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Stinging Nettle Soup

April 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

IMG 6181 Stinging Nettle Soup

Want a quick, easy and nourishing soup for Spring?  Want to eat more greens?  Want to do both of these things while saving money on your grocery bill?  Have I got the soup for you.

This recipe was a last minute light supper for us over the weekend.  I was out picking more clivers for my detox infusion, and came across a massive patch of stinging nettles.  So I picked some, and instead of making nettle tea, I experimented with a soup.  Oh yum.  Even Zak loved this one.  If you want to try eating wild food, this recipe is a great starting point!

Why would I want to eat wild food?

Eating wild, foraged food is becoming more popular.  Actually it’s the ultimate vintage skill, it’s how our ancestors ate for generations – just eating what’s around you!  But even in our modern lives, I think there are benefits to eating wild foods:

  • Wild foods are organic
  • Wild foods are local
  • Wild foods taste good
  • And wild foods are free!
Eating wild food also puts you in touch with your local environment, seasonal changes, and gets you outdoors in nature.  Since you’re eating seasonally, nature usually gives you what you need at that point in time … and in the Spring that means lots of healthy young greens for a vitamin boost and spring cleanse!

What are the benefits of stinging nettles?

Stinging nettles (Urtica dioica) are in the top 10 list of useful wild plants for most herbalists.   According to Rosemary Gladstar, nettles are:

  • Full of vitamins, iron, calcium, potassium, silicon and magnesium
  • An all around tonic herb to strengthen and tone the body
  • Reproductive tonic for men and women, even alleviating PMS and menopausal symptoms
  • Strengthens kidneys and liver
  • Excellent for allergies and hay fever

I like nettles because they grow abundantly everywhere, and they’re really easy to identify.

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Split Pea and Ham Soup Recipe

April 5, 2010 By 1 Comment

Knowing how to make great soup is a key element of having vintage savoir-faire in the kitchen.

Short on time?  Make a big pot of soup on the weekend, for easy weekday lunches and dinners. Soup also freezes really well in individual containers, for those nights when you just can’t cook.

Want to eat healthier? Homemade soup has no preservatives and much less sodium than the store bought kind.  Plus, you control what goes into it – so it can be loaded with veggies and nutritious homemade chicken stock.

Saving money?  Soup can feed a crowd. It can be a starter or a main course.  And best of all, it is the easiest, sneakiest way to use up leftovers and random vegetables.

This Split Pea and Ham soup is thick, hearty and comforting.  Perfect for the last chilly nights of early spring.  It’s also a great way to use leftover easter ham!  I made this low maintenance recipe  in a slow cooker (crockpot), but you can just as easily make it on the stove.

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How to Make Chicken Stock

April 1, 2010 By 6 Comments
atomicjeep goodsoup 300x198 How to Make Chicken Stock

Photo by AtomicJeep on Flickr

I never used to think about chicken stock.

When I needed chicken stock in a recipe, I would just dissolve a stock cube in water.  This extended to even eating broth made from a stock cube when I was sick.  And if I really wanted to splash out on a recipe, I would splurge on some pre-packaged liquid stock from the store.

That is, until I discovered how easy it is to make homemade stock!  Plus, homemade chicken stock:

* tastes better

* is more nutritious (no preservatives, and have you seen the amount of sodium in those pre-made stocks?!)

* costs less

* helps you use up all those chicken and veg leftovers (great-grandma would be proud!)

Homemade chicken stock can be used right away in soup, or frozen (either in big containers for soup, or small containers for cooking – even in ice cube trays to easily throw into recipes!)

Vintage Tip – homemade chicken broth is also brilliant ‘convalescence’ food (we don’t ‘convalesce’ much anymore, but it’s the process of resting during/after an illness to let your body heal itself) – in general terms, if you’re sick, eat some warm broth, maybe with some mushy noodles in it.  Total comfort food!

Remember our Classic Roast Chicken?  Making stock is the activity for the next day.  Although the stock needs to simmer for a few hours, the active time is very minimal – just throw everything in a pot and let it cook!

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