Yes, the stinging nettles are actually edible, and they are delicious.The sting is a potent mix of formic acid, histamine and serotonin. Remember they are just trying not to get eaten from an evolutionary point of view!
However, if you pick the young leaves (using gloves) and blanch them in hot water, they turn edible. A wonderful illustration of humanity's transformation of a wide range of inedible raw substances into edible ones through the transformative power of heat.
(Which is why the "raw food" movement is a buncha horseshit. Ahem!)
They have a wild green taste with a zingy peppery bite.
6 comments:
Ok, I wasn't sure I had a blogger account, so thats for the test. Maybe I'm thread-jacking, but I'm trying to feed the Crazy Ego here, so bear with me... ;)
I've got nothing to say about the nettles but I wondered what you might recommend for a meat dish with lots of flavor and no carbs? (yeah, I'm on a low-carb diet) I'm looking for a general purpose thing that can go with lots of different veggies and such.
So I tried cooking some chicken yesterday. It might have been good except I DEFINATELY didn't get the maillard thing going. It's kind of disgusting today and has shot my menu for the week...
Basically I mashed up thyme, garlic, salt/pepper and olive oil in my morter and rubbed it on the chicken and roasted it in the oven.
I was thinking about maybe trying something similar with thai or indian flavors but I know so little about that...
To be extraordinarily blunt -- like you didn't see that one coming! -- you need to reconceptualize your concept of a meal.
If you insist on the traditional meat+veggies route, you will get bored really quickly.
You need to get acquainted with the concept of lentils - high protein, low-carbs. If you can't name twenty different kinds at a drop of a hat, you need to do some homework.
Also, spices are your friends.
Gonna have to think this one through.
Some ideas...
Depending on the quality of chicken, you may want to try some plain yogurt, lemon juice or raw papaya as tenderizers. Best to leave the marinade on the meat overnight.
If pressed for time, work with fish - no yogurt needed, just something acidic will do. 15-20mins is enough marination time.
Simplest solution is to buy good grilled meat from you local friendly mediterranean joint and focus on the veggies pairing. If they grill the meat right, it heats up very nicely in the oven even a couple of days later.
Lentils are fairly easy also and nice one bowl meals because they pair easy with veggies.
Raw papaya contains a natural meat tenderizer. Allied with spices, it produces some of the most silky meat ever!
Yogurt is excellent. There are recipes posted here and here.
Again, if you don't want to be bored to death, spices are the key. How to create novelty is explained here.
Well, in this case I didn't see it coming...but not so much b/c of the herb selection but b/c I didn't roast it right. It wasn't golden at all (ok, maybe that shoulda tipped me off...). The full meal included squash and zuchinni cooked in olive oil with s&p and some of the aforementioned chicken.
In any case, I do realize I need more selection going forward (had I roasted correctly, I think my menu for the week was sufficient) and thats why I posted about it here.
If I were to adhere to this diet strictly (which I intend to do), there is a fairly limited amount of food I can eat. This includes a number of things that would normally be considered generally "low carb" and healthy, but still don't fit on this particular diet. (I'll look into lentils) Generally, meat and salad-type veggies are allowed.
Normally, I'm not really a "follow the diet" kind of person. Usually they seem to be cultish and silly to me, but the simple fact is I tried this once before (the one and only time I ever did a diet) and lost ~50 lbs (from 200 down to about 150). Yeah, I gained it back and need to incorporate excercise into my life and deal with my sweet tooth better and drink less, yada yada...
But right now I'm looking at my diet to lose weight.
So I'll check out the creating novelty post. That's what I'm looking for. Thanks.
I'll also check out the mediterranean thing and look for other places that will sell grilled/roasted meats that can be reheated. We do have one place that I tried for the first time recently which was fantastic. (first time I've had that type of food...it was turkish, or at least thats how it was presented)
Novelty matters.
The one time that I cooked a full-on fancy meal for my parents was the day when my dad's blood-sugar reverted back to "normal" from "elevated" the next morning, and I assure you that I used both plenty of salt and plenty of sugar.
The point is that novelty breaks up the flow. One doesn't overeat out of boredom because there is something more to look forward to.
Is this absurdly unscientific based on a singular data point? Damn straight!
However, I've seen this a buncha times to at least posit a hypothesis that this matters.
Humans crave novelty - whether it's in film or foods scarcely matters.
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