Cooking Nettles Herbs

Stinging Nettles – How to Use It as Food and as a Health Remedy

 

Most people regard stinging nettle, Urtica dioica, as a bothersome weed and generally try to tidy it away from the environment. You can however make tasty dishes of this plant and you can use it to improve your health.

The plant is composed of a central root system, horizontal and generally hided stalks growing out from the root and vertical stalks growing up from those horizontal ones with leaves and flowers. The leaves sit around the stalks all the way to the top in young sprouts. Eventually there develops a top with a lot of green flowers sitting around. The root and the horizontal stalks live for many years, and the vertical ones grow up each spring.

You should harvest this plant and cook it as a dish and use it as a health remedy in the form of teas or extracts.

HOW TO GATHER AND COOK STINGING NETTLES

Young stalks that are in the process of growing up in the springtime are the best material to use from this plant. You can however also use the soft tops of older stalks and you can harvest only the leaves by gripping around the stalks and pulling the leaves off with an upward movement. When harvesting this plant you must of course use glows on your hands.

You then must flush the material with water to remove sand and soil and cut it up in smaller pieces. Then you can boil it as a vegetable. You must not spill the water from the boiling process since that contains a lot of good nutrients. Use it in your dishes or drink it as a tea. When boiled for some time, the plant do not sting any more.

You can also dry stinging nettle and then store it for later use either as a tea or as a vegetable. You can press the juice out of it or you can make extracts of stinging nettles.

Stinging nettles can also be used as a very well tasting ingredient in soups. To use stinging nettle as a remedy for diseases, it is often best to make teas and extracts from it. By making teas and extracts, you can use much more plant material than you manage to consume as a dish and thereby increase the dose of the effective substances. For this type of use you can also process the vertical stalks.

THE NUTRIENTS FOUND IN STINGING NETTLES

There are much calcium and much iron in stinging nettles and the plant contains more protein than most other vegetables. Fresh stinging nettle contains a high amount of vitamin K, but that content goes down by drying.

There are much trace minerals in stinging nettles because the plant grows in nutritious soils that are not over-exploited. Many of these trace minerals are necessary for a good health. The good effect from the plant upon the health is partly due to the high content of trace minerals.

HOW STINGING NETTLES ARE GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH

Dishes, teas and extracts made from stinging nettles help to strengthen the health generally and to keep the body young. It has an especially good rejuvenating effect upon the brain functions and for the skin. The rejuvenating effect upon the skin can often be seen after a few days if you consume a good portion of stinging nettles each day.

Stinging nettles promote a good kidney function and enhances urine production. Stinging nettle is a good remedy for prostate hyperplasia. The improvement of urin production can alleviate water retention and help by heart and circulatory problems. Stinging nettles may also give better milk production for nursing mothers.

Stinging nettles counteract inflammation and pain, and can therefore be used against inflammatory diseases like rheumatic conditions and allergies. It is a good remedy for respiratory conditions like sinusitis, rhinitis, hey fever and asthma. It is good to sooth irritated skin with, and is a good remedy for eczema, and for these purposes teas and watery extracts of the herb can be both drunk and applied onto the skin.

The plant may help to cure anemia and other blood deficiencies partly due to the iron content. Juices, teas and extracts of newly harvested plants are good against bleeding because of the high content of vitamin K. Remedies made from the dried plant has lost the blood stilling effect. Drugs made from the dried plant are instead good for thinning of the blood.

DO STINGING NETTLES HAVE ANY HARMFUL EFFECTS?

No serious effects of stinging nettles have been reported. The stinging sensation by touch from the plant at the bare skin is of course the most obvious side effect of stinging nettles. Coming in contact with the fresh plant can also cause eczema that lasts for some days.

Sometimes stinging nettle mildly irritates the digestive tract, and materials from the flowering herb or from plants having flowered may irritate the urinary organs. You should therefore be cautious about the amount you use of the plant after it has begun flowering.

You should be cautious when using the plant as a medicine if you use blood thinners, use medication for high blood pressure or during pregnancy.

About the Author

Knut holt is a business consultant and online marketer focusing mostly on the health and fitness field. To find further information and products for body development, fitness and natural disease cures, please see Knut Holt’s web-site: Products against over-weight, hypothyroidism, hemorrhoids, acne, joint pain, flu, UTI, yeast infection, edema, heart problems, nervous problems, etc. —

http://www.panteraconsulting.com/salg2.htm

Cooking Nettles Herbs – How to make nettle soup

 

Cooking Nettles Herbs

Herbs – Herbal Remedy

 

Since the dawn of time our ancestors realized and have used different plant parts for their effectiveness as a remedy for certain ailments. The plant parts were extracted by boiling water and drunk as a beverage, eaten raw or applied on the skin for treatment of bruises, cuts and various skin infections. Of the glossary of examples known, we mention herewith a few:

For example, the use of legumes of Acacia sp. (Acacia arabica, nilotica senegal and others), are soaked in water and the extract drunk. .The extract is used for curing fever, headache, and tooth ache. It is now realized that the legumes contained almost raw salycilate derivatives; the wonder drug which we call aspirin, discovered and synthetically made in half of the 19th century. It is used for the same purpose, treating fever, headache, toothache etc.

