a couple of minutes and add double cream. Put through a blender and season with nutmeg.

For the pesto: crush together the hazelnuts, Parmesan and wild garlic leaves.

Add a little rapeseed oil and pepper.

Serve the soup with a little pesto on top.

I had been presented with nettles in the form of soup twice before, once aged about nine, when cabbage was hardly bearable, spinach off limits, so the idea of eating these things which sting was a complete non starter.

Years later when I was living the life of a semi-nomadic tree hugging road protester, in the beautiful Jesmond Dene in Newcastle upon Tyne, foraging, either from nature or skips was almost compulsory. A fellow campaigner decided that it was time for nettle and ginger soup. Now I was new to this lifestyle, but looking at the large, leather-like leaves whose green had almost turned to black I thought this was probably a poor move. No matter how much ginger and garlic was added, one spoonful was enough to make me believe that agricultural methods of food production were actually an advance for humanity.

Today, a bright and sunny day in early April would have been a better day to claim this part of nature. A bit of nature which grew in my garden with absolutely no effort from my puny efforts at growing food. Pair of gloves and boiling water were all I needed to turn these Urtica dioica with all that formic acid into something I could eat. However to turn into something I wanted to eat I would need some hot olive oil and a lot of garlic, and maybe some parmesan. Three minutes, and without the parmesan it was ready. I think I went slightly over the top with the garlic, two large cloves per portion meant that it was essentially, in terms of taste, just garlic. But I reckon I’ll do that one again.

PS, I also discovered that nettles contain serotinin,  although I’m not sure if cooking, with or without copious amounts of garlic, takes that out, but I will find out.

Things planted: 3 – Carrots, salad, sweetcorn (very good)

Trips to allotment: 1 (and it was mine today, unlike yesterday where my good intentions were subverted by offer of lunch and later cake at someone else’s allotment)

Hours spent at friends house: about 4, and jolly nice it was too (especially as it included pancakes for lunch and chocolate crispies).

This evening, I’m mainly considering nettles.  I was mildly flattered to find I have inspired a more proficient gardener than myself to do some blogging http://canleyfoodproject.blogspot.com/2011/04/nettle-drying-digging-and-salad.html and note with interest that she has been drying nettles harvested from her allotment to make tea.

I too have nettles.  In more than one place at my allotment.  I don’t think I’d drink nettle tea (indeed I’m pretty sure we have had some commercially  bought bags lingering in the cupboard for several years), so I looked up what else I can do with nettle tips (you only use the young leaves) in Wild food for Free by Jonathan Hilton (which I gave Him for Christmas) and the River Cottage Cookbook by Hugh Fernley-Wittingstall (which we got as a present ages ago).  The options seem to be

1. rinse them and wilt in the resulting drops of water that stick to the leaves and then serve with butter and pepper, like spinach (both books are in consensus on this – although the latter comments that nettles are mildly laxative, which is vaguely worrying, but then so is orange juice)
2. make nettle soup – Hugh suggestion,  complete with recipe where he describes it as a “truly luxurious dish”
3. brew into beer – which Jonathan Hilton suggests adding (to my astonishment) that it takes about a week.  But then no further information is given

I don’t think I have ever eaten nettle leaves (although I do remember sucking the nectar from the flowers as a child).  Things seem to be pointing that way, if only so I can reclassify several patches of my allotment as “cultivated”!

I’m intrigued by the soup .  Nettle soup and luxurious were not two words I expected to find in the same sentence and I like the fact that one option is to thicken it with rice cakes instead of potato. But I’d need to buy some of the ingredients (including cream, which I don’t normally buy, and celery, which I probably couldn’t get locally), and I don’t have any proper stock as recommended. Plus, my children are notoriously bad with soup.

So for tomorrow, I think I’ll try a variation on 1. I doubt I’d persuade children to eat wilted nettles, but they do eat wilted spinach chopped and cooked with scrambled eggs. And I have a now thriving spinach plant at the allotment (about the only thing that currently is apart from the nettles). So I’m going to try spinach and nettle scrambled eggs, possibly with some of the wild garlic leaves that are still in the fridge (from my veg box) added too.

