Nettle soup

This evening I knocked up some nettle soup for the freezer in preparation for my second year of Bactober which starts in a couple of weeks.

The recipes I’ve followed before all recommend using young nettles but there are some juicy-looking big nettles in the garden with nice clean leaves so I thought I’d try them out, using just the leaves and not the stalks (which give the stringiness bits that you are trying to avoid). I snipped a mixing bowl-full with scissors and gave them a quick wash to get rid of extraneous flora and fauna.

I fried up carrots, onions and potato (all home-grown) in butter until soft then added hot water, salt and pepper (all permitted as basic ingredients) and boiled until I was sure it was soft sand mushy. Then I added the nettle leaves and enough hot water to cover them. The online recipes say that you don’t need to boil for long at this stage as you’re just wilting the leaves. I gave them five minutes and then whizzed it all up in a food processor for a minute.

I returned it to a clean pan and am am now simmering for an hour to thicken it up a bit. I’ve added a glug of (homemade) rice and sultana wine as some recipes recommend adding sherry and this wine has a definite sherry twang to it. I’ll pour into two or three takeaway tubs, leave to cool overnight and freeze in the morning. This will provide two or three easy meals for occasions when I can’t be bothered to cook next month.

I’ve just had a sneaky sample and it tastes good, if a little bitty. I probably won’t make any more of this despite the huge volume of raw materials in the garden as nettlw soup is the sort of thing you can tire of quickly.