Edible weeds: seizing the nettle

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Edible weeds: seizing the nettle

Postby American Dream » Wed Apr 29, 2009 10:12 pm

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/52 ... ettle.html

Edible weeds: seizing the nettle
If you can’t beat them, eat them – weeds are not only nutritious and abundant, they’re also free .

By Elspeth Thompson
Last Updated:T 28 Apr 2009
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Everything’s coming up in the garden: perennials pushing out frills of growth, and rosy red shoots of peonies and rhubarb nudging through the earth. Trouble is, so are the weeds. The nettles I thought I’d dug out last summer are back, their hairy white roots snaking sideways just beneath the surface of the soil, and there’s a froth of lime green chick weed in the borders.

Never mind, I think, taking down my well-thumbed copy of Richard Mabey’s Food for Free (Collins £12.99): if you can’t beat them, eat them.

Foraged food has become fashionable, with top London restaurants employing professional foragers to supply them with ''wild greens’’, samphire and mushrooms. But why venture so far as a country lane when equally good ingredients are just outside your back door? Weeds are the ultimate credit-crunch ingredient: abundant, involving little work other than weeding that one would do anyway, and free. They’re also incredibly nutritious: according to the tables in the excellent Cooking Weeds by Vivien Weise (Prospect Books £9.99) they have many times the minerals, vitamins and protein of cultivated vegetables – compare 333mg vitamin C in 100g stinging nettles with 13mg in an equal amount of lettuce, and 8.4mg iron in 100g chickweed with just 4.1mg in spinach.

One of the easiest and most enjoyable ways to eat weeds at their freshest is to use them raw in salads, and I’ve been doing this for a few years, the smallest leaves used whole and larger ones snipped or chopped. Although it’s possible to serve a salad entirely of weeds, the flavour may be overwhelmingly strong to unaccustomed palates, and I’ve had more success using a sprinkling of weeds (oops – that’s ''wild leaves’’ to visitors) to eke out bags of bought leaves or add a welcome bitter tang to silky soft, home-grown lettuce. Chickweed, clover, daisy (flowers and leaves), dandelion, fat hen, garden orache, ground elder and young goosegrass are among the many common weeds that can be eaten this way, with sorrel, wild garlic, lady’s smock and hairy bittercress providing an even stronger kick.

With only a little more effort, many can be made into soups and pestos that even children will enjoy, and all the more so if they have helped to harvest ingredients. I was introduced to nettle soup by Beth Chatto who, still sprightly in her eighties, is a fine advertisement for its properties. Nettles can often be substituted for spinach in recipes for sauces and lasagnes. (Remember to wear gloves when handling.)

I made a tasty dandelion baklava from the enjoyable Seaweed and Eat It by Fiona Houston and Xa Milne (with foreword by AA Gill, Virgin £10.99), and have also tried their herby and cuminy ground elder and chick pea salad, and hedge garlic sauce for lamb (two handfuls chopped hedge garlic and one torn-up mint leaf to 2 tbsp vinegar with sugar to taste).

From Edible Wild Plants and Herbs by Pamela Michael, first published in 1980 and recently reissued by Grub Street (£20), I’ve been inspired to chop burdock stems into stir fries for a celery-like crunch (not 100 per cent successful when tried on my husband), use meadowsweet instead of sugar or honey when cooking rhubarb or apples (this got the thumbs up) – and how can I resist the gardener’s revenge pizza with chopped stinging nettles, ground elder and garlic mustard or ransoms?

Although I fear some of the farther-fetched recipes will never make my table (hogweed pulao? Nipplewort minestrone? No thanks!), incorporating wild greens into my diet is becoming a way of life. Like endeavouring to use even the initially unpalatable cuts of a pig or cow, eating weeds can become something of a crusade in these cost and waste-conscious times – so much so that even putting these nutrient-rich offerings on the compost heap seems profligate. So these days, when I’m weeding, I have a pair of buckets by my side – one for the compost and one for the kitchen, and the latter is usually the fullest. Harvesting and weeding at the same time – what’s not to like?
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