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Nettle salads
Use young nettle leaves for cooking green salad. To keep the nettle from biting, you first need to put it in a colander or sieve and pour over with boiling water, then rinse with cool water. The taste of the salad will be determined, of course, not by the nettle, but by other ingredients (salads, vegetables) and dressing. It is better if it is fragrant vegetable oil (from mustard to pumpkin seed) with vinegar. Sour cream is also used for serving.
Tip: nettles can be replaced spinach in any cold salad.
Scrambled eggs or scrambled eggs with nettles
For scrambled eggs or omelet with nettles the greens must be quickly boiled in salted water and put on a sieve. In a frying pan, sauté chopped onions in oil, put nettles there, salt, mix well, simmer. Cover with eggs, fry. If you need more detailed c.u., see the recipe here.
Council: cook scrambled eggs not only with chicken, but also quail eggs.
Nettle soups
Green cabbage soup
Perhaps the most common recipe for nettles is green cabbage soup… It is important to know here:
- Nettle is most often used not by itself, but in combination with sorrel (it is he, and even a spoonful of sour cream as the final touch, will be responsible for the sourness that is mandatory for this soup).
- Nettles must either be scalded before chopping, or work with culinary gloves.
- Since nettle is a rather tough herb, it should be poured into boiling water about ten minutes before cooking (unlike sorrel, which is added immediately as the burner is turned off under the pan).
Tip: so as not to lose all the nettle vitamins during cooking, salt the soup just before serving.
Soup in Bulgarian
Another option for the first is nettle chorba (Bulgarians call her, and Romanians -). Here, the role of nettle is different than in cabbage soup – it is not added to a ready-made broth, but, as it were, “creates” it itself. Young nettle leaves are boiled in salted water. Then a tablespoon of flour, onions, a pinch of red pepper are added to the vegetable oil heated in a pan. When the flour is browned, add a little nettle broth to the pan and, after mixing well, put it all in a saucepan with boiled nettles. Either rice (40-50 grams) or feta cheese is immediately added. In the first case, the soup is boiled until the rice is cooked, in the second, the cheese is boiled quickly (literally 1-2 minutes). At the end, the chorba is acidified with kvass, vinegar or lemon juice.
Tip: in the chorba for satiety (in the case of feta cheese), you can add potatoes, pieces of boiled chicken and / or hard-boiled eggs.
Nettle Cream Soup
Nettle can be used to make cream soup… At the bottom of the pan, simmer the onion and garlic in vegetable oil, add the prepared vegetable broth, potatoes and nettle leaves there, bring to a boil, and then cook over low heat until the potatoes soften. Then all this must be chopped or blended and brought to a boil again.
Council: Chicken broth works well in creamy nettle soup.
Okroshka and botvinia
Slightly boiled nettle can be added to okroshka. Moreover, not only leavened, but also in the “southern” style – with sour milk (kefir, ayran, etc.). In Central Asia, such okroshka is called ayran chalob and is often cooked with nettles. And what about her excellent botvinha it turns out …
Tip: be sure to use ice for serving, which is prepared from delicious drinking water
Nettle soups with hearty additions
Of course, green cabbage soup is a great thing, but nobody canceled nettle soup with chicken meatballs, dreamy cabbage soup with buckwheat (no longer even soup, but almost a messy porridge) and nettle soup with semolina dumplings.
Tip: experiment with brothon which you will cook these first courses. Chicken, vegetable, meat, mushroom – everything must be tested.
Pies, pies and pancakes with nettles
With nettle leaves, as with almost any fresh herbs, they bake pies… The dough can be yeast, and insipid and flaky. To touch the filling, the nettle does not perform solo, but in the ensemble. For example, with rice. Cook the rice separately, almost until tender. Then simmer onions over medium heat, add chopped nettles to it, and after five minutes and rice – add a little water and stir several times, bring to readiness. The filling is ready. By the way, you can use boiled millet instead of rice. You can also add a chopped boiled egg. The proportions can be different: someone adds 3 parts of cereal to 2 parts of nettle, someone puts 100 grams of rice and five eggs on a kilogram of nettle.
A good combination comes from young cabbage and nettle. to test this statement, prepare cabbage pie with nettles.
Council: Add other spicy or leafy greens to the nettles. Stuffing for nettle and green onion patties: simmer for 5 minutes. nettles, then mix with finely chopped green onions and chopped egg. Stuffing for nettle and spinach patties: simmer for 2 minutes. nettle, add spinach and simmer for another 3 minutes. Rinse and dry all greens beforehand. You can also add young cheese like suluguni or Ossetian to greens.
Bake with the addition of nettles and other fresh herbs green fritters.
Tip: the best combination for pancakes: nettle and green onions.
Italian pasta and risotto with nettle
In the home cuisine of different regions of Italy, both risotto and green pasta. In risotto very finely chopped nettles are put already at the “sofritto” level, that is, at the very beginning of cooking, together with the onion, and when the onion becomes transparent, then it is worth adding rice.
As for the pasta: blanched and finely chopped nettles are placed in the dough (spaghetti or sheets lasagna turn green, and nettle replaces spinach) and are used for various dressings-sauces, for example, nettle pesto.
Tip: for this pesto, use only dill leaves, the stems are not needed here at all!
BONUS: of course, we cannot end our conversation about nettles without something captivating and special. Let it be Italian gnocchi (since we talked about pasta and risotto above). Malfatti with nettles Is something!
Tip: you can try to serve nettle pesto with such gnocchi, if, of course, you have adjusted its taste to your liking
Everything that has been said above is about the leaves. But the stems of young nettles are also edible. They are peeled from the leaves, blanched, then dipped in an egg and breading (flour or crackers) and fried until a beautiful golden color. Very tasty! But collecting the stalks of the nettle is quite tedious: they are very thin, even for 2-3 servings of the stalks, you need to collect quite a lot.