Sunposition - Lily

Terrifying!!!

“Report shows that pregnant women were excluded from the trials before they concluded it was safe and effective. They concluded it was safe and effective based on mice and the autopsies of mice fetuses. And horrifically, the Department of Defense data shows that female soldiers’ pregnancies are experiencing an absolutely catastrophic rate of abnormalities and fetal problems…”

— Dr. Naomi Wolf

Medieval Irish Nettle Soup

Today, I’ll be taking a look at a staple of Irish medieval cuisine: the humble nettle soup. Late spring and early Summer is the ideal time to make this dish, as the nettle leaves used here won’t have matured fully, and retain a soft, lighter texture than older woodier leaves. Plus they won’t sting your hands as badly as mature nettles. Plenty of Irish families have their own takes on this recipe, and this is influenced by my family’s take on the tradition!

In any case, let’s now take a look at The World That Was! Follow along with my YouTube video, above!

Ingredients 2-3 cups nettle leaves 1 onion, minced 2-3 cloves garlic (or two bulbs of wild garlic, minced) chives (for decoration) butter ½ cup milk/double cream 500ml water or stock salt pepper

Method

1 - Chop and cook the Garlic and Onion

To begin with, we need to peel and chop a whole onion, before tossing this into a pot with some melted butter. You can of course use oil, but dairy products was (and still is) a major part of Irish culinary traditions - so try and use Irish butter here if you can.

In any case, let your onion sauté away for a couple of minutes until it turns translucent and fragrant. When it hits this point, toss in a couple of cloves of crushed garlic - or some wild garlic if you have any!

2 - Deal with the Nettles Next, ball up some nettles and chop it roughly with a knife. Be careful, as the leaves and stems of this plant has stinging fibres (which will get denatured and broken down when it’s cooking).

Nettles act like spinach when you’re cooking them, so have about 2-3 times more than what you think you’ll need on hand. Add your chopped nettles into the pot, and let them cook down before adding the rest!

3 - Cook Soup When all of your nettle leaves have cooked down, pour in 500ml of soup stock (or water) into the pot. Then, toss in about a half a cup of whole milk, or double cream if you have it. Mix this together gently, before putting this onto a high heat. Bring it to a rolling boil, before turning it down to low until it simmers. Let the whole thing simmer away for about an hour.

Serve up hot in a small bowl, garnish with some chives or seasonal herbs, and dig in!

The finished soup is very light and flavourful, but quite filling for what it is! It’s another variation on a medieval pottage, with ingredients that could have been easily foraged in the spring and summer. As it can be made with only a few ingredients, it could have formed the basis of more complex dishes - such as the addition of more vegetables, or meat products.

Given how little the dish has changed from antiquity to modernity, it’s likely that the basics of this soup go back to pre-historic Irish culinary traditions.

Voting is just about as useful as using a backscratcher on your stomach.

Blåbärsris~

So inspiring! I hope to one day see so much nature in my home too.

I wonder if the wagon is diy?

Hen wagon by Maja Larsson

Do not delete description.

At least we can laugh about it ..

100% me

Sun spots in “white” light and prominences and “surface” in red H-alpha wavelength light.

For the suspots (group AR3007), the telescope was a 80 mm f6 refractor with a Herschel wedge, ND 3 and 540 nm continuum filter (8 nm bandwidth). Video camera uses Sony IMX290 monochrome sensor. Telescope mount was Takahashi EM200. For the two H-alpha photographs, a 40 mm Coronado etalon was used and the Herschel wedge was replaced with a BF10 diagonal. These images are the result of processing the best frames from three 1000 frame 8-bit video sequences using Autostakkert!3 and Registax 6 software. Some further processing in Gimp.

Having everything provided to us has made us greedy and weak. Self sustainability will allow us to live naturally and successfully.

Just imagine if we could even get 50% of people to do something like this. Get outside, plant something, reconnect to Earth. Plus you will feel the satisfaction of providing for yourself!

If there’s one lesson I’ve learned as I enter year four of my foray into farming, it’s that lambs love to be born during the darkest hours of the coldest nights in the most inconvenient way possible. But we still love them, ‘cause they are the sweetest creatures around.