Nettles & Horseradish

Stinging nettles are one of the easiest, delicious and most nutritious of the spring greens to be had.

Here's my favourite recipe;

Simply boil your nettles for two minutes in a Chicken or vegetable stock with boiled potatoes and lightly fried onions and blend all with a teaspoon of horseradish sauce and a pinch of sea salt.

Fantastic!

The nettles should be shade grown, if you can find them thus, and before June. Use gloves to avoid being stung and scissors to cut the growing top with it's 4 leaves. You can use these to have as a side dish with any meal. Simply steam them for a couple of minutes.

Have a look at www.blurb.com at my book 'Homewood's Harvest for some more uses!

Wild Horseradish is a nice addition to nettle soup but is nowadays usually served with roast beef on Sunday's. However, it's original use appears to be, along side wild gooseberry sauce, accompaniments for smoked Mackerel.

Here's a photo of my wife and I on the river bank yesterday with a sprouting horseradish in the foreground. It's very difficult to prepare if taken from the soil here in Sussex as the root needs to be peeled and growing here is changes dirrection as it hits flint or chalk stones while growing. The thing to do is to take a tiny shoot and root cutting and plat in a tube of fine soil or compost at home. Ideally, cut up a plastic drain pipe into various sized leghths and make something that looks like aa church organ against a wall or fence, fill the pipes with soil and palnt the cuttings in them. Theye will take two or three 3 years to be a good size, but take one or two from years one and replants so that as the years go by you will always have a supply of tlong straight managables roots.