Early Spring Foraging | Nettle & Cleavers Soup + Preserving Spring Greens

Hello everyone, today we are going foraging and we are going to focus on spring greens. Although it's early spring the sun is not shining which means that our wildflowers and also all the lovely magnolia blooms which are opening right now are not going to be abundant with pollen so they're not going to smell very fragrant and they are also not going to taste amazing in our dishes. We always want to pick wildflowers on a sunny day so we'll save that for another day and today we will do spring greens. The woodlands and the hedgerows are absolutely abundant right now with nettles, with cleavers, with jack brother hedge and even the wild garlic is popping out. So all of these ingredients are packed with vitamins, minerals, nutrients, antioxidants and many of them are really powerful cleansers as well especially kind of our nettle and our cleavers but we'll talk about that more later. We are going to be making the most vibrant and delicious dishes with our spring greens and we're also going to talk a little bit about preserving them as well. Of course we want to make these ingredients last us through the year, we want to have that vitamin C rich nettle tea in the middle of winter but now is the time to collect our spring greens for later use. So let's grab a basket and let's go! So I've just got to the woods and one of the first things I've noticed is an absolute abundance of stinging nettles which is fantastic because as much as I forage for wild mushrooms and tree saps and tree resins, my favourite thing to forage will always be nettles. Firstly they are incredibly abundant and secondly they are the most nutritious superfood that we have access to whether we're in the supermarkets or the hedgerows. So they are packed with vitamin A, C and K and actually if you put the nutritional tables of spinach and nettle next to each other you'll see that nettle beats spinach on everything. Not only vitamins but also calcium, magnesium, protein, everything that we need. They are also an incredibly powerful medicinal herb, they help to cleanse the blood, they are incredible for boosting the immunity and they're also known to have anti-hay fever effects as well which is brilliant for springtime. So this is an incredible plant that we just overlook and so many people just walk past every day but I have this huge area of woodland here and it is covered in nettles and I'm going to show you just how much we can do with nettle and what amazing recipes we can make. So I'm going to spend a bit of time here and collect some of these lovely nettle plots. The other thing we have plenty of here are these little cleavers also known as sticky because they are covered in tiny little hook shaped hairs that make them stick to jumpers. They are not only a fun game but also an amazing wild food and an incredible medicinal herb too. So medicinally they help to boost the lymphatic system which is the body's way of flushing out chemicals and toxins and they really help to aid clean the liver as well and with all of these detoxifying qualities people throughout history have noticed that people who drink cleavers water or eat cleavers have beautiful clear skin and actually there's an old folk saying in Sweden that goes something like she who drinks cleavers water for seven days and seven nights will be so beautiful everyone will want to marry her. I have tested it and it's not true but it does make your skin lovely and vibrant and fresh and it is an amazing spring tonic. So we're going to collect some of this too and we are going to take it back with our nettles. By the time I was done picking nettles and cleavers my basket was already full so I decided to pick a few primroses and a few wild violets to garnish our dish and head home. So we're back in the kitchen now and it's time to make something delicious with our wild greens. The first thing I'm going to show you how to make is a beautiful vibrant and nutritious spring time soup and now I'm going to show you two methods of how to preserve our lovely wild greens so we can use them later in the year and benefit from all of that goodness. For the soup you're going to use your magical witchy skills to chop up two sticks of celery a courgette and half an onion add some butter and some oil to a pan and fry your onion and celery until it is super soft then add your courgettes and fry again until they're browned and soft should take about another eight to ten minutes then you're going to add a litre of really good stock or bouillon bring to the boil and then add 50 grams of cleavers and 100 grams of nettles you don't need to pre-cook any of your cleavers or your nettles because they're going to steam in the pan so when they're in just cover with a lid and you're going to leave this for four minutes until your nettles and cleavers are dark green and wilted this will get rid of the sting then I want you to transfer it to a soup blender and blitz while you make your croutons simply rip up a bread roll cover with olive oil and salt and bake until your croutons are super crispy these are really delicious and I could honestly eat them on anything then we're gonna pour out the soup and we're gonna garnish so I simply decorated the soup with a good handful of croutons and then I popped on some dried sumac which is a really lovely wild spice I harvested earlier in the year and then I also used some wild flowers and a little drizzle of olive oil and it was so so good next we're going to preserve our nettles and our cleavers we picked plenty and they're so packed with vitamin c and antioxidants that we want them to last all through the year so the first thing I'm going to do is simply dry our herbs you could use a dehydrator for this but you could also wait for a sunny day and lay your herbs out on a basket or a baking tray and simply leave in a sunny spot when these are dry and feel crispy the nettles might still have a little bit of a sting so you could wear gloves if you want simply transfer them to a airtight dry and clean jar and leave them in a cool dark area the great thing about our dried herbs is that at any point during the next year we can make a delicious herbal tea which is packed full of vitamin c I really like mine with a spoonful of honey you can also make a herbal powder from your dried herbs simply by whizzing them up in a spice grinder or a high speed blender once you've got this powder you can use it to make nettle lattes or you can use it as a superfood sprinkle and it's great in smoothies the second way we're going to preserve our herbs is by steaming and freezing them so all I'm going to do is add nettles and cleavers to my steamer and let them steam for four minutes until they're dark green and wilted once they're done I'm going to rinse them in cold water and squeeze out any excess moisture and then I'm going to transfer them to a tea towel and roll them or mold them into these small balls and I'm going to pop those in the freezer I've put them in a Tupperware box but once they're frozen I can put them in a big ziploc bag to take up as little space in my freezer as possible and I use these throughout the year simply to throw them into soups curries stews and really you can use them in exactly the same way that you would use frozen balls of spinach that you can buy from the supermarket but they are much better for you and in my opinion much more delicious so it's the end of the day and I'm going to go and enjoy this delicious spring green soup it is honestly so tasty and just feels so so nutritious and wonderful but thank you so much for joining me today let me know what you would like to forage next in the comments and please like and subscribe if you would like to see more foraging content from me okay lots of love bye