I've started a new blog, An English Kitchen. I'm not abandoning this one, I'll be using it exclusively for recipes. An English Kitchen will cover all the stuff that goes on here in the heart of our home. Today, there's baking, and I've been eating primroses. Yes, really.
Lunch was an elegant protest in a flurry of snow in Trafalgar Square. Delicious fruit smoothies, vegetable curry, all the fruit you could find. Supermarket waste. And all of it would otherwise have ended up in landfill. Not even composted.
This lovely fruit made thousands of smoothies, full of goodness. Why don't supermarkets TRY selling less-than-perfect fruit, and see what happens? Why don't they give the rest to homeless charities. And COMPOST whatever's left.
They couldn't give these grapes away fast enough. No stalks, so no good to the supermarket, apparently. Daft world: I spent a few minutes earlier in the week taking grapes off their stalks to put in a sauce. But even if they don't want to sell them, they should at least PUT THEM IN THE COMPOST.
Then on to Heywood Hill to pick up a book they'd found for me; and a walk round Shepherd Market. Heywood Hill really is the most life-enhancing shop, laid out a little like a library in a private house, and full of well-chosen books, both old and new. Always lots you want to browse, some you want to buy. Nancy Mitford used to work there; now there's a helpful young man called Ben, and a bevy of girls in the room at the back.
And home, to find the house looks like this:
These are the leaves I used to make a salsa verde for lunch. The dandelions came from the lawn, just before its first cut of the year; the nettles came from a newly-sprung patch just outside the greenhouse; the rocket had self-seeded in the greenhouse; the sorrel has seeded itself all over the path - my fault for not picking it hard enough last year. In other words, this is the lazy gardener's sauce. Tastes good.
This variation on my basic salsa verde recipe went as follows:
Blitz:
It's very satisfying, eating weeds, especially nettles, which grow so readily here. This is a quick addition to lunch: I split my "usual" flatbread dough in two, made two rough circles, covered one with a cheesy nettle mix, covered and slashed it, then baked it in a hot oven. Delicious.
Nettle flatbread
for the dough:
300g strong white flour
1/2 tsp instant yeast
170ml water
pinch of salt
glug of oil
Put everything in the bread machine and use the dough setting.
for the nettle mixture:
A handful of nettle tops
A few leaves of mint
onion
cheese - whatever you've got
Slice an onion and sweat in a little oil. When it is soft (or browned, if that's what you'd like), add the chopped washed greens. Continue cooking until they've collapsed and the nettles have lost their sting.
Make two circles of dough. Cover one with the nettle mix and add some chopped cheese. I used gruyere, but blue or creamy would work here too. Cover with the second circle, pinch it together, slash and bake for 15-20 minutes in a hot oven.
Mmmm
Other things to make with nettles
Nettle pesto
Nettle soup
Nettle tea
Nettle beer
Here is a rare recipe for this blog: one I haven't tried. But it's nettle time of year; Gertrude asked me for the instructions but didn't leave an email address, so here they are. I know that there's a lot of interest in cooking with nettles, because my posts about nettle soup and nettle tea are amongst the most visited on Joanna's Food, particularly at this time of year, when they grow with such profusion.
I'm giving CDW's exact instructions, as found in A Greener Life. There is some suggestion that this helps with rheumatism; not sure I believe it, but it sounds worth a try.
Nettle beer
makes 4.5 litres
1 kilo of young nettle tops
zest and juice of 2 lemons
25g cream of tartar
500g demerara sugar or honey
4.5l water
15g brewers' yeast
Wear rubber gloves to pick the nettle tops. Wash and drain them. Place the lemon zest and juice, cream of tartar and sugar or honey in a large container, preferably an earthenware fermenting vessel. Put the nettles and water in a large saucepan and bring to the boil. Boil for 15 minutes. (This can be done in two batches.) Strain the liquid into the lemon juice mixture. Stir well. Allow to cool to around 21C/70F. Remove a little of the liquid and make a paste with the yeast. Stir into a large container. Cover with a layer of thick cloth, tied down so that it doesn't sag into the liquid.
Leave in a warm place for three days to help the yeast to activate. Strain into bottles and cork loosely. Store in a cool, dark place. It is drinkable in one week, but ... the longer you keep it, the better it be.
