Foraging for nettle

Foraging is a great way to instill the love of nature in children. The gathered food also comes without plastic packaging, and it is free. We do it throughout the year and collect various edible wild plants. We always act responsibly and only take a fraction of the available plants. Early spring is nettle time for us.One April morning we armed ourselves with gloves and scissors, waited for it only to drizzle (no hope for dry weather these days) and went nettle picking. We took a friend with us. The kids were told to only pick the top few leaves of the nettle plants for two reasons, 1) that’s the most nutritious bit and 2) most dogs are less likely to reach that high and signal their territory there.

Nettle is an underrated superfood; it is full of valuable nutrients. We use nettle in various ways, we put it in smoothies raw, cook it into soup, and dry it for tea. This time we baked it into cake!We only needed 100g of nettle for the recipe but in the absence of a portable weigh scale, we just collected while we had fun. We ended up collecting more than what we needed so the rest is now drying and will become tea. Incredibly, no one got stung!Our recipe was for a nettle and lemon cake. The nettle needed to be blanched and blended before adding it to the batter. We made the cake together but the decoration was entirely up to the kids.The only naturally green cake we’ve ever eaten! It was funky looking cake and ever so delicious. What more could we want than a yummy cake that we gathered some of the ingredients for together?