LIVE BELOW THE LINE, Day 3 Foraging

Well, here we are at day 3 and this is the crux where forward planning would have helped some of us right now. I take a leaf  from superstar life coach, Saiyyidah Zaidi, who also stresses , “if you fail to plan then you plan to fail “.

 

Today was supposed to be fish soup day, salmon and stinging nettles, sounds glamorous, but it’s really boiled fish heads, with carrot and potato, bumped up with some greens from stinging nettles, it’s actually American Indian frontier style recipes. The thing we find on this one pound a day thing, is that you can’t season your food as well as you would if you had more money. 

We decided to go foraging for the nettles and while we were out we found wild garlic and dandelions as well, alhmdulilah, praise the creator.

It helps when you go foraging to have fotos in your phone of things that are safe to eat, so hers a few to help you urbanites in future.

Now this is a close up of the plants, do not eat the flowers, the plant is a duirectic, which means it makes you wee more than usual, leaves can be used in salad and the roots are used dried then ground to make a kind of coffee substitute.

Now stinging nettles are great but you need to wear gloves, once cooked or marinated they are a lot like spinach, if you get stung, there are normally dock leafs growing nearby, pick the dockleaf and rub profusely on the stung part of your body

One of the Karimah’s Cuisina members told us that “hurigah” is the Maghrebi term for stinging nettles so affectionately calls Karimah, Karimah Hurigah, quite apt really!

Stinging Nettles are the clusters of smaller leaves with serrated edges , not the larger long leaf in the centre

Now  a couple of weeks ago we paid a small fortune for wild garlic at out local stoooshy farmers market.

And today we saw and collected it in its natural habitat, complete with snails and duck down, make sure you wash it when  you get home.

 

If you would love to get involved with the LIVE BELOW THE LINE challenge, please see the following link

http://www.madeineurope.org.uk/campaign/lbl