If it works, then I’ll try option 2 at a weekend, when it’ll be easier to cook soup and more people will be around that will eat it (rather than dip their bread into it once at most).

And if that works, then maybe I’ll try the beer.  A quick search on google has found a recipe from an interesting looking site, http://www.selfsufficientish.com/nettlebeer.htm, unless anyone has a tried and tested recipe they can recommend?

I’ve never really been that successful at foraging, but I enjoy it anyway. It keeps me in touch with the seasons and reminds me about the cycle of nature, and there’s something very reassuring about that. It’s good to know where the musky orange chanterelle mushrooms grow year on year and where the best sloes are to be found. I like late summer best for foraging – when everything feels rich, mellow and on the cusp of going over and off.

Lizs wild garlic quiche. And a few sprigs of not-so-wild lettuce.

Spring is a fine foraging time too, and I spent the weekend just gone in the Wiltshire countryside making the most of all the new growth. With socks on our hands for protection, my friend Liz and I collected a bag full of young nettles, plucking the four tender leaves from the top of each plant. That’s enough for a big pot of soup that served about six (recipe below). Liz made a quiche with wild garlic, cheese and pine nuts and a wild garlic potato salad – a feast indeed.

I spent a happy half hour early the next morning collecting more wild garlic before my friends were up. It promised to be a warm day, but the sun was still low in the sky and there was a chill in the air. The smell – garlic but not quite garlic with a hint of leek – hit me as I crossed the field to the stile into the wood. Wild garlic carpeted the ground, green and wet with morning dew. The crows cawed and circled over head, their big bundles of nests resting high in the bare trees were clear against the brightening sky above.

I’ve great plans for wild food on the west coast. Armed with my trusty Food for Free book, I’ll be scouring the hedgerows, beaches and fields around the cottage. I doubt it will provide me with many square meals, but it will provide hours of happy rummaging and, hopefully, something for the pot.

Here’s the recipe for the nettle soup.

• A chopped onion
• A diced potato
• Four big handfuls of nettles
• A handful of wild garlic
• Stock

Sauté the onion for a few minutes then add the potato. Add the nettles and some chopped wild garlic if you have it. Add the stock, simmer until the potatoes are cooked and then liquidise the lot. At this point it tasted a bit bland, so we added more salt, some mixed spice (I think the traditional spice to add is nutmeg, but we didn’t have any) and a few spoonfuls of natural yoghurt, which worked a treat. It’s earthy, rich and green.

There is a certain thrill about getting food for nothing, isn’t there?

It was also a chance to get rid of some nettles in the garden!  Thank you to David Semple of The Garden Kitchen who told me that having nettles in the garden was a sign I have good ground!  I must have excellent ground!  There are nettles everywhere – I have become quite intimate with the roots of nettles!

Nettle Soup anyone?

I’d never made it before so now was the time!  I will post the recipe over the next few days.

Then there was the search for some local wild garlic!  And look what we found…

So there was also time to make some Wild Garlic Pesto!

It made the whole lack of telecommunications worth while!

Now is the perfect time to pick Nettles, the tips are a good few inches off the ground so no dirt but at the same time they are as tender as they will get and should not have been attacked by any insects yet, they will still be good through to April but not all that great afterwards. When picking them you want to wear some thick gloves and have a cotton/cloth bag rather than plastic to put them in as they will take a lot longer to wilt this way. You only want the very top shoots, the unfurled tip down to the first bracket of fully open leaves but no more, as everything else below will be quite a bit tougher and have less flavour.

