Cooking with Stinging Nettles

Come on Pussies, are you coming? Puss, puss, puss. Hello everyone, well you won't believe it but we went off whizzing to Barcelona for a week which was a Christmas present from my daughter and we had incredible weather but everybody here also had incredible weather up to about 24 degrees and we've come back and our fur stayed back, grey and spitting with rain and quite chilly after all the recent heat. Oh yeah, it's raining now. I'm going to dash around the garden to get some nettles because today's film is all about harvesting nettles. How to do it because I've had a few questions about the sting. How can you eat nettles when they sting? So I'm going to show you lots of different ways you can use nettles from a tea to a medicines to different types of food including a delicious cake. So stay with me till the end and that's when we'll make the cake. Before I head off to get the nettles and show you how to grasp the nettle so that it doesn't hurt or you can use gloves if you want to, I'd just like to say a big thank you to Noreen for looking after the house and the animals and keeping everything running smoothly and all the lovely things that she did to the house while we were away and thanks to Mandy as well for putting us up in Dublin. So I'm going to head off now and get some nettles. We've got nettles dotted all over the garden so I'm going to go to a few different places because you never harvest everything in one spot. Now grasp the nettle firmly with confidence, grasp it hard and it's less likely to sting. Of course there's lots of nettles around the one you're cutting off so you might still get a little brush against your hand but wear gloves. But I just can't be bothered to wear gloves because I feel restricted and I welcome a few little stings because it's beneficial. It makes my fingers feel a little bit numb and imagine if you had pain, well that would be a good thing and that's how it works. It brings so much blood to that area that it takes away any inflammation or whatever it is that's causing pain and to me I just feel a bit numb because I don't have any pain. But the nettles are absolutely brimming with nutrients, they're just so beneficial for us. The chlorophyll in particular is very beneficial for our blood because it is the plant's blood and so we are kind of getting a blood transfusion in a way and that's why nettle has always had a reputation as a blood cleanser. It builds up the blood again, makes it healthy and strong, helps it to carry more oxygen and so it's beneficial for everybody. And we can also feed it to the chickens, we can use it to make compost tea for our garden plants. In the past it was harvested and made into a fabric in a similar way to flax and uniforms were made. The rain's getting a bit worse now so I'm going to dash in. So when you have your big harvest of nettles, you get them home, you can tie a little bunch together like this which I've just done and you can hang that up to dry for tea or for medicine in the future. Alternatively you can have fresh nettle tea, just chop it up, put it into your teapot. I've got some just freshly chopped here and you can pour on either boiling water, you know, just off the boil water to have a hot cup of tea or you can put cold filtered water on it and just leave it to stand for several hours and have a lovely refreshing cup of tea that way. But what I really wanted to talk to you about today is the medicine making and the cooking because these, you know, in some countries, I've heard from people in Greece, you can buy nettles in your vegetable store, on your market stalls and why wouldn't they do that? Because it is so nutritious. So to make a tincture I always use fresh nettle and what I'm going to do is, even when you're using it at home now, you want to be grasping it firmly as I said outside, cut it up into the small pieces just like any tincture and I've made many different tinctures on this channel and if you look back you'll see it's always the same. We're just cutting everything up as small as possible and then chop it finely to make sure that it is as small as possible so we get more coverage and some people have been in touch and some of my students have mentioned it as well that they've come across herbalists who just throw it all into a blender with the menstruum which will be vodka in this case and just whiz it all up like that and yes, that is a very, very quick way to make it because you only need to let it stand for a few hours before you strain it but I just think it's, to me that is wrong because one of the beautiful things about making your own medicine is using the time and being patient and being patient is part of what we have to do when we're not well, we become patient because time is necessary for us to get well and in this last century, in the last century we've been encouraged to believe that we can pop a pill and we can just carry on, go to work and never mind what our, you know, health issue is but I think, I just think that's wrong. It's not a quick fix, it's working with nature, it's taking time and time is one of the things that helps us to get well as well and so that's why I like to chop everything myself as finely as I can to create the greatest surface area so we get more of the constituents of the nettle extracted and I'm going to just throw that nettle into this Kilner jar now I'm just going to pour in the vodka so just covering the nettle with the vodka and you could cover the nettles with apple cider vinegar if you can't take alcohol or because nettles are so amazingly nutritious for children as their bones are growing you could cover it with glycerin and make a tincture for children which is called a glycerite so I'll just put my label on and that's that we've got some types of medicine we can make fresh nettle tea, dried nettle tea we can make a tincture with either vodka, apple cider vinegar or glycerin so now let's get on to how we can use it as food because again people are saying but how can you eat stinging nettle isn't it going to sting your mouth and your throat and the brilliant good news is that no it doesn't because you have cooked it, sautéed it, steamed it and whatever you want to do with it and so the sting becomes ineffective and it's completely safe and tasty so I did make a video a year or two back about soup, how to make nettle soup it's simply sautéing an onion, throwing in the chopped nettle, adding some stock adding salt and pepper and a potato or two just to thicken it a little