This is my entry for Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted this week by Cate at Sweetnicks
Links to other posts about nettles
Nettle tea
Nettle soup
Links to nettles on other blogs
Nettle and ricotta frittata from The Chocolate Lady
The Old Foodie on rennet from nettles
Chicken breast stuffed with nettles from Eating Britain
Friends phoned this morning to say they were passing and could they drop in for lunch. Well, the patient and I are getting a little short of conversation, so YES, come AS SOON AS YOU CAN.
These particular friends are tremendous food scavengers - we've been with them shrimping and on mushroom hunts, and you wouldn't believe how determined they are. So I went out into the garden to see if I could find anything wild. Much too dry for mushrooms. Nettle soup, I thought. The nettles are beginning to show, but there weren't quite enough for a big pot of soup. Next week, probably, if the sun keeps on shining.
So then I turned my attention to the lawn. During the summer, blink, and there's a mass of dandelions. Young dandelion leaves make very good eating, soft bitter leaves if you catch them early. Well, it's too early ... not a sign of a dandelion. I know they're lurking there, beneath the ground, but nothing so much as the tip of a leaf.
However, in the search, I found something truly lovely, and utterly unexpected: in the place where, until last summer, stood a crab apple tree - there, hardly visible, were two wild crocuses, and the tip of another. Magical.
So then I went to pick the first of this year's sorrel.
Related posts:
Nettle soup
Nettle tea - and other tips
Sorrel
The crab apple tree
To get to our house, you go up a single-track lane lined on both sides with a hedge - not, on the face of it, a very remarkable hedge - it's often untidy to look at, the rabbits have damaged its roots, there are no eye-catching exotics. It's a very English hedgerow. And yet, as we discovered a few years ago, it is an important part of our heritage: living history, home to hundreds of species - mainly insects, which in turn support birds and other wildlife. On the lane we regularly see little owls, barn owls, many finches, woodpeckers, partridges.
This post is for Amanda at Little Foodies, and anyone else who is out foraging for blackberries or sloes .... a little bit about dating hedges, which may turn your afternoon into a history project, as well as a kitchen adventure.
Years ago, Eleanor - then aged about 10 or 11 - and I set about trying to find out the age of the Huntswood hedge. It is obviously ancient: the lane itself is sunken, a sure indicator of age, there are fully mature self-sown oak trees, there is a multiplicity of native species (and no exotics). But exactly how ancient?
Hooper's Rule (first published in 1974 in Hedges by Dr Max Hooper) is:
Age = (no of species in a 30 yard stretch) x 110 + 30 years
Or, to put it another way, pace out a thirty-yard stretch, count the individual woody shrubs and trees, multiply by 110 and add 30 .... and you'll get an idea, a best guess. You have to count all the different types of hawthorn as one species, you mustn't count seedlings, you don't get such a good result if there's elm about (I wish - the elms round here all succumbed to Dutch elm disease in the late 70s early 80s). According to Wikipedia, it doesn't work so well in the north of England. Oh, and it doesn't work at all on a planted hedge, however old.
Hooper's Rule is somewhat controversial - we wanted to date the hedge for a public inquiry about whether the lane was a public right of way (new neighbours said not, and spent a great deal of energy trying - fruitlessly, as it turned out - to prevent nice people from walking their dogs there). It's not the kind of evidence that can be accepted on its own, documentary back-up is required (!). It's also better if you do several 30 yard stretches.
But it's fun to do - you may, like us, have to do a bit of work to identify all the different species. The hedge itself, however old it turns out to be, is a piece of living history, the best possible habitat for the widest number of species (better than anything you plant yourself). Once you've completed your survey, the hedge will never be an invisible part of the background for you again. And, of course, you'll know exactly where to go foraging in autumn.
PS, I forgot to say ... we found that this hedge was about 1,000 years old.
Earlier this week I picked some sloes - including the ones in the picture - and combined them with vodka and rather a lot of soft brown sugar to make a stickier version of the usual liqueur. At least, I hope that's what will happen. If not, I'll add some more sugar when I bottle it. I don't quite see the point of a tart liqueur, which is what you get with the usual sloe gin recipe (450g sloes / 250g white sugar / one litre gin).
Sticky sloe vodka
450g sloes
450g soft brown sugar
most of a litre of vodka
a 1 1/2 litre Le Parfait bottling jar
I can't say that I'm using vodka to get the "cleaner" flavour some people write about - I've never noticed the all-pervading taste of juniper in sloe gin; it was more a case of - oh good, there's some vodka in the cupboard.
