Wild food in the garden

Spring is in the air and new leaves are bursting forth all over the place. Mostly these are weeds, but some of them are also edible. Desiring something different to go on my pizza this evening, I headed into the garden and gathered ground elder and nettles, the former thanks to a tip from Green Aura on the Selfsufficientish forum.

Ground elder and nettles. Don't they look vibrant?

Here they are on the pizza:

Pizza with delicious greens on MY half

Notice how the greens are only on one half of the pizza. Ian isn't keen on eating green things at all - peas are his limit - and he certainly wouldn't contemplate weeds on his half of the pizza.

Nettles obviously require some care in the preparation, though they're quite safe once they're cooked. I wore rubber gloves to pick them, then put them onto the pizza with tongs, then having got some tomato sauce on my finger, licked it off... complete with small nettle leaf. OOPS! It wasn't actually as painful as you'd expect, but I can still feel a slight tingling on my gum three hours later.

The pizza was delicious and I'm very pleased to have learnt about a new tasty weed. I love being able to eat wild things from the garden. Let's face it, I'm not going to get rid of them however hard I try, so I may as well enjoy eating them!