bit and that's your nettle soup so one way or another you can look back on that video but now I want to show you how to make a quiche and I've also collected some other fresh greens here I've got wild garlic, I've got the three-cornered leek I've got some dandelion, some wild rocket, I've got some cleavers I've got a little bit of sorrel and a couple of really young dock leaves now these and the nettles are all weeds they just grow out there for free they don't just grow in my garden you'll find them on hedgerows, wasteland, derelict sites, parks and places you'll have to check that they're just growing wild without any interference you know in terms of sprays and things but this is all free food and it's highly nutritious and it's cleansing and it's perfect to eat at this time of the year so I'm just going to sauté these vegetables now so I sautéed the onions and I've taken the nettle leaves from the stem because you don't want it to stem, it's too chewy and they're just sautéing down so you can see how it's shrunk down, it's sautéed down and so now I'm going to add in the other greens and I forgot to mention a couple of the plantain leaves as well in this so I've pre-baked the, you know, I've done a blind baking for the bottom of this quiche and now I'm just putting in now all of that nettle and the wild green weeds they've diminished quite a bit when they've been sautéed you know the way spinach just kind of dwindles away as well it's the same thing so I'm just spreading it lightly across the bottom and then I have my eggs whisked up with a bit of salt and black pepper and just to add a bit of colour I've cut some peppers I'm just going to pop them in on the top and then I have some cheese which I just sprinkle on the top as well and I think I'll just add a little sprinkle of paprika because I love the, I love the taste okay so I've popped this in the oven all the instructions and the quantities will be in the information box below the video so my quiche is in the oven the cakes are made or the mixture is made but first of all I'm just going to blanch the nettles so I'm just going to throw them into this pan of boiling water and blanch them for about a minute or so stick them in that water that I've just strained off you could use it for your houseplants or you can just use it as a you know if you're making a soup or stew you can use that water for that so I'm just going to put those nettles into the blender with their last little bit of water and I'm going to make a puree so I'm just going to let this cool down for a minute and then I'm going to add about half a cup of well I'm going to add a couple of ounces for this recipe I'm just going to add about an ounce to two ounces of this puree when it cools down so my puree is finally cooled I put it into a wide flat bottom bowl to help it along so I'm just going to fold it in a little bit at a time because I'm not sure how much I've adapted the cake recipe so I'm not sure how much I'm going to use in these cupcakes so it's becoming a lovely green colour so kids love coloured foods and we know that there are just so many harmful additives that disrupt their brain function and I don't know what else they do but we certainly don't really want our children to be eating the colourants in food but this is a lovely way to give them great nourishment and the colour that they like so they're getting weed food and colour and of course with nettles you can dye fabric as well for the colour of them so versatile you can also use nettles in the way that flax would have been used to make fabrics and anything that's left over from this puree can go into soups and stews or it could be used as a compost tea you know you can make compost tea with nettles as well so it looks nice and green I'm going to put it into the little cupcake papers now so there's the cupcakes all filled out and I'm going to put them in the oven now I have the cream frosting made we call it buttercream and I'm going to add a little bit of colour to this as well so that when I decorate the cakes there'll be a continuity of green so after a hard day chained to the stove I have my quiche and my cakes ready and I'm going to have a lovely cup of tea now made from the nettles but before I finish off I'm just thinking to myself if I was to give my grandson one of these cakes it would be nice to put some sprinkles on the top but I don't have sprinkles and I wouldn't buy them anyway because they're full of colour additives you know the different colours which we know disrupt a child's mental processes and they're just not good for you they're just toxic so I thought what can I do and I came up with the idea of some flowers so I have a little violet I have some cherry blossoms because we came home to all the trees are in blossom and some dandelion petals and some daisy petals so they just make these things even more fun for children and for grown-ups if you like this kind of thing it still gives children particularly a chance to understand that flowers and weeds are edible and nutritious and fun to use and include in your cooking so I think I'll just sprinkle these last few petals and wherever they land it's where they land so that's it so I hope that's given you some food for thought as they say and made you aware that you can cook with weeds and really enjoy tasty food with them as well as sweet treats like these little cakes made with nettle and I do love my nettle tea so I'm going to have a cup of that now it's not quite ready really but I'm just ready for a tea and just before I go as well we've got some amazingly good news this morning there has been a proposal by an offshore wind farm company to put 300 meter high windmills around the coast here which would be not only an eyesore but completely detrimental to the environment to the marine environment to seabirds, whales, dolphins, everything and the company have pulled out and decided against it so hooray we're absolutely thrilled and delighted and to celebrate I'm going to have a cake and my cup of tea and I'll see you next week have a good week yourselves bye I hope you enjoyed today's film if you did subscribe and hit the bell for notifications and have a look at the website www.darnewsirisherbgarden.com for more information about us and about the herbal medicine courses I offer and the Wise Woman Way training and if you go to the shop you can find the books the weed handbooks and other herbal goodies and remember we put a new film out every Sunday so looking forward to seeing you next week