Nettle

I talked my good mother into coming with me up Big Cottonwood Cayon to forage for stinging nettles. My mom's a good foraging companion because she knows more about plants than anyone I know (more than once I've sent her a crappy cell phone picture of a leaf or flower and she's been able to identify it faster than I could through the internet), so she teaches and quizzes me as we go along.

So to answer my mom's question of, "why on earth would we purposely pick stinging nettle?": it's soooo good for you- one of the most nutritious greens, in fact- more protein than most, lots of vitamin A and C, calcium, potassium, iron, etc. etc. And plus, it's kind of fun to learn how to live off the land, you know?

The reason the nettle stings is that the leaves and stems have little hairs on them that come off when you touch them, and inject you with formic acid (the stuff that makes an ant bite hurt) and histamines. I'll have to invest in some better gloves, because we quickly learned that the ones we were using were insufficient, and we got stung through them. When nettles are dried or cooked, the chemicals are neutralized, or something, and so they're safe to eat/touch (something Luke didn't believe. He wouldn't try the nettle til he saw me eat it with no throat/tongue swelling or death).

The plant is easy to find up in the canyon from spring to the end of summer. You wanna eat the young, not-woody ones, so earlier in the season is better, but the plants spread through rhizomes so you can find young ones even at the end of summer (you just have to pass up a lot for being too old). After bringing them home, I blanched them and froze them, and have been using it when I want to add something healthy to a bowl of pasta. It tastes like if spinach and swiss chard had a love child. Very good.

Spring!

Yesterday was the Vernal Equinox. I wish I would've been outside planting cold crops and turning the compost and enjoying fifty degree weather (and otherwise celebrating the change in seasons as a representation of future food, flowers, and babies); instead, I was inside at work all day, spent the evening at Whitney and Scott's house for the Three Best Friends Saturday Triple Feature!!: Volume 3, and have a newly broken foot, so probably wouldn't be too productive shoveling compost anyway.

However! I did plan ahead enough that we were able to share a bottle of Sima, a Finnish spring mead, for the first day of spring. My mom lived in Finland for a year and a half when she was twenty-one (trying to convert Finns to the LDS religion, which is apparently almost impossible). While she didn't make a whole lot of foods from Finland when I was growing up, we did usually have this fermented lemonade in the spring.

To make it, you put the peels of two lemons in a gallon bowl/jar, cover them with boiling water, and add 1/2 C brown sugar, 1/2 C sugar, lemon slices (pith removed), and 1/4 t yeast (I used a multi-purpose yeast for sparkling wine, but regular baking yeast works fine, too).

Let the sima sit, covered, for one or two days on the counter. The yeast will start doing its work, making carbonation. After a couple days, bottle the sima, and add a five or six raisins to each bottle. Cork the bottles. As the drink gets more fizzy, the raisins start to float.


When the raisins are floating, put the drink in the fridge to cool before drinking (or just drink right away. Sima's good lukewarm, too). I didn't put the bottle on the left in the fridge soon enough after the raisins starting floating, and so much CO2 built up that the cork popped off and hit the ceiling.


If you drink right away, the fermentation is little enough that it's okay to serve to kids- like kimchi, vinegar, etc. If you let it sit longer, it will quickly become as alcoholic as other wines. We're considering trying a batch like that, but it's so good this way, I don't know if I can wait long enough.

The number of raisins you get when you pour the sima into your class is a sign of how many kids you're going to have: three for me, six for Luke (uh-oh!)


I'm spending this first spring Sunday hanging out in sweatpants, drinking sima in front of the picture window in the livingroom, and updating my Netflix queue. Luke's on the couch next to me on his computer, and we're not really talking, but just doing that being-together-without-doing-something-together thing. So pleasant.

Happy Spring!

Forsythia

My mom and I used to drive around our local neighborhoods at the beginning of spring, looking for forsythia. She would get upset when people would trim the bushes down into neat little hedges because, "They're supposed to be free and wild!" This year, my husband and I went out walking with our clippers for some late-night forsythia-stealing. One branch from the neighbors across the street, two from down the street, and pretty soon we had a nice bouquet to put in our bedroom.
This week I embroidered this little forsythia bush on white cotton knit (which was a nice material to work with). I haven't decided what to use it for yet, probably a little clutch wallet or pencil case.