I love eating nettles and they're back in season, appearing at farmers markets etc.
They contain calcium, magnesium, trace minerals, chlorophyll, chromium, cobalt, iron, phosphorus, potassium, zinc, copper, sulphur, thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, vit A, protein, manganese, selenium, silicon, tin, vit C, sodium, vit D and vit K and can be good for mild UTI's (Cystitus).
In order to eat them you have to blanch them first to get rid of the stinging prickles. I then toss them in sesame oil Asian style, or treat them like spinach and mix them into fritata's, spanakopita's, pies etc or make a sauce with them.
But I've been really crook for a while now and resorted to brewing up Chinese herbs to get better. One day in my delirium I burnt the herbs dry and despite scrubbing and using detergent, the thick burnt crust just couldn't be removed from my big stainless steel saucepan.
When I started to get better, I remembered that every time I blanch nettles, the saucepan comes up gleaming.
So I boiled a bunch of the lower woody nettle stems - that you don't eat because they're a bit stringy - in the burnt pot. It worked a miracle and dissolved the entire thick mass of burnt on crud and cleaned the pot with a simple wipe out. All without a drop of anything toxic - PHEW!
Then I tried it on a heavy ceramic roasting pan that was charred and cruddy too. Worked a treat. All I did was pour the water I blanched that night's side serve of nettles in, onto the pan and left it to sit over night. The next morning I rinsed the pan and it was pristine - no elbow grease required. Next I'm going to make a paste with it to try cleaning the oven.I'm thinking of bottling the stuff so that when nettles are out of season I can still have this amazing cleanser on hand. Nature is wonderful.
I guess our ancestors knew about this, so how did we get into a cycle of needing expensive spray packs of chemical cleansers?
Ever cleaned anything with nettles yourself?