You do have to prick the sloes, but one hole is enough, and if you do it with a fork you can prick two at once. It doesn't take long, and, although your fingers get blue, the dye washes off easily. Put everything into the jar, seal and shake. Keep in a cool dark place, and shake it up fairly regularly.
This will be ready for bottling at the very earliest the week before Christmas. It will be better to wait until the week before next Christmas, but I do see that may not be possible. On the other hand, you may forget all about it, and discover it some years later, in which case it will also be fine. Bottling is easy if you have both a large funnel and a fine plastic sieve.
Really thrifty people use the sloes in baking after they've bottled up the liqueur, but then you really do have to take out the stones, because, in truth, a sloe is more stone than flesh. Flapjacks seem to be the preferred option. Lazy people don't bother to strain this, in which case they often put the sloes straight into a bottle. This is more trouble than using a jar. (I have never done the thrift thing, but I have done the lazy thing. And the forgetting thing.)
This type of seasonal preserving is quick and easy; it's not exactly food for free (all that vodka!), but it's definitely making the most of what's free in the hedges - and it's a lovely winter treat, either to drink, or to use in cooking, or to pour on ice cream. It also has the bonus of making you feel rather clever.
PS: There's a lot of debate about whether or not you should wait until the first frost before picking sloes. Even in a good year such as this, waiting until the first frost means that the birds will get them - they know far better than we where the best bushes are ... indeed, there were blackbirds nesting in the hedge less than a foot away from where I was picking.
Yesterday morning, our host took four teenagers out on the boat to catch mackerel and set creels (in that order, because you need mackerel as bait to catch lobster). They also went to the beach, where they found mussels. So when they returned, just before supper, they had a large bucket of mussels (they'd scraped the barnacles and pulled the beards on the way back in the boat), and a huge basket of smallish mackerel.
Bridget made moules marinieres in a huge saucepan, using a whole bottle of white wine for the "soup". Delicious. We threw the shells into champagne buckets (the house in which we are staying used to be a hotel, and has a great deal of useful kit which is not found in most private houses). Roast chicken to follow.
Many of the mackerel will be used for lobster bait, straight from the freezer. A neighbour here on Mull is a particularly successful lobster fisherman, and this is his secret: he puts his bait in a large plastic tub, covers it in salt, then seals it and leaves it for a year to ripen ... the smell is appalling, but the lobsters like it!
Meanwhile, for the second year running, we made this delicious gravad max, from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Cookbook. This needs to be made at least a day in advance, but is better left for two or three days beforehand.
Gravad max
For 10 large or 20 small mackerel
Mix: 100g caster sugar, 75g coarse salt, and a handful of chopped fennel sprigs (HFW says dill, but that's not growing round here).
Fillet the fish. This can be done in one of two ways - either use a sharp knife to take a fillet off each side of an ungutted fish, or behead and gut the fish, slit them open, press them flat and then tease out the backbone.
Layer the cure and the fillets in a plastic box (DO NOT use metal). Start with cure, then fish skin side down, then cure, then fish skin side up &c. When you've finished, weight the whole thing down with a board and some bottles or tins (if you are using tins, then you must put them into another, smaller, plastic box). HFW has a third layer, because he puts the fish into a perforated (wooden) box, and therefore needs something to catch the drips. We've dispensed with this, because his instructions tell you to baste the fish with the drippings from the fish box, and I always like to simplify things to make life a little easier when possible.
After one, two or three days, your fish is ready to eat - cut it with a sharp knife at an angle towards the skin, as if you were cutting smoked salmon. Serve with lemon juice, a little green salad, and plenty of good bread. HFW makes a creme fraiche sauce flavoured with mustard vinegar and dill, but we may not bother with that (it will rather depend on what we find in the fridge).
Last year, Craig brought fish fresh from the sea, and filleted them for us in moments with his very sharp knife (and superior knife skills). This year, a work party gutted the fish, and we all then wished we'd filleted them, because teasing the backbones out of very fresh raw fish is time-consuming (Ola, pictured below, did the most). HFW says that filleting them whole is more wasteful - that may be, but it's certainly much quicker, and a great deal less trouble. If you're buying the fish, none of this need trouble you, just get the fishmonger to do it for you!
