Nettle & slippery jack soup

NETTLE & SLIPPERY JACK SOUP

This week we bring you a wild cure-all soup to bring you strength for these winter days. For this post, I don’t want to say too much – because I think the photos speak a thousand words. It’s that time of year again, where we live and breathe wild mushrooms - picking them, delivering them, eating them, preserving them, dreaming about them. It’s quiet, it’s cold, and it’s a special time of the year.

What I will say, is that we have been talking a lot about keeping “well” at the moment, not doing too much, staying warm for winter and eating nourishing foods. And this quick soup fits right into that. It’s absolutely not complicated, made from ingredients that are prolific in the wild around us, and is something you can throw together super quickly, while still being super nourishing and warming.

We see this as a cure-all soup: stinging nettles are an amazingly earthy wild green, prolific at the moment and incredibly cleansing; slippery jack mushrooms are one of the most delicious mushrooms in our forest, with a beautiful spongy texture, a bit like porcini; and chicken stock is a truly ancient food that has been keeping people well for millennia, rich in vitamins and minerals to nourish everything from your heart to your immune system.

Read the full post and get the recipe here.

Cucumber kimchi

CUCUMBER KIMCHI

You will notice that this newsletter looks a little different! We had a few requests to make our posts easier to read in your inbox, and we agreed. We hope you like it!

We are little bit obsessed with fermentation, in particular fermented cucumbers seem to be one of our favourites! Last year we put up our fermented dill pickle recipe, which truly is one of the most popular recipes in our house, and we eat them non-stop throughout winter. I think it’s because in the depths of winter, eating a fermented, crisp cucumber tastes so delicious and fresh, at a time when you seem to be eating basically all cooked food.
 

So this year we have been experimenting with cucumber kimchi - which combines two of our favourite things together: Cucumbers + kimchi. Fermentation is super good for you – this style of preserving, preserves all of the naturally occurring vitamins and minerals in the vegetables and additionally adds lots of good bacteria, to help maintain gut and immune health. We try to have something fermented with every meal, especially coming into winter and throughout it, to keep us well as it begins to get so cold.
 

This recipe makes a vegan, crunchy cucumber kimchi, with a little sourness from the lactic-acid (good) bacteria and is medium-hot! Adjust as desired!  

Read the full post here
 

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P.S. We are running a pickling and preserving workshop in Melbourne, Sunday April 17th. Come along! We will talk you through preserving with the seasons - bottling (preserving with heat) and fermentation (preserving for health!). Click here for tickets