- Recipe -

1/2 an Onion, chopped

3 cloves Garlic, crushed and chopped

2 slices Bacon, chopped roughly

1/3 of a carrier bag of Nettle Tops, most of the storks removed

2 medium sized Potatoes, cubed

3/4 of a cup of Peas

4 tablespoons dried Mint (or a good sized handful of chopped fresh Mint)

Beef Stock (or Water and a Stock Cube)

100-200g Pancetta Cubes

about 150-200ml Sour Cream

1. Fry the Onion, Garlic and Bacon with a knob of Butter. Add the Nettle Tops and stir/press down till they have all wilted.
2. Mix in the Potato, Peas, Mint then cover over with Stock and add Salt and Pepper to taste. Simmer till the Potato is soft.
3. Begin to fry the Pancetta while the potato softens, add any liquid from it into the main soup pot and then reserve the Pancetta when crispy and golden.
4. Add the Sour Cream to the soup, blend briefly, and then serve with the Pancetta, a dollop of Sour Cream and some Parsley on top.

Enjoy with some Crusty Bread!

How often have you spotted nettles growing happily in your garden? Once again you find yourself grabbing them by the stems with gloved fingers, giving them a damn good throttling.

STOP! They’re not so bad! Read on…..

Now I realise how invasive nettles are, but if you can spare a patch for them in your garden they can be used to make really scrummy things like refreshing tea, wine, beer or soup and used the same way as spinach. Mixed with water, nettles make a nitrogen-rich feed for other plants. They are also the number one plant for certain species of butterfly and ladybirds to lay eggs, ladybirds and larvae are ferocious predators that munch on pests which of course is great news for gardeners. Nettles are fussy about where they grow, a healthy patch of nettles growing in your garden is an indicator of rich fertile soil. Nettles also make a useful addition to the compost heap by speeding up the decomposition process (but don’t use the roots) for the compost bin. Certain species of butterfly depend on nettles to reproduce, they are the primary food source for their caterpillars. Health remedies are made from nettles too. If you’re interested in finding out more about uses for nettles, you might be interested in the book 101 Uses  for Stinging Nettles by Piers Warren http://www.wildeye.co.uk/stinging-nettles/index.html

The following image is the main reason why I will always leave a patch of nettles growing wild….

Peacock butterfly caterpillars munching on nettles in my garden, nettles are their food plant and lets face it, butterflies need all the help they can get right now.

Seems strange that this startlingly green, attractive and yummy plant is on the hit list of every farmer in the area, along with rabbits, roos and greenies. Sure, it can take over paddocks in the blink of an eye.

It’s also pretty nasty if you grab a handful of it unsuspectingly. Those little stinging hairs are incredibly annoying and slightly painful, like an itch that won’t go away. If you rub them on to a spot where you have different pain, that pain will go away and you’ll just have the itch to deal with. I’m not sure if this is useful, but it’s definitely interesting.

But the positive is that nettle is without doubt the deepest colour green you’ll eat, aside from the wheat-grass shots everyone was drinking a few years ago.  Stinging nettle is the real deal – and has positive flavour, rather than tasting like the lawn. Like super-concentrated spinach, full of iron and vitamin C and all those other essential minerals.

And I’ve found some. Down Tallagandra Lane way, my mate and olive-oil maker Ernie has been unsuccessfully spraying his nettle for years now. It keeps coming back like Malcolm Turnbull, so the regrowth is mostly young and tender, which is what needed, staying away from any woody trunks. So I end up with a bucketful of weed. What to do?

If you want a real hit of nettle, soup works well. For this, I just make a nice chicken stock and pile a heap of nettle into the pot. Cover and cook down until it’s all wilted. Blend thoroughly and pass through a fine sieve to remove the courser stems and any stinging bits which in theory should be inactivated by the cooking process anyway, but just to be sure.

Return this thinnish soup to a simmer and add – say you have a litre of soup – three or four peeled and diced small potatoes, something like Sebago, which I have plenty of after grabbing some from the regional markets last weekend.

Cook quickly, so you don’t tone down the colour, until the potatoes collapse and now blend again, and season with salt and pepper. The soup doesn’t need much else. Herbs are lost in such a rich, green broth. I added some shredded rabbit confit leftover from last week, so it becomes a farm pest potage of sorts.

