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Stinging nettle pesto and branch lettuce salad!

It's feasting time here at our Appalachian mountain cabin. The morels have come and gone, the ramps are getting scarce, but the branch lettuce and stinging nettles are in full swing.

Take a little walk with me to the creek and we'll collect some branch lettuce for a salad and some stinging nettles for pesto. We're heading though the yard to the woods where it's damp and creeky.

Lookie here! Right in the middle of our mountain creek, grows our appetizer and salad! To the left is branch lettuce (Saxifraga micranthidifolia), and to the bottom right are stinging nettles.

 My good friend, Effie Price taught me about branch lettuce. She was born in our Big Pine cabin  in 1914.

She said to me, "You pluck the tender leaves out of the middle of the plant in April before it blooms, and then you wash them good. Then you kill 'em with bacon grease."  So if you are graced with this treat, fry up a couple slices of bacon in a skillet, leave a little of the fat in the pan and cook up a chopped ramp if you have one, then quickly stir your branch lettuce in the pan until it wilts. Effie would have just drizzled the hot fat over the branch lettuce. A sprinkle of salt and a drop of your favorite vinegar and you're good to go.

Ok, so this is an Appalachian style stinging nettle. See the pokey things sticking out all over? Well watch out ... if you brush up against them, they'll make you holler and want to throw yourself in the freezing mountain stream water for relief.

Put some lovely blue gloves on and cut the tender tops off the plant. I like to harvest when the plants are little and the leaves are tender. Do harvest before the plant flowers.Nettles cook down to nothing, so you'll need a fair amount.

Now, my friend, Jeanie is going to share how she makes her stinging nettle pesto. In the next post, I'll talk about our ladyslipper party in the woods behind our house where we enjoyed this garlicky pesto which we topped with a dollup of ramp aioli. Now that's some odiferously delicious treat!
P.S. That's a Jack-in-the-pulpit plant on the table in the pot next to the pesto. They're not for eating, but my friend Jean who made the ramp aioli also grows Appalachian natives from seed.

Jeanie's Stinging Nettle Pesto 
About 2 cups of rinsed young stinging nettle leaves (no stems!)*
2 cloves garlic
A handful of whatever nuts you have (walnuts, almonds, etc.)
A drizzle of olive oil
Put nettles, garlic, and nuts into food processor and, while running, drizzle in enough olive oil to make a smooth consistency.
*I plunge my nettles into boiling water a second to de-sting. Jeanie and everybody else I know will tell you that this is not necessary. As long as you only have the leaves, the processing should de-sting them. I'm not taking any chances!

Serve with crackers, as a dip, on pasta, bruschetta, on cooked heirloom white beans. Definitely serve with home-made mead!

 

Flipped for Flapjacks

The Guinness has gone but the oat flapjacks remain.... I take that back, I highly recommend flapjacks plus Guinness for dessert tonight. I've been staring down photos of oaty Irish flapjacks for years and finally baked a tray of them for an Irish-themed St. Paddy's day potluck and now I can't stop making them. And giving them away, and now more people are hooked and it's gotten out of control. So I'm posting this "recipe" so I can be free of the torment of it all. Think carefully before you make these. Please.

Probably, if you're Irish or British, you'd think these "tray-baked" oat bars about as exciting as a Little Debbie snow-ball, but they fit in perfectly with my adoration of peasant food that's not trying to be anything other than what it is. Crunchy, grainy, and oh so simple. Sort of, you'll have to tinker with what I give you because I don't measure. Sorry.

Flapjacks just out of the oven, all nice and caramel-y.

Cut them while they're still warm. A pizza wheel works better than a polka-dot knife. 

This is not flapjacks. It's my niece's brand new beautiful baby girl. I brought the new dad and mom flapjacks to munch on while they hung out in the hospital. 

Crunchy Flapjacks ... Gluten-free Oat-y Bars

Preheat oven to 350 and lay a piece of parchment onto a 1/4 size baking tray
Into a saucepan, melt 1 stick butter
Add a glug of golden syrup or light corn syrup or agave or honey.... about 3 Tablespoons
Stir in a scant 1/2 cup sugar (I use less, see below)
And 2 cups old-fashioned thick oats and a pinch of salt
Spread the mixture onto the parchment paper evenly and bake until the mixture is bubbly and dark caramel colored. Start checking at 12 minutes.
Remove parchment with hot flapjacks from pan to a board and let them set up a minute before cutting into small squares while still hot. Or you can let them cool and break them into rustic pieces.

Tinkering options:
Substitute nuts and seeds for equal amounts of the oats. Pumpkin, sesame, sliced almonds, coconut. Or just leave the recipe as is and sprinkle sesame seeds and/or thin sliced almonds on top when flapjacks have baked about halfway. It will be time to sprinkle when they begin to get bubbly.

You can decrease the sugar to 1/3 cup, but they might not stick together, so up the syrup a Tbs. or two.

Drizzle with bittersweet chocolate if you must.

Butter .... needs to stay the same or they won't hold together. Yes, they're fattening. Cut them small and you get to eat more!

How did you whip that up so fast?

So says my husband as I plopped dinner on the table tonight. After returning from a chilly evening stroll with the dog, I wandered into the kitchen to assemble dinner before Wayne had to leave for his weekly radio show. 30 minutes later, dinner appears in the form of a sort of chili. It smelled great, tasted like it  had been long-simmered, and thus prompted his question "How did you whip this up so fast?"

Let's see. I started this dish a year ago when my friend gave me a handful of cranberry bean seeds that have been passed down in somebody's Appalachian family for generations. I planted those seeds last May, weeded, watered, mulched, fed and harvested the beans. Dried and shucked them in August, put them in jars. Last night, I soaked them and slow cooked them for hours today. Then I added tomatoes. That I grew from seeds I saved from a combination of local heirloom tomatoes and those given to me by a Tuscan farmer whose agriturismo I visited in the fall of 2010. I grew the tomatoes, blah blah blah, harvested, roasted them for hours in a slow oven last summer with herbs and garlic from my garden. The chili powder came from here because I like these guys and what they're doing for small family farms in the southwest and in Mexico and plus, it's yummy. The meat came from a local farm. OK, I bought the onion at the grocery store.
I don't have a recipe. I just whipped it up.
Just sayin'

PS The beautiful beans are delicious and I'm sharing them if anybody wants a handful to plant.