nettle pasta

what are nettles good for #5 - nettle pasta

After making the nettle beer, I was left with a panful of nettle pulp with a few bits of lemon peel.  I picked these out and thought… seems a shame to have done all that tedious nettle picking and then throw them away and only keep the cooking water! I figure you could use the pulp now in place of spinach in most recipes. We opted to make spaghetti.

Got out the pasta machine and spooked ourselves as there was a note on the inside of the box, even spookier it was in himself’s handwriting! it said “1 egg to 100g of flour.. you always over cook it!”

We don’t recall leaving this message to ourselves.. but it’s good advice!Experimented with the pasta recipe.. which I have put on the recipe pages,  if you add wet stuff. you need more flour.. or less eggs - we ended up with 500g flour + two egg sized lumps of squeezed out nettle pulp + 2 eggs.  There is the faintest hint of nettle taste about the pasta, which is frankly swamped by most sauces, but the goodness is still there, and the colour!

Always enjoy making pasta.. must do it more often, especially as we now have plenty of eggs. The Rayburn provided us with a handy rail to dry the pasta on (since the rayburn is currently cold), and we made lots of lovely spagetti at 11 o’clock last night. 

Today sat in the garden eating green spaghetti with a nice tomato and ham sauce I threw together.. very satisfying indeed.. wild foods made good, one picking session made into two recipes, tasty food and a lot of fun.