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.

Ingredients

• Honey (a couple of hundred grams ish or  1 cup)
• Olive oil (a couple of hundred mls ish  or 1 cup)
• Rolled oats (up to 500 grams or 2-3 cups)
• A hand full of  dried fruit, nuts, orange or lemon peel, chopped – what ever you have in the kitchen.  If you choose just two types,  it’ll have a clearer flavour.

(or – equal parts honey and oil, with equal parts dry to wet ingredients)

Method

Heat the oven to 200 degrees c. and oil a metal baking sheet.

Combine the olive oil and honey in a large saucepan and warm over a medium heat. When it comes to the boil, turn off the heat and add the two or three types of flavouring ingredients – I normally stick to two so that it’s ingredient A and ingredient B flapjack – Almond and Lemon flapjack, or Walnut and Ginger flapjack etc … three flavourings becomes too much of a mouthful to say, if nothing else. Once these are mixed together, add as many rolled oats as you can – ie completely coated by the honey & oil.

Turn the mixture into the baking sheet and pack it down with the back of a wooden spoon. It needs to be an inch or 3 or 4 cms thick. Once it’s packed down, you can use a spatula to cut it into portions, then pack it down again. This’ll make getting it out much easier.

Bake in a pre-heated oven at a medium heat  for 20 minutes, or until it’s a nice golden brown. Let it cool before eating.

* Traditional Flapjack is something like American Granola bars.

Breakfast:
Porridge with honeyed fruit
Home made muesli (oats, wild bilberries*, dried apple, sunflower seeds, raisins)
Bread rolls & toast
Home baked croissants
Cornflakes

Lunch:
Builders’ breakfast (a full English breakfast)
Home made bread rolls
Cheese & home made pickle
Vegetable soup
Lemony tomato and lentil soup
Spicy Parsnip soup
Potato and sweetcorn soup
Stinging Nettle soup (because there will be a LOT)
Potato salad
Garden salad
Scrambled eggs with fresh spinach & feta cheese
Fried egg sandwiches
French toast
Czech Easter Egg spread
Czech fish head soup (without the fish heads)
Hummus made with sprouted chick peas
Spicy bean pate
Sunday Roast dinner – with roast veggies, veggie gravy, sage & onion stuffing, bread sauce, Yorkshire puddings, nut roast, roast potatoes.
Australian Smorgasbord

Evening meals:
Baked potatoes with cheesy coleslaw
Herby Puy lentils with Spinach and Feta cheese
Mushroom risotto
Curry Night (Spinach, Potato & Chickpea, Chapattis, Mango chutney, Yoghurt Raita)
Mushroom lasagne
Home made pizza
Home made pasta
Tex Mex ish (Mexican rice, refried beans, salsa, sour cream, tortilla, roast veggies)
Fritata
Thai green curry (sprout beans in advance)
Wagamama ginger noodle soup
Chinese stir fry with noodles
Polenta with onion, fresh tomato & feta cheese
Fish pie
Dauphinoise potatoes
Fancy mac & cheese

Snacks
Dried apple
Home made biscuits (cookies)
Home made honey flap jack (granola bars?)
Home made carrot cake
Tábor apple bombs

* We didn’t move to Nový Mlýn and throw everything out. I was just thinking about how we could pick fruit from the forest and had heard about a tool which could be used to quickly pick bilberries – it takes hours to do it by hand. I found something called a blueberry rake on the Internet, but after looking at some pictures, suddenly realised that among a cupboard of mystery tools was something that looked very similar. On closer inspection, one of them actually had a tell-tail dried berry and leaf left in the comb. Wonderful.

Béchamel Sauce:

6 tablespoons butter

6 tablespoons flour

4 cups milk

salt and pepper

2-3 cups cheese, diced: a mix of Gouda and Edam (and cheddar if you’re lucky)

2 cloves garlic, minced

Pasta/Topping:

1.5 pounds elbow macaroni

1 cup breadcrumbs mixed with a few tablespoons melted butter

To make the béchamel, melt the butter and then add the flour. Mix well, then add the garlic and cook for 5 minutes on low. Warm the milk in a separate pot and then add it to the butter/flour/garlic mixture, along with the salt and pepper. Bring it to a boil and then add the cheese. Cook on medium-low heat until it melts. Cook pasta until it’s a little underdone, drain, and mix with sauce. Place in a greased casserole dish. Sprinkle bread crumb mixture on top and bake in the oven at 375 degrees F. for like 15-20 minutes, depending on how brown you want it. Remove, let it cool for about 5 minutes, and then enjoy!