This is wonderfully good for you, free if you're lucky (or pretty cheap if you buy the fish), and a really good dish to make for a crowd or a party, because you do the bulk of the preparation well in advance. It's also a delicious treat.
PS I think you could do this with any oily fish, and when I get home, back to Oxfordshire, the English county furthest from the sea in every direction, I will try it with whatever oily fish I can buy.
I really felt as if I was bottling sunshine when I made this delicious jelly, because as soon as I had finished picking the roses, the sky turned grey and the heavens opened - yet more torrential rain, fierce enough, once again, to damage flowers.
I found the recipe this morning, lying in bed reading old Sunday supplements unread from the weekend of our parties. It was extracted from a book which I see is due to be published tomorrow, Edible Wild Plants and Herbs: A Compendium of Recipes and Remedies, by Pamela Michael. Looks good enough to buy. As ever, I've adapted the recipe a little.
Rose petal jelly
1 litre rose petals
1 litre water
juice of two lemons
1 kilo sugar
Pick one litre of scented roses. The original recipe suggests dog roses, but as they're now over, mine was a mixture of the beautiful English rose Noble Antony (David Austen), Tuscany Superb, Gloire de Dijon, a pretty little unnamed pale pink rambler by the front door, and Compassion. I don't spray my roses (or anything, come to that), so they're okay to eat. I had no idea what a litre of rose petals looks like, so I went out with a colander which I half filled. Too many, it turned out, but no matter, they'd have needed dead-heading soon anyway. You want them blousily open, but not over. Check for scent as you pick, because some roses become more scented as the flowers develop, other lose their scent quickly.
Pull the petals off the stalk, and loosely fill a one-litre measuring jug. Check for insects - I put several earwigs back into the garden, as well as a couple of small grasshoppers. Put the petals in a stainless steel saucepan with a litre of water, bring to the boil and simmer for 15 minutes. They will completely lose their colour, and the water will turn a murky shade of reddish-brown, deliciously scented. Strain this into a glass bowl and cool.
Next you add the lemon juice, and a magical thing happens - the murky brown suddenly becomes a beautiful and bright pink. Pour this back into the pan, and add one kilo of sugar (I used preserving sugar because I happened to have it in the house, but ordinary sugar would do just as well, it would just take a little longer to dissolve). When the sugar has disappeared, turn up the heat a little and bring to the boil. It will take 10 minutes to reach setting point, or you can use a sugar thermometer.
Leave it to cool a little before bottling - if you do this, you'll find that much of the scum disappears. I never bother to skim the scum, because I don't enter my jellies in the produce show, and because it's perfectly edible - it disappears if you're heating up the jelly later (the main reason I make jellies is to liven up sauces).
Bottling isn't too much of a palaver, although you need to sterilise the jars. This is easily achieved in one of three ways (I am assuming that they are already clean): 1) put them in the sink and pour boiling water on them; 2) run them through a hot dishwasher cycle; 3) put them in a low oven for half an hour.
People get very worked up about making jellies, and Nigella even said in one of her books that making jelly was more trouble than jam ... but Nigella's wrong, and the whole process is quick and easy. Jelly is easier on the cook than jam, because you don't need to peel and core, top and tail, you let the sieve or jelly bag do all the work. And the key thing is never to make more than 3-4 jars at once ... in other words, never use more than one kilo of sugar - scale the recipe down if necessary (it's also true for jam). This rose petal jelly took under an hour from start to finish, in three short bursts of activity.
Incidentally, you can see from the photos below just how much colour is extracted from the petals when they're simmered. The original recipe suggests putting the petals back into the syrup when you've dissolved the sugar, but I didn't want to spoil the look of the jelly, and, besides, thought I'd probably have to sieve it before using it in a sauce.
This is the one you dilute with water. It keeps for ages in the fridge - I've still got a little of the last jar from last year, and it's as good as it was on day one. Some people put it into plastic bottles and freeze them, but my friend Vivien says that the nasties in the plastic leach into the liquid, so perhaps it's not such a good idea.
Whatever, this is simple to do, the sort of thing that makes you feel tremendously clever and together, when actually you haven't done very much at all. The effect has been slightly lessened by the sort you can buy in the supermarket, which really does taste like home-made, because it is home-made, but on a much much larger scale. But it's still worth doing, if only to save money (it's amazing what they charge for a bit of flavoured sugar water!).
