Foraging 101

These, my friends, are nettles.  Stinging nettles.  Urtica dioica, to be exact.  And tonight, I am having my first meal with them.  I have foraged.

My sister sent me two cookbooks about foraging.  One, entitled Hunt, Gather, Cook, by Hank Shaw, is amazing and hilarious.  This guy thinks a bit like me.  He looks at something and his first thought is, "Can I eat that?"  The only problem with the book is that it isn't really a field guide.  So I took a few of the greens he mentioned in the book and looked them up on the internet, just last night.  One was nettles.  And, lo and behold, while I was riding today I noticed something that looked a lot like the pictures I saw.  To be fair, I started my afternoon at the stables by looking around at the ground and thinking, "OK, dandelions I know, but are those lambs quarters?  Is that garlic mustard or geranium?"  But with the nettles, once I got over to them and took a look, I was quite sure of myself.

You might find this strange, but I keep gardening gloves in the trunk of my car.  I started that because sometimes when I hike I see trash and want to get rid of it, so I have the gloves with me and a plastic bag to gather trash.  Who could have foreseen that I would want to pick stinging nettles?

Once we got home, I blanched the nettles in boiling salt water and then shocked them in ice water.  This gets rid of the formic acid which makes them sting.  I made a potato-nettle soup:

1 cup nettle leaves, blanched

1 clove garlic

1 shallot

2 cups chicken stock

3 small potatoes, cubed

1/2 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. parsley

The onion, garlic and nettles were pureed with 1/2 c. of the stock and then added to the rest of the ingredients in a pot.  This was simmered for about 30 minutes until the potato cubes were tender and then the immersion blender did its thing.  We now have a thick green fragrant soup and I almost cannot wait until dinnertime!