Clafoutis aux Cerises

Baked cherry pudding, serves 4-6

Butter for greasing

750g/ 1 ½ lb black cherries, or other fruits and berries

4 eggs

Salt

100g/3 ½ oz sugar

70g/2 ½ oz flour

70g/2 ½ oz butter

250ml/9fl oz milk

Sugar for sprinkling

Generously butter a wide, shallow oven dish and arrange the cherries evenly over the bottom. Beat the eggs lightly in a large bowl; whisk in a pinch of salt and the sugar. Sift the flour gradually, still whisking. Melt two-thirds of the butter and beat it tin. Stir in the milk.

Pour this batter over the cherries and dot with the remaining butter. Bake at 200°C/400°F/Gas6 for 35-40 minutes until the batter is set. If you don’t want to serve immediately, it may help to prevent the batter sinking if you turn the oven down to 150 °C/325°F/Gas3 and bake for a few minutes longer. Sprinkle with sugar and serve hot or lukewarm, with cream.

INGREDIENTS

* 4 (1 ounce) squares semisweet chocolate, chopped (I USE ¾ BAG OF TRADER JOE’S CHOC. CHIPS… WITHOUT MEASURING…. DOESN’T SEEM TO MATTER MUCH.
* 1/2 cup butter
* 3/4 cup white sugar (less is more. not too sweet, brings out choc.)
* 1/2 cup cocoa powder (plus a little bit more to coat the pan with)
* 3 eggs, beaten (by hand)
* 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

DIRECTIONS

1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees F (150 degrees C). Grease an 8 inch round cake pan, and dust with cocoa powder. (JUST SPRINKLE COCOA POWDER OVER A GREASED CAKE PAN WITH A SPOON. THEN TILT IT BACK AND FORTH SHAKING IT AROUND, TILL THE COCOA COVERS BOTTOM AND SIDES WELL.)

2. In the top of a double boiler over lightly simmering water, melt chocolate and butter. Remove from heat, and vigorously stir in sugar, cocoa powder, eggs, and vanilla. Pour into prepared pan.

3. Bake in preheated oven for 30 minutes. Let cool in pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack and cool completely. Slices can also be reheated for 20 to 30 seconds in the microwave before serving.

IMPOSSIBLE TO GO WRONG. NOTHING MUCH IN IT. NOTHING MUCH TO IT. EXCEPT, OF COURSE, HOW FABULOUS IT TASTES.

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.

Chamomile grows like a weed in the fields and on the roadsides during the summer. The flowers are like large daises but with feathery leaves (which look rather like dill). You need to be careful not to pick May Weed by mistake – which has very similar flowers but very different leaves.  The Chamomile flowers are ready to pick when the flowers turn ‘bug-eyed’ – with the petals turned downwards and the yellow centre rounded.

Once gathered it needs to go somewhere in the sun – for example sprinkled on paper and covered with muslin. When it’s completely dried out it will be crumbly and can be kept in an airtight jar.

Chamomile flowers at the same time as the cornflowers and poppies. This year I will also gather poppy seeds so that we can have wild poppies on the roadside by the house.  I didn’t gather any seed heads last year because of a reluctance to pick from the wild… however the roadside mowers taught me that it’s fair to take seeds from the wild a metre from the road. I guess it’s more important to have safe roads than beautiful verges…

After experimenting with several types of chocolate, I prefer to use a 35% cocoa chocolate from a Papua New Guinea plantation (bought in Lidl) because there was no sugar on the cherries and they really need the sweetness of the chocolate to balance the flavour.

If you plan to post the cherries, it’s best to remove the stems because these will cause the chocolate to crack in transit. Otherwise, just remove the pit using a hooked bit of wire or a (new) hair pin with the plastic stripped off.

You can prepare these vodka cherry chocolates a couple of days in advance of a dinner party and serve them with coffee after the meal.

To make vodka cherry chocolates you will need:

• 80 pitted cherries which have been pickled without sugar in neat vodka
• 125 grams of good quality chocolate
• some cocktail sticks
• A metal bowl
• Grease proof paper

Float the metal bowl in a saucepan of boiling water which has been removed from the heat.

Break the chocolate into the bowl and stir until it has melted.

Add 10 cherries at a time and stir them into the melted chocolate.

Remove one cherry at a time and place on the grease proof paper to dry using the cocktail sticks.

Repeat until all of the cherries are used up. You can use a little of the left over cherry vodka to make a chocolate sauce by using it to ‘clean’ the metal bowl.

Leave the cherries in a cool place overnight to set. These will keep as the cherries are preserved by the vodka, but it’s unlikely that they will get the chance as they are rather delicious.