Limousin Recipes Nettle Soup
By Les Trois Chenes, 21st Apr 2010 | Follow this author
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At our B&B near Rochechouart in Limousin France, we like to explore traditional foods and recipes. Nettle soup is a local dish, cheap, easy to make, readily available and delicious. Wild food is also said to be more nutritious than modern selectively bred vegetables.
- Eating your enemies
- Words of Warning
- Ingredients
- Method
- Blend
- Serve
- Variations
- Find out more about Les Trois Chenes
- Articles by the same author
- Enjoy!
Eating your enemies
What could be more satisfying than eating all those weeds that you labour to eradicate in the garden? Here, in the Limousin, everything grows. We are just ten minutes from the medieval town of Rochechouart and on the borders of the Charente and the Dordogne and so enjoy an exceptionally pleasant climate. We have rain, sunshine, hot days, cool nights. The vegetables grow fast, but the weed (ah! such is life) grow faster, and many people don't know that some of these are edible, and some are not only edible, but positively delicious. The nettle is one of these.
Cut the tips off the nettles, the top few leaves, in the spring. The young leaves are best. You can then cut back the plants and they will regrow those soft tips - and more of them. Nettles are a real cut-and-come-again herb.
Words of Warning
Words of warning: Never eat anything that you find in your garden or in the wild if you have any doubts over identification. Ask somone who knows about plants, about medicines or poisons to identify them for you. You could ask the local chemist. In France the Pharmacy will identify plants and funghi for you.
Secondly, make sure that any plants you collect could not have been polluted, for example by dogs fouling, or by pesticides or herbicides. I have a nice bank of nettles in the hen run that I 'nurture' specially for cooking.
Thirdly, stinging nettles sting! Take care. It won't do you any lasting harm if you are stung my nettles, but it is pretty unpleasant. Once cooked, of course, the nettle loses it's sting. To collect your nettles you will need a pair of scissors and a pair of rubber gloves; I use washing up gloves.
Ingredients
- Oil or butter
- Onions
- Potatoes
- Nettles
- Garlic
- Salt
- Pepper, preferably whole black pepper corns roughly crushed
- Stock or a stock cube
- I also added Jerusalem Artichokes (Helianthus tuberosus) because I grow them in my garden.
Method
- Roughly chop the vegetables and the nettles. (The image shows plants other than nettles as well as it's from my 'Weed Soup' recipe). You will be blending the soup later, so it doesn't really matter how you cut them up.
- Put the butter or oil into a pan, then add the onions and brown gently, followed by the other vegetables, nettles pepper and salt.
- Add the stock or water and stock cubes to cover and simmer gently for about twenty minutes or until the potatoes are soft.
Blend
When the soup is cooked, blend until smooth. The easiest way to do this is to use a hand blender, or you can put it into a food processor. Failing that, press it through a sieve (but this is really hard work). You can buy a hand blender for less than £5! I am normally anti-gaget, but this is one kitchen tool that is really worthwhile investing in.
Serve
Serve with a dusting of nutmeg, a swirl of cream or natural yoghurt, grated cheese or cubes of blue cheese, garlic bread or croutons and garnish with parsley. The soup is a wonderful, dark green and contrasts wonderfully with white cream or garnish. Nutmeg gives a lovely, spicey, complementary flavour and aroma.
Variations
- You can experiment with any vegetables that you have to hand. Celery, spinach and lettuce would all go very well. Beware, though, of carrots and coloured vegetables as they will turn the soup to a brownish colour, but otherwise would be excellent.
- More potatoes will give a thicker soup. You can also add a table spoon of flour to thicken the soup when you saute the vegetables. Take the pan off the heat and stir in the flour. Add the stock bit by bit, stirring constantly to prevent lumps forming.
- For a thinner soup use fewer potatoes and add more stock.
- If you are trying to lose weight, this makes an excellent meal, and soup itself has been shown to help dieters. Make sure you serve with low-fat yoghurt. Don't add cream or cheese. Don't add croutons if they have been fried. Instead make them with toasted bread that you then rub with a clove of garlic and cut into cubes.
- You can also use other wild herbs (or garden weeds) such as chickweed, sorrel or dandelion in addition to the nettles.
Find out more about Les Trois Chenes
At Les Trois Chenes we offer Bed and Breakfast Accommodation, a self-catering holiday cottage and Painting Courses. We have a lovely garden, small farm animals, and love French food and wine. Where possible we use our own produce and locally grown food for breakfasts and dinner.
Articles by the same author
- Wild herb ('Weed') Soup
- How to Cut your household expenses by 50%
- How to make your own natural yoghurt
- Cheesy Pumpkin Soup
- Creamy Jerusalem artichoke and carrot soup
- Ecological 'lawn mowers'
Enjoy!
Spring soup, in the April sunshine under the cherry blossom tree? What could be better? We like to sit with our goslings and geese, which we keep to 'mow the grass', and enjoy their gentle chuntering as they peck and nibble around us.
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Comments
27th Apr 2010 (#)
This sounds delicious and I really love traditional recipes.My Hubby is a soup buff..He can't take a meal without soup.Thanks for sharing..
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28th Apr 2010 (#)
Thanks Qiwoman. It inspires me to do the weeding if I think I'm gathering food at the same time! Particularly interested in the properties of Chickweed to help to lose weight!
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16th Jan 2011 (#)
I really do want to try Nettle soup, it sounds good :D Will wait for summer. Your pictures are lovely, and your farm sounds truly wonderful :D
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16th Jan 2011 (#)
Many thanks Grenfaol. Let me know what you think.
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