Show me your nettle...

Nettle tart

I'm sure there aren't many people who wouldn't be excited by the idea of free food, but what most people don't realise is that at this time of year, we're surrounded by all sorts of yummy things just growing away in the wild. Well, that's the case if you live in a little village in the country anyway, but what if you live the city of York?

Fortunately for us, some of the best wild food can simply be found in hedgerows or overgrown back gardens, or in little oases of green of which we are lucky to have quite a few in York and yesterday I spent a sunny afternoon exploring them. My very first wild food experiment was a disaster and involved some old dandelion leaves that I picked out of my back garden. Dandelion grows pretty much everywhere and is frequently reported by foragers to be a delicious salad leaf. It's not. It's horrible.

Despite this minor setback, I continued my quest and soon found some garlic mustard growing by the pavement on Greendyke's Lane on the way into uni. Unlike the dandelion, garlic mustard is delicious in salads or sandwiches, tasting mildly like, well, garlic and mustard. I ended up bringing lots home and using it in a salad with tomatoes and young hawthorn leaves, which are also edible and just taste like lettuce really. You can eat the little white garlic mustard flowers too which is nice because they're very pretty.

But salad was not the only fruit of my exploits. Oh no. The dish of the day, and perhaps one of my proudest creations to date was an enormous nettle tart. Yes, I know it sounds disgusting, and that the idea of eating stinging nettles seems plain weird, but I knew there must be a reason why people went to all the effort collecting, preparing and cooking them.

In fact, it was not actually that hard, and just involved me getting a few odd looks from some dog walkers whilst I picked huge bunches of the stuff with rubber gloves and shoved it in a carrier bag. If you do want to try this, bear in mind to either pick the youngest plants or just the tips of the older ones, and to pick a huge great bagful, as like any other leafy green vegetable, they boil down to almost nothing when cooked. Also, don't eat them when they start to flower (which looks like this) later on in the summer, as they tend to have laxative effects (unless of course this is what your after, in which case they are apparently a great herbal remedy). You want to take the shoot bit and the top leaves from the stem, wash them well and then boil or steam them (which turns them from stinging nettles to just nettles) until they resemble cooked spinach and then use them however you bloody well like.

I'll be honest, I was wary after my dandelion experience and expected them to be either bitter or bland. They weren't. They tasted like green beans and were absolutely delicious. I could have happily shoved them in a risotto, inside some cannelloni or even just eaten them on their own as a vegetable. As for the tart, I decided that such a feat in experimental food should be imposed upon other people beside myself, and who better to witness such an eco triumph than former Environment and Ethics officers John Nichols and Joe Thwaites who were roped in as culinary guinea pigs. They agreed it was pretty good. In fact, Mr Nichols had a second helping. I'm taking that as a victory.

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