And wow, what a soup. Velvety. It takes quite a bit of seasoning to bring on all the background flavours. It has a nutty, slightly spicy character, definitely better than spinach and doing me the world of good, unless of course there’s any residual Roundup on the leaves. But hey, this is good soup and makes you feel purified. Did I mention nettle is a diuretic and possible laxative? And good for your joints. That sound I’m starting to make when I sit down or stand up – ughhhhhh, ahhh – has miraculously gone.

So I’m hooking into this weed now and actually encouraging the small outcrop I have in the chookyard. It might transplant it to a container. Like rabbits and hares, eating something that just exists and is a pest is a fundamental joy, no carbon footprint save for the energy it takes to walk outside and grab some, and no staying awake at night wondering what horrible things are happening in feed lots, sheds and commercial high-intensity farming. Couldn’t be more natural and fulfilling.

Canberra Times, September 29, 2010

When I first started making herbal remedies I lived in a new-build estate with the inescapable wasteland next to it. On this wasteland were many nettle plants and I was really excited about making the tea. I was also looking forward to making nettle soup, should the tea taste better than I expected.

So off I went to gather the necessary plants. I returned home with a carrier bag of nettles and a sense of excitement.

Upon making the tea, howe ver, I can’t say I was in love with it. Perhaps I made it wrong, perhaps it was stronger than it was supposed to be, or the nettles were too old, but whatever the case it tasted a lot like it smelled-like cabbage water.

We had also read somewhere, probably Gardeners World, that nettle tea could be used on young plants as a natural feed and decided to use it on our tomato plants instead. It worked amazingly well! The tomatoes grew faster and stronger than we expected, and were an absolute pleasure to behold.

We decided then that nettle tea would be made, but only for the plants, and I started making concentrated versions and diluting them down as we needed them. I have never regretted using it as a plant feed, and, unsurprisingly, never got around to making that nettle soup!

I was gathering to make soup for my tea – very yummy and full of health-giving vitamins and stuff – you can positivley feel it doing you good as you eat it!

A different way of using nettles, though I’m not sure they do you quite as much good as having them in a soup, is to mix them into your Pimms (www.anyoneforpimms.com), the receipe does not feature on the official website, but take a nettle about as long as your jug is tall, pop it in, add ice, Pimms, lemonade, fruit of your choice and mint for a perfect (if slightly unusual) summer drink!  Splendid!

Nettle Soup!

I have already tryed this and it is delicious.

ingredients:

1 lb potatoes
½ lb young nettles
2 oz butter
1½ pts chicken or vegetable stock
sea salt & black pepper
4 tablespoons sour cream

Method:

Cook the peeled, chopped potatoes for 10 mins in salted water. Drain.

Wash & chop coarsely the nettles (Only pick the new, young tops,using gloves!)

Melt the butter in a saucepan, add the nettles and stew gently for a few minutes. Add the potatoes and heated stock, bring to the boil and simmer for 10 minutes or until tender.

When all is soft, cool slightly & purée in a blender, adding seasoning and the sour cream.

Clare Winfield

Whilst we were out walking this Easter weekend we came across a patch of lovely young stinging nettles…

…ideal for making our first nettle soup of the year. Fortunately we had some gloves & a bag with us.

It was delicious with crusty bread!

Here’s our recipe if you’d like to try it out for yourself:

Nettle soup
•    1 medium onion
•    couple of sticks of celery
•    1 small leek
•    1 tablespoons vegetable oil
•    1 large knob of butter
•    1 vegetable stock cubes
•    4 pints of water
•    4 medium potatoes peeled & chopped
•    large bowl/standard-sized plastic carrier bag-full of nettle leaves (use tips & young leaves)

1.    Roughly chop onion, celery & leek
2.    Put in large, thick-bottomed saucepan
3.    Sweat over gentle heat in vegetable oil & butter for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally
4.    Add water & potatoes to the saucepan
5.    Crumble stock cube into saucepan
6.    Bring to the boil & simmer for 1/2 hour
7.    Add nettle leaves & simmer for a further 20 minutes
8.    Blend & pass through a sieve
9.    Season with salt & black pepper to taste
10.  Add a splash of cream to finish (optional)

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