The real key though is stinging nettles just simply grow like crazy in your backyard (at least in Ireland) so it's a two birds with the one stone kind of deal, you're gardening as well as cooking. There is also the 'badass' feeling of eating something that previously was dangerous. The heat will denature any stingers in the soup.
We never ate the nettles, just had 1000 remedies for stings, but we did eat a lot of blackberry jam, cobblers and pies.
I remember dreading them when we'd go through the ravines with friends to our hideouts. :D
Can't control the size of other people's dogs.
These days, tyre microplastics and diesel particulates are still a concern, but there's little hard science around the hazards of eating them in small quantities - there's microplastic in basically everything, to some degree, so you're not making it appreciably worse - and agricultural farm machinery is a worse diesel PM offender by far than a street's worth of modern cars.
One would hope that more expensive chocolate would have a value chain to show that it’s been dried in a proper manner.
Nothing beats random sampling though.
We also eat nettle soup with a boiled egg-half. I would not call it bland, it is just a dish that does not scream with its loudest voice in your face.
My dear mother told me this story when I was just a boy. I was enchanted by the idea of this magical stone, too young to consider the clever trick the tramp was playing on the woman.
The sense of cooking being a magical endeavor has stayed with me ever since.
Every time I go out for hotpot, I get as many greens as possible; I love boiling them down in a tasty broth and chowing down on an entire football field of vegetables, sometimes wrapped around a piece of meat. I could see adding them in here easily.
There are also a lot of dishes you can add a big handful of chopped, frozen spinach to for some additional nutrition. These would be another incredible option in scenarios like that.
Blending it down to add a more herby flavor to a puree, or to bulk up a pesto, or something along those lines could work well.
>Both trichomes and root hairs [...] are lateral outgrowths of a single cell of the epidermal layer.
When dry they are irritating if rubbed against the skin but not stingy anymore and when boiled they have at most a sandy nature as the trichomes soften and can't penetrate as well.
Fun story (semi related) she visited us in the US in 2015 and my sister served her kale. She amusingly said: “I haven’t had this since ww2” apparently when food was scarce they grew kale which was easy to grow in Poland and packed with nutrients
A lot of the more recent examples of Polish cuisine are dishes originally invented out of poverty and made largely out of cheap ingredients and which now took a new form using stuff unheard of at the time because the real recipe is not to contemporary taste.
My favourite example of that would be cold cheesecake - originally made largely from cottage cheese, nowadays has mascarpone as the main ingredient.
Mascarpone! Hardly anyone knew what mascarpone even was in the 70s.
Behind the Iron Curtain and no trade with the Decadent Bourgeoisie Westerners
Years later, dating the Finnish woman who is now my wife, I learned how to gather nettles, about nettle soup, and even that eating nettles can de-sensitize you to seasonal allergies. I had completely misinterpreted that part of Solzhenitsyn's writing, and that his point was that at least when the nettles were growing the gruel had some additional nutrition (like vitamin c) in it.
A lot of knowledge like this has been lost in suburban America.
If we had always had this attitude towards "weeds", we wouldn't have turned the weedy Brassica oleracea into cabbage, broccoli, kale, collard greens, etc.
Maybe it was just natural suppressant of pain or anti-inflammatory remedy, certainly no expectation to fix joints themselves (that even current medicine often can't fix) but nobody normal would go through such experience daily if there would be results.
Is there any research backing up this folk remedy? Asking for a partner and multiple family members with severe seasonal allergies
It’s effective in a clinical setting and honestly too dangerous to recommend in home settings without several layers of precautions.
But, in theory, highly specialized exposures to particular local allergies would be more effective than most of the clinical studies. And that’s what I would expect is driving the folk remedy.
Worth noting, almost all of the treatments like this are VASTLY more effective when done at younger ages. But they are also even more dangerous. So please speak to an allergist first and don’t do stuff you just read online.
(if it does have an effect then I wouldn't be surprised if it also matters if the nettles were regionally sourced or not - IIRC there were some studies suggesting that that mattered for the effectiveness of honey helping with seasonal allergies or not)
I was vegetarian for 10 years until around COVID. I often want to go back to vegetarianism, not for ethical or health reasons, just for the sheer diversity of what I ate and the fun of cooking with limitations.
Sure, I could develop a minimalistic game using the Unity engine – but I find it much easier when I'm using the Pico-8 fantasy console to force myself to do so.
Similarly, I could cook a varied vegetable meal any day of the week – but I find it much easier when I'm using vegetarianism to force myself to do so.
It’s why I like pixel art, chiptunes, polaroids, one-pot stews and modern video games for retro consoles among many other things. Sometimes I feel like this is why so many great artists come from restrictive religious backgrounds as well.
