After the latest foraging walk, armed with gloves, a bag and scissors, I decided to go for it and try nettles. I was very nervous about trying them for obvious reasons, but I filled up my bag and headed home with my bag of free food.

When I got back, pulling on some rubber gloves, I put them straight into the sink full of water to wash off any dirt and bugs. I couldn’t believe how many bugs of all kinds floated off them! There was hundreds of everything from spiders, ladybirds to green fly. I ended up running them under the cold water because leaving them sat in the water was not doing an awful lot. Once they were bug free I still left them for a few hours in the water just to be sure I had got them all. The nettles were great, they didn’t go soggy like I though they might.

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After I cut all the individual leaves off the stem, I dried them with kitchen roll. They were really easy to dry off, and seemed not to retain any of the moisture.

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A few weeks back when I when out collecting wild garlic, I decided to chop some up and put it in some olive oil, to infuse it with the flavour of wild garlic so now it was time to try it. I got a baking tray and brushed the tray with the wild garlic olive oil, I lay the Nettles on the tray and brushed them with some of the oil too. I then seasoned them with salt, and popped them in the oven at about 150c for about 10 minutes.

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They were well worth all the prepping. So light and delicious and the flavour of wild garlic and the salt made them very morish. I will definitely be making them again.

There are still quite a few left in the fridge so more crisps are on the cards and I’ll have to try some nettle tea too. So I will let you know how that turns out.

That’s all for today, but if you have any recipes you’d like to share, please send them to us.

Bye for now

Kiera and Tony