I love foraging for edible plants, such as fruit trees in public spaces, native berries of all sorts or wonderful pioneering wild plants otherwise known as “weeds”.

Their ability to quickly colonise disturbed soils and survive harsh conditions is the testimony to their efficiency in extracting nutrients from the soil. This is why weeds are nutritional powerhouses and most of them are not only edible, but have also medicinal uses.

In recent years I have seen an emerging interest to learn about the value of weeds. Urban foragers such as Diego Bonetto or Oliver Brown teach how to identify wild edible plants and how they can be used.

Last Saturday I had the pleasure to co-host a “Forage and Feast” event with Diego, attended by nearly 20 people. We walked through a local park and talked about wild plants found there, then I cooked some of weeds (safely harvested in my garden) to give a group of budding foragers a taste of wild food. Hopefully this will encourage more people to make the leap from knowing about the value of weeds to actually preparing meals using them!

Below are the recipes I used on the day. The nettle soup is a traditional Polish dish and the two others are my inventions. Feel free to play with them!

 

Stinging Nettle Soup

 Harvest young shoots in springtime when they are about 10 cm tall. If using older plants, only pick the leaves, preferably from the tips. The older a nettle is, the more fibrous; do you know you can make fabric from the fibres? Or use nettles to make dye?

But I digress. Let’s go back to the art of cooking nettles and a traditional Polish recipe for a nettle soup:

Ingredients:

• 300 g of young nettle leaves
• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 tablespoon of good frying oil or butter
• 1 L of stock (vegetable or chicken)
• 1 tablespoon of flour of your choice
• 1 egg yolk
• juice from ½ lemon
• 100 ml cream (optional)
• salt, pepper to taste

Method:

• Rinse nettle leaves, blanch with boiling water, then chop finely.
• Chop the onion, fry on hot oil until slightly translucent
• Add the nettle, cover the pot, stew for a few minutes on low heat.
• Add 900 ml of hot stock, mix well, then blend the soup using a hand blender.
• Bring to boil, add salt, pepper, lemon juice to taste.
• Mix the egg yolk with flour and 100 ml of cool stock, add to the hot soup, bring to a brief boil while mixing until the soup thickens.
• Add cream (optional)

Serves 4

 

Dandelion and Onion weed Mini-frittatas

You can put any edible greens in frittatas, really. Think spinach, sorrel, dock, fennel, Warrigal greens. And dandelions  😉

Use fresh dandelion leaves (the younger the better) and large onion weed bulbs together with white parts of the stems. Despite its name onion weed tastes more like garlic than onion.

 

 

Ingredients:

• 2 cups of finely chopped and blanched dandelion leaves
• 1 cup of onion weed, chopped or grated
• 1 cup of potato or zucchini, grated
• 1 clove of garlic, crushed

(instead of chopping you can put all ingredients into a kitchen blender to chop)

• 1 egg
• several tablespoons of flour (I use wheat or potato flour) – enough to thicken the mixture
• 1 tablespoon of chopped fresh marjoram leaves
• Good quality frying oil
• salt, pepper to taste

Method:

• Blend chopped vegetables and herbs with the egg.
• Add flour to thicken the mixture.
• Heat oil on a frying pan and put small portions (1 heaped tablespoon) of the mixture on the hot oil, flattening them into round “cakes”.
• Fry on both sides until golden.
• Serve with grated cheese, or sour cream, or chilli jam etc

 

Chickweed and Mallow Pesto/Dip

Harvest whole chickweed plants using scissors – if you pull them up instead, there will be plenty of soil in the leaves, impossible to wash out well. Chop into small pieces.

Use young mallow leaves.

 

 

 

Ingredients:

• 2-3 cups of chopped chickweed plants
• ½ cup of mallow leaves
• ½ cup of olive oil
• 1 clove of garlic, crushed
• juice from ½ lemon

Method:

• Put all ingredients in a bowl and blend into a smooth pesto.
• Add nuts (macadamia or bunya pine) and parmesan to make a pesto
• Mix it with cottage cheese or yoghurt for a thicker, creamy dip or spread.