That looks and sounds rather lovely Don Basilio.

If you have any nettles left they make a wonderful hair conditioner.  Boil them up, cool, drain.  Store liquid in fridge.  Use as a final rinse (leave it in, no further rinsing) and hair is like a L'Oreal Advert    No, seriously it works.  Also efficacious in the event of male pattern balding I believe as a restorative.

I once bought a packet of nettle tea, but it sat part-used on the shelf for far too long so got binned eventually. Never tried making soup out of them though.

"Nettle tea", made by brewing nettles or fermenting them in rainwater, is a good starter for your compost heap - as are: "Russian tea" (fermented cow dung in ten parts water) and "Chairman Mao's" (a four to one dilution of urine). Sorry, this is supposed to be a cooking thread not a gardening one!

Well, the Marquis of Posa returned this (light) evening after mass at St Vedast, Foster Lane (and the one female singer he found impressive - St Vedast tended to use only one professional singer, and RVW's Come my way cropped up rather frequently when there was a male singer,) and visits to the British Museum and Library.

We had Parma ham for supper, then nettle soup, then cold lamb and veg.

He was suprised I made the soup with milk and flour - he was expecting it to be thickened with potatoes.  As it is, it is very thick and will do us at least three times.  I could have done it with bacon (to run the fat) and oat meal.

He was so excited he wants to buy more nettles next week, but assures me there is a clean pair of rubber glovelies unsullied by other domestic use.

I first tried nettle soup c25 ago when I was working in a Rudolf Steiner community for the learning disabled near Ringwood in the New Forest.  They were very into getting back to Nature and were pleased to gather the nettles from the woods.  (I realised at the time their religious views were heretical, and their outlook irredeemably Germanic, but they were OK about nettle soup.)

I just ate my ham hough stew - even better than last time! And lots and lots of leftovers.
Hurrah!

I'm surprised too. I always use potatoes to thicken soup, wouldn't ever use flour. I'd never use milk either - mainly because I don't like it, except in tea/coffee - but soups when I was a kid always had to have some milk added to them or we wouldn't eat them. They also had to be "blended" since we wouldn't eat soups that had "bits" in them though I've no idea how my mother did it - she didn't have a food processor or a hand blender.

No No No?

 

She probably had a Mouli - my mum used one to make apple puree with all the windfalls. We only had a small garden but it was full of apple trees. I grew to loathe apple puree, stewed apple, veg soup with apple sneaked into it - she thought we wouldn't notice - and even risotto with bits of apple in - but I did enjoy apple pie, apple crumble and baked apples.