I've been making it for years, using a recipe that's been in my manuscript recipe book for as long as I can remember, so it's in imperial measures, rather than metric. The exact quantities don't much matter, because all that sugar and the citric acid keep it all sweet (in both senses) for years.
But when you've made it, don't just limit yourself to diluting it with water to drink on a hot day ... you can use the syrup to flavour gooseberries (just coming in to season), or apricots (the first from Sicily are just appearing in the shops now), or to make a sorbet.
Elderflower syrup
25 elderflowers, stalks removed
1kg sugar
2 lemons, grated, squeezed, and cut up
50g citric acid
1 litre cold, previously boiled, water
Put all the ingredients into a bowl in a cool place for two days. Stir occasionally. Or not. Strain and bottle. Dilute to drink. Keep in the fridge.
If you're impatient (and who isn't?), there's an alternative way to do this:
Quick elderflower syrup
Stir 500g sugar into a litre of water, with the juice of two lemons. Boil for about a minute, then add 10 elderflower heads. Remove from the heat, cover the pan, and leave to cool. When it's completely cold, bottle and strain.
The only reason I don't use this recipe (although I have made it in the past) is because it's a little more of a palaver.
Just make sure that the flowers are completely white - any brown and the whole batch will taste filthy (Sarah Raven says it makes it taste like cat's pee ... I wouldn't know!).
No, it's not champagne, and it's not alcoholic, but I don't know what else to call it, because elderflower champagne is its traditional name. And if there's a cross French wine grower reading this, well, think of it as a homage from England - remembering that more than half the fizz grown in Champagne is drunk in England.
Elderflower champagne is completely different to the elderflower cordial which you can make - or, these days, buy in a supermarket. It's cloudy, naturally fizzy (perhaps there are natural yeasts at work, I'm not sure), and not unlike the ginger beer we used to make as children with a starter that quickly got out of hand as it doubled every time you made it (only without the ginger!).
My mother-in-law used to make this delicious drink every summer, in an explosion of sticky bottles. I make it once in a blue moon - I don't know why I don't make it more often, because it's very little trouble, and very delicious. I suppose it's all that collecting bottles for weeks beforehand.
Anyway, I'm giving you the recipe now, even though I haven't started on it, because the elderflower are coming into bloom all over the place. I'll dig out the recipe for elderflower cordial and post it before the season is over - although as you can see from the photograph, it's only just getting under way here.
Elderflower champagne
3 large heads of elderflower
1 lemon
750g white sugar
2 tbsp white wine vinegar
4.8 litres cold water
1 large plastic bucket
Pick three large heads of flower in full bloom. Make sure they're not going over (you can tell by the browning of the petals), otherwise the finished result will taste nasty and not at all flowery. Peel a lemon, making sure not to include any pith. Squeeze the juice. Put the flowers, the lemon peel and juice into a large clean plastic bucket, together with the sugar, wine vinegar, and water. Stir vigorously.
Leave for about 24 hours, then strain and pour into strong screw-topped bottles - fizzy water bottles are ideal. Don't fill them to the top. Leave in a cool place for two weeks. You may find one or two of the bottles explode; there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to it, but it means you need to put them somewhere that the resulting sticky mess is easy to clear up. I think they're less likely to explode the cooler they are, and you can take preventive measures by just slightly opening the bottles from time to time to let off the gas - it's easier to see if this is necessary when you're using plastic bottles.
Drink cold. Great for a party on a hot summer's day. Oh, and by the way, it doesn't keep long - although it tends to disappear pretty fast.
Believe it or not, it's Be Nice to Nettles Week this week ... which means not pulling them up whenever you see them. They're a good habitat for butterflies - peacocks, small tortoiseshells and red admirals all lay their eggs in nettles (also cabbage whites, which I'm less keen on). It's a good trade-off for all the nettle patches in our garden, because my heart always lifts when I see a butterfly - and, over the past few years, we've seen fewer and fewer here.
A couple of months ago, I posted a recipe for nettle soup, and there's been a lot of interest in it. It's delicious, a little like spinach or watercress soup, and I should think that you could substitute nettles in any favourite recipe you have for spinach or watercress soup. Nutmeg is a good addition to all three of these soups.
I was just going to make a cup of nettle tea, but I got side-tracked while looking up how to do this (dur ... you just get some leaves, put them in a pot, and pour on boiling water!). So now, I'm going to be very nice to nettles and tell you what I've discovered:
* they make a good spray for blackfly and other aphids (I've lost count of the number of veg gardeners I've heard this spring talking about the blackfly on their broad beans). Soak a bucketful of nettles in water for a week. Strain and spray.