The limitations put up forces you to go hunt for smaller, and sometimes fringe restaurants, located off the beaten path run by passionate people.
I don't have the time to cook and ready-to-eat or frozen vegetarian meals just aren't a thing around here. I think if I went full veganism I'd starve.
Many cultures around the world have awesome food that's easily convertible to vegetarian or is vegetarian already, where meat might be a luxury.
Central America and the Caribbean have tons of dishes with rice, beans, plantains, and flavorful sauces with flatbreads. Or a million ways to prepare corn. West Africa has peanut stew that's amazing. Across the rest of the continent jollof rice and githeri are good solid bases for a meal. Misir wot is a spicy hearty lentil stew. North Africa has a rich vegetarian tradition of soups, stews, and rice dishes. In the middle east there's falafel, hummus, mujadara, shakshuka and about a million ways to combine spices, onions, tomatoes, flatbreads, etc. South Asia obviously has a massive vegetarian cultural tradition, as does Southeast and East Asia.
When I started, I found it hard. I kept thinking "beans and rice... I guess?" Once I started going, "ok, I'm going to pick a small region of the world and see what they eat there and try it" I had WAY more success. The first time I made tteok-bokki or sushi or vareniki I suddenly realized just how much of the world is really already preparing vegetarian meals for many of their meals.
> FBI agents are devoting substantial resources to a multistate hunt for two baby piglets that the bureau believes are named Lucy and Ethel. The two piglets were removed over the summer from the Circle Four Farm in Utah by animal rights activists who had entered the Smithfield Foods-owned factory farm to film the brutal, torturous conditions in which the pigs are bred in order to be slaughtered.
> Rather than leave the two piglets at Circle Four Farm to wait for an imminent and painful death, the DxE activists decided to rescue them. They carried them out of the pens where they had been suffering and took them to an animal sanctuary to be treated and nursed back to health.
Your tax Dollars at work!
And I think "understanding your food sources is terrorism" has impacts too people should be worried about. (To be clear, they ARE less acute than ICE concerns, of course).
I don't object to eating animals, I object to torturing animals in the process of raising them. You can raise pork without forcing mother pigs to indefinitely share a space with a pile of their rotting children's carcasses.
Ask yourself why it warrants a terrorism charge to smuggle out photos of animal mistreatment.
Read the article:
https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missin...
Jared Rydelek's channel is about eating exotic fruits. It's a bit long winded but pretty neat to see the unusual fruits from around the world.
A recent video has him eating a berry from the Gympie gympie/stinging tree/Dendrocnide moroides from the nettle family.
His videos are incredibly interesting and fascinating
If you like it, great, but I think the value to those who don't have some pre-existing reason to be interested in the dish to be overstated. Similar plants in the category are miner's lettuce and dandelion greens.
If one has a great abundance of it, and one likes to spend time preparing ones own food, or if the idea of wild gathered plants has special appeal, then nettles (etc.) can indeed take the place (ish) of things like lettuce and spinach, but don't expect some dramatically unique experience.
"just taste like plant" the same can be said of Matcha which tastes like eating grass.
I'd disagree that they're bland. Are they more towards the bland end of the scale than mustard greens or something, sure, but they're definitely not tasteless.
Also works as a pesto ingredient
Once the leaves are older, there are all sorts of oxalates, and you should really avoid them if you are sensitive to kidney stones.
These plants also absorb pollution very effectively, so keep in mind where you pick them from.
I've heard this before but I've never seen reliable evidence for it. I searched PubMed for "Urtica dioica oxalate" and found this study:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23009884/
The full text is paywalled, but from the abstract:
"Four examples of typical wild edible plants were evaluated (stinging nettle, sorrel, chickweed and common lambsquarters), and based on substantial equivalence with known food plants the majority of the bioactive components reported were within the range experienced when eating or drinking typical food stuffs. For most compounds the hazards could be evaluated as minor. The only precaution found was for common lambsquarters because of its presumed high level of oxalic acid."
There are also several animal studies suggesting a potential protective effect of stinging nettles against kidney stone.
Oxalic acid is a component of the toxin injected by the stinging hairs, but this is removed by cooking.
It's possible that there's confusion because older stinging nettle leaves grow cystoliths (hard mineral deposits in the leaves). Cystoliths are usually calcium carbonate. I'm not aware of any plant that produces oxalate salt cystoliths. If anybody has some hard evidence for the composition of stinging nettle cystoliths I'd like to see it, even though I personally only pick stinging nettles when they're in season and the leaves are still young.
I have nettle tea every morning and now thinking about the standard black tea, I see that as "bland/boring". I admit it didn't appeal at first, but now I love the earthy taste, so maybe it's slightly acquired taste?
