Nettle Soup


I’m a little bit red on the arms and legs. It’s not all sunburn, some of it is from the nettles along the banks of the Irwell. So when I got home I was in the mood to torture some of the little buggers.

Ingredients:
Nettles
Half a large onion
1 pint chicken stock
1 and a half teaspoons of ready garlic
Celery
Boiled rice (left over from yesterday’s Chinese)
Fresh Basil and Chives
Milk
Parsley (for garnish)

Chop onions. Soften in a pan with olive oil and butter. Add garlic and celery. Wash and blanch the nettle leaves, picking the stems and anything else off as you transfer the leaves to the pan (they pick up all sorts of stuff, and not all of it is removed by washing.) Add basil, chives, stock and rice, bring to the boil and simmer for fifteen minutes.

Pour the soup into a liquidiser and give it a blast. (Don’t, as I did, lift the lid just as you turn on the motor and spurt boiling soup onto the back of your hand.) Pour into a dish, swirl a little milk in and garnish with parsley.

It was a gorgeous shade of green, and it tasted very nice. But there wasn’t a distinctively nettle-y flavour, I don’t think I picked enough nettles- next time.

This has been part 1 of the Spinneyhead cookbook, one of the 100 Things. Also toward that end- Venus sells raw green coffee. Now I just have to work out how to roast it.