* they make your hair shiny and soft, and maybe even get rid of dandruff. This time, you pick a big bunch of nettles, wash them, put them in a big saucepan with a pint of water and boil them for 15 minutes. Strain the liquid into a bottle, and keep it in the fridge.
* pick young leaves, because if you pick old leaves you have to cook them hard or risk kidney damage.
* one of my books says - and they don't seem to be joking - that stinging nettles rarely suffer from pests or diseases, and that they are easy to propagate by dividing established roots in the spring.
* and, for the feint-hearted, I would like to emphasise that they DO NOT STING ONCE THEY ARE COOKED - but you do need to wear a pair of gloves while picking them.
* Clarissa Dickson Wright (one of the Two Fat Ladies) says that her old gardener used to cure his rheumatism with nettle beer. I'll happily supply anyone with the recipe if they want it, but I'm not going to make it this year, because pretty soon I'm going to make elderflower champagne, which will take up all my energy for that sort of thing, not to mention all my spare bottles. I think the nettle beer is only very slightly alcoholic, just like the elderflower champagne.
* in the winter nettle beer is a good source of minerals (and in the summer, they're a good source of Vitamin C).
How to make nettle tea: fill the pot full of young nettle leaves. Pour on boiling water. Leave for five minutes.
I did all that, and it tastes like essence of green, as if it's doing you good - more good than spinach. Eat your heart out Popeye. I managed a couple of tepid mouthfuls, but I'm giving the rest to the broad beans. Or perhaps I'll rinse my hair in it, we're going out tonight, and I'd like to at least aim at the soft and shiny haired look!
And if that's not enough nettle information for you, here's the link to Be Nice to Nettles Week
Holiday time, and the children want lunch. Not leftovers, my staple, but lunch cooked from scratch. Mostly it's pasta, sometimes it's a pizza, if I remember to make the dough in the morning. Today we had linguini with mushroom sauce. It's cooked slowly to extract the maximum flavour, which makes it a good way to give those slightly dull supermarket mushrooms some taste.
Chop a couple of onions and sweat them slowly in a little olive oil. When they're soft but not brown, add some chopped parsley (and some garlic if you've got it; I ran out last night, and haven't been to the shops today). Stir, and then add in a little flour. When that's amalgamated, add chopped mushrooms - I used four large field mushrooms, one per person. Cook slowly for about 15-20 minutes. The liquid from the mushrooms should be enough to make a sauce, but if you overdid the flour (and I did), then loosen the sauce with a little stock or water. 
Overall, it took about half an hour, with three bursts of activity of about two minutes each.
This would also be a good basis for a meat casserole, or you could turn it into a cream sauce with a dollop of creme fraiche. There's a little left over, and I'll chop fresh herbs into it and spread it on little toasts or biscuits as a starter. In the autumn you could use wild mushrooms from the countryside.
This is my entry for weekend herb blogging, hosted this week by Anh of Food Lover's Journey
I've got a cold this week, so need something to build me up. Nettles (urtica dioica) fit the bill perfectly, as they are full of iron, and, I think, vitamin C. As so-called hedgerow food, they have the added advantage of giving you something for nothing. But in this garden they grow in huge profusion, great clumps of them. They're only just beginning to show now, which is perfect, because you need young shoots if you're going to eat them (they get very stringy indeed, and mature plants can be made into clothes, just like hemp). 
It's hard to believe that this clump of three-inch high nettles will be four feet tall by midsummer. 
Even nettles this small carry quite a sting, so you need to wear gloves: finding them is probably the most difficult bit of making this soup.
Quick nettle soup
For two, you'll need half a colander full, one potato, one onion, some stock or water, and nutmeg.
Chop the onion, and sweat in a little oil. When they're soft but not golden, add potato chunks, stir round for a few moments, then add the nettles. The leaves will fill your pan pretty full, but, like spinach, they wilt right down, so when you add liquid, don't put in too much, there's no need to cover the leaves. Bring to the boil, put on the lid, and simmer gently for 10 to 15 minutes. Liquidize, & season with lots of nutmeg. Reheat, and serve with a swirl of fromage frais.
This is my entry for weekend herb blogging, hosted this week by Becky at Key Lime and Coconut
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