When I tell people in the Czech Republic that we don’t use stinging nettles as a vegetable in the UK – I’m met with incomprehension – “don’t nettles grow in Britain” was one response.  When cooked correctly it’s almost indistinguishable from spinach in appearance, with a nice flavour, a natural organic – those stings protect it from most bugs, so pesticides are unnecessary, and zero food miles if there is any patch of unused ground close to home!  However, most people in the UK  have in mind an image of the deodorant eschewing as typical consumers of nettles. The nettle marketing board has a way to go yet.

You use the top couple of inches of the plant as a vegetable, so when you’re weeding next time, put this part of the plant aside for dinner, rather than on the compost heap.

Of course, you need to wear protective gloves while picking,  and wash them thoroughly as they grow close to the ground.  The best method for cooking I’ve found so far is to put them in a covered pan in as much water as sticks to the leaves after washing. Within about 5 minutes (heating from cold)  they will have wilted down – take them off the heat as soon as they look like cooked spinach – you don’t want to destroy nutrients by cooking longer.  Use them in place of spinach in any recipe.

Sekanice is a local Easter recipe here which, according to my students, requires between 30-50% nettles. In my version of the recipe I substitute smoked tofu for bacon and soya for boiled pork – much to the chagrin of my Czech students. I have tested the recipe on non-hippie meat lovers, it didn’t last long despite the perceived weirdness of the ingredients.  Traditionally Sekanice is made for the Easter weekend. You can eat it hot, straight from the oven, and then cold, cut into slices over the next few days.

Sekanice uses nettles as the green because in the old days before we had vegetables flown in from Kenya, it was the first vegetable to come up after the snow.  The word Sekanice means sort of “Cut thing” – because you can harvest baby nettles using a scythe, and then you can cut the Sekanice into slices when it comes out of the oven.

Vegetarian Sekanice (pronounced Set can it say)

• 8 eggs
• 1 block of smoked tofu, chopped into small squares
• 1 pack of soya chunks – soaked for an hour in vegetable stock, then fried in a generous amount of  butter or olive oil
• sage
• a handful of chopped chives
• 3 bread rolls torn into chunks
• 2-3 large handfuls of stinging nettles

Method

Prepare the soya – once it holds the same amount of fat and salt as boiled pork, it loses it’s holier than thou taste.

Heat the oven to 200 degrees c. & grease a large ceramic  baking dish (if you use oil to grease with, it’s really easy by the way).

Separate the egg yolks from the whites and mix the yolks with the bread chunks.  Whip the egg whites into a frenzy (in Czech, they say whip it into snow – when the egg whites are fluffy and form peaks).

Chop the tofu, bread & chives. Combine all the ingredients apart from the egg whites, mixing well. You will need to add quite a lot of salt and pepper as tofu and soya are not salted when you purchase them like pork and bacon.  Finally, fold in the egg whites and turn the mixture into the baking dish. Cook for 40 minutes or until the top has gone a nice baked brown.

During a recent wet weekend I decided to make jam. I sat with a friend at the kitchen table and we spent the morning hooking pits out of cherries with  hairpins (the wide sort). These jobs are always so much better in company. I used sugar with added pectin, and put in the zest of a couple of lemons for good measure. Miraculously, it set and I was able to give jars away to friends and neighbours in town.

The end of May is a little early for cherries in this area, so my neighbours were impressed to see jam already…  the magic, extra flavoursome twist to our jam was that the cherries had been steeped in vodka for 11 months! It worked out well. Last year we didn’t have water at Novy Mlyn, so making jam would have been a nightmare, instead I packed the cherries into large jars and topped them up with vodka. I was really surprised that the process actually added a good flavour to the jam.

This year I am going to try to sun dry the cherries. I plan to make square frames out of willow switches & the net curtains (which I removed from every window in the house (washed, of course)). I also plan to sun dry some apples because we didn’t use the crop last year and I have rather enjoyed dried apple made by my students.

Now I have rather a lot of cherry vodka around the place – I wonder if there is a magic solution to that particular glut.

When I was small my mum bought a spinning wheel which was sent in a box from New Zealand. We learned how to card wool (to straighten out the fibres so it can be spun) and used all sorts of things to dye the wool after we’d spun it… we saved our onion skins for months, and experimented with spice. The result of all this was somewhat uninspiring turmeric scented browns when our friends wore Cerise pink and electric blue.

The spinning wheel is now on it’s way to Novy Mlyn – and is in need of a bit of repair. I was telling our neighbour about it (I say ‘telling’ and mean performing – I have at my disposal simple words and acting out – rather than the word for spinning wheel in Czech – kolovratek).  His reaction was way more interest than I expected (another strangeness from the strange English couple in the village) & he explained that he’d actually had to throw wool away in the past as nobody wanted it. He has sheep for flavour, not for wool, so the strands aren’t very long, but I am very happy to try it out – if it’s unsuitable for producing yarn, I will certainly be able to use it for felt – and I can experiment with different natural dyes as well.

While I’m working on the house I’m also thinking about activity holidays at Novy Mlyn… as well as knitting we now have the potential to take part in the whole process… a knitting holiday could involve meeting the sheep whose wool we will spin, dye and knit.  Now… I wonder if I can persuade our neighbour to adopt some Alpaca.

For May, it’s surprisingly warm. We spent today working outside as much as possible. But on a really hot day, water is essential. Our swimming pond is still  at the stage of pre-construction, so we have to find other means to ends…

The drainage from the house has stopped, and so we’re back to using the outhouse while we get the necessary permit to fit a new water treatment system (envi pur is a company originating from our local town).  The problem is that, if our 18 months waiting for a permit for our well is anything to go by, it could be a very long time before we have the right paperwork. I have contacted Envi Pur to see if they have a turnkey solution – ie they handle all that as well as fitting the system – however I’ve had no response to my email written in halting (or perhaps failing) Czech.

Our neighbour said that there has never been a water treatment system at the house (though we did wonder if he’d simply diverted it – as he did with the water supply). It’s horrible that even the bath and sink cannot be used in the bathroom for the time being – the water drains straight out of the top of a pipe by the back porch. JD, our builder, thinks that this could have been deliberately blocked – just to inconvenience us.

JD gave us a cast iron bath a few months ago when he was refurbishing the bathroom in his cottage. He has a place on a hill about 7 miles away – with fantastic views. JD is the hoarder I aspire to be… nothing is ever wasted. He decided that what we needed was a free standing cast iron bath. What could I do but agree. Though it was in a bit of a state, like everything in my life it was nothing that a bit of elbow grease and Hammerite couldn’t right.

Due to the dire drainage situation we decided to set the bath up in the garden. Today we positioned it in the middle of the lawn where it would get the sun all day, filled it with water, covered it with clear plastic sheet and waited.

After a day of pottering, rather than hard graft, with a bit of flopping about in the sun thrown in for good measure, just as the heat was getting unbearable, I was able to sink into our luxuruiously long & deep bath, containing water warmed by the sun. We had a good old splash about (we being Misha -2.3- and I) and after lay in the hammock strung between the apple trees to dry off. Absolutely the best bathtime ever.