Most superfoods are what we ate when we were poor growing up. Nettles, collards, mustard greens, kale...
My opinion, the word superfood, gets people to pay a premium for cheap and easily commercially grown plants.
But it takes a morning to have the equivalent of 5 minutes in the vegetable isle of the supermarket.
Tangential, but this is one of the things I like about eating fish. There are so many species you can eat, some of which you can only find in certain regions or have to catch yourself. My list of aquatic animals I've eaten has 47 entries on it and I've surely missed some because it's often hard to tell exactly what species you're getting at a restaurant. I'm always excited to add more to the list.
Some less common ones I've had are sickle pomfret ("monchong") and moonfish ("opah") from a fish market in Hawaii, cobia from a fishing trip in Florida, and many perch and bluegill that I've caught myself.
Apparently it's possible to make nettle rennet for coagulating milk into cheese, though it's not recommended for making aged cheeses.
It looked like this: https://www.northumberlandcheese.co.uk/nettle-cheese
Wasn't expensive.
We just spent a 3 year sojourn in the Atlanta metro area and the Dekalb Farmers Market is one of the only things we will miss. Still the best reasonably priced beautiful cheese/dairy/seafood/charcuterie + a whole bunch of other stuff in N. Georgia.
Now we're back West again and there is Lee Lee Oriental Market. No interesting cheese, but a lot of other things. Including charcuterie!
If you go to the Dekalb Farmer's Market definitely look for nettle cheese.
Is this a frittata-style baked pancake? I've made rye pannukakku from the family cookbook here in the US Midwest but never seen any Finnish pancake with spinach or nettle.
https://scandicuisine.com/stinging-nettle-pancakes/ looks quite reasonable though most Finns would not use a blender for this.
Hold up, is silica (SiO₂) supposed to be a nutrient? That's a striking sentence.
I haven't tried nettles yet, mostly because people say it's bland and there's so much else to choose from. In particular, nettle season is also meadowsweet season, and that is incredibly good. It's in the same taste family as vanilla, almond and cinnamon but it's its own unique thing.
About every part is edible too: new leaves are sweet, old leaves are bitter, buds can be pickled, roots you can make teas and coffee substitute.
A few related plants are also good (e.g. wild chicory), and it's one of the easiest plants to identify.
- Harvest the younger leaves, remove the stems.
- Harvest before they go to seed, or remove all seeds.
- Make a tea from the leaves by soaking in hot water. Do not let the water boil or simmer with the leaves!
- Add a healthy portion of lemon juice. I'll use 1/2 to 1 cup for a 20L batch.
- Use brewing sugar, or invert your sugar.
- Choose a yeast that doesn't impart too much of its own flavour (I like ale yeasts, like for ciders).
For me, the choice of yeast was key.You only get stung by nettles around the edge of their leaves. You can touch the middle of the leaf and you won't get stung.
Works on a few types of thistle with small thorns but a stick works better.
The problem is all the thin skin (ankles, wrists, lower leg/arm) that you are very likely to graze them with.
Apropos of stinging plants though both of my parents are supposedly very allergic to poison ivy. I maintained an immunity to it until I was around 27-28 when it began to affect me very slightly. Now if I graze it I can get away without ill effects merely by washing the urushiol off with dish soap within a half hour or so. I've heard of gardeners and outdoorspeople eating it in small quantities to maintain their resistance to it. While I'm not particularly keen to try this there is something poetic about it.
My dad got exposed a few times in a row and had to stop eating cashews (same plant family) for awhile.
Risking your throat closing up seems Darwinian.
People don't usually have an Epipen within reach?
Animal research reveals that this powerful plant may prevent the conversion of testosterone into dihydrotestosterone — a more powerful form of testosterone (12Trusted Source).
Stopping this conversion can help reduce prostate size.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/stinging-nettle#TOC_TIT...
I prefer them raw.
The stalks also produce fiber that is long and strong - almost as good as flax/linen.
The plant is very easy to grow because it spreads both by rhizomes and by seed although that means you have to be on top of it in order to control its spread.
https://buddhaweekly.com/milarepa-explains-happiness-story-n...
Pick them from wild areas
Pretty good stuff.
If you do grow them, make sure you situate them in a corner of the yard--no fun to get stung.
dip the the plant in water and that whip the back kids with it. yeah, horrible i know.
I gotta find this guy's videos I follow he's actually Japanese/lives in the woods
I was surprised the first time I saw her making it but it was creamy, tasty.
I got spoilt for teas when I was contracting in Germany. Nettle was very common along with some other traditional teas, including one that was good for flu/fever that I can never remember.
Well, that’s kind of the point no? You do.
I think they mean people imagine you’d give up on variety of food.