Senna sp (e.g. S. Alexandrina) plants were known in the Middle Eastern world to cure constipation and induce easy defecation. Other species also occur in China and other south eastern Asian countries. The plant parts are used mainly for cooking curries. Nowadays, Senna purified extracts, are used as pills for the same sole purpose of curing constipation…

The Chinese folklore medicine includes many herbs and plant parts which are either taken individually or else as a mixture.eg. kola fruit, cyamoposis gum, alfalfa together with atractylodes rhizome ( for lowering blood fat, removing dampness by dieresis), Flaxseed (as a mild laxative, anti inflammatory and anti-oxidant), unripe fruit of Evodia Rutaecarpa ( for increasing fat burning activity) etc.

Ginkgo biloba leaves have been used by the Chinese in treating various ailments for the 5,000 or so years. Ginkgo biloba is described to cure different numerous ailments, The Indians have similar herbal uses for the oriental plant, Nelumbium speciosum, described to reduce the blood fat , restrains appetite.

Soy beans (Soy disambiquation, native to east Asia,China, Japan and Korea) contain several active ingredients which have several uses eg. act as antiangiogenic modulating vascular inflammation.

Needless to say, the most common plant composites often used in our daily cooking and seasoning food, have different remedies. As an example, garlic a member of the onion family, is known to be bactericidal, lowers blood pressure and cholesterol. Equally well chilies pepper (Capsicum), regulates body temperature, increases appetite and metabolism. Onions also (Allium sp) is cultivated almost everywhere in the world, the most common additive in many seasonings of various foods, are said to have therapeutic, antibacterial, antifungal and loads of other beneficial properties, and preventing thrombosis. It is useful in curing neuritis, vertigo and bronchitis, alleviating the symptoms of sinus, and diabetes, osteoporosis and other diseases.

Black pepper (Piper nigrum) is mainly used in daily spice seasoning of large varieties of food it is native to India, Sumatra, Madagascar. It is used in the mummification recipes by the early Egyptians .The berries are dried, finely ground and used as such for seasoning. Also mixed with a wide variety of other herbs, used for the treatment of constipation, diarrhea, ear ache, gangrene, heart disease, hernia, oral abscesses, tooth decay and other ailments

Most of these prescription or over-the-counter slimming and dietary drug, have large amounts of herbal supplements, which are either derived through conventional extraction methods, or else laboratory synthesized so as to mimic the herbal remedy effectiveness. The examples are numerous, and we here cite but a few:

The slimming drug called Synephrine which is said to provide an energy boost, suppresses appetite, and increase metabolism to help burn fat in the body, has an active ingredient derived from Citrus aurantium

AmbiSlim PM contains as a main active ingredients Slimaluma, Dandelion Root, decaffeinated green tea extract. Fastin, Adipexand Oxycodone ian is an opioid analgesic pain reliever, commonly sold as Percocet and OxyContin. Proactol contained the alkaloid derived from quinozole alkaloid, isolated from the unripe fruit of Evoida Rutaecarpine. Forslean contains100% pure synthetic E and Z Guggulsterones and a dark brown guggul extract obtained from a tree grown in India, which exudes a resinous sap

Now most non -prescription diet pills also use green tea, which seems to have an effect on the metabolism and also slows fat production, or bitter orange; is a chemical isolated from citrus fruit.

About the Author

Born in Khartoum, Sudan (1942),
Education, attended school at Comboni College, Khartoum
BSc (1964), MSc. (1962), PhD(1966) Univ. of Khartoum
Appointed lecturer in Univ. of Khartoum, Faculty of Science (Chemistry)
(1970) Associate professor (1980), Professor (1984)
Migrated to Australia (1995) Research associate in School of Chemistry, UNSW (1995) to present Published more than 53 scientific papers in synthetic organic chemistry.

http://www.slimmingactionimproved.com

Anyone eat nettles picked from the wild?

If so, how did you eat them: raw or cooked. They are supposed to taste pretty good in a soup or stew and in the old days, in the UK at least, people made plentiful use of this free wild food. They are suppose to be highly nutritious — why do we not use them still?
Plus they had a multitude of other uses too
Thanks for your answers
Thanks to everyone who answered

Uses for nettles:

The tops of growing nettles are a popular cooked green in many areas. Some cooks throw away a first water to get rid of the stinging compounds, while others retain the water and cook the nettles straight. Nettle tops are sold in some farmers’ markets and natural food stores.

Tea
The fresh or dried leaves of nettle can be used to make a detoxifying tea and commercial tea bags are commonly sold in natural food stores.

Medical
Nettle is believed to be a galactagogue[2] and a clinical trial has shown that the juice is diuretic in patients with congestive heart failure.

Urtication, or flogging with nettles, is the process of deliberately applying stinging nettles to the skin in order to provoke inflammation. An agent thus used is known as a rubefacient (i.e. something that causes redness). This is done as a folk remedy for rheumatism, as it provides temporary relief from pain. They may also be used as a suppository, although this can be very painful and will not stop much skin irritation.

Extracts can be used to treat arthritis, anemia, hay fever, kidney problems, and pain. Nettle is used in hair shampoos to control dandruff, and is said to make hair more glossy, which is why some farmers include a handful of nettles with cattle feed.[3]

Nettle root extracts have been extensively studied in human clinical trials as a treatment for symptoms of benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH). These extracts have been shown to help relieve symptoms compared to placebo both by themselves and when combined with other herbal medicines.

Because it contains 3,4-divanillyltetrahydrofuran, certain extracts of the nettle are used by bodybuilders in an effort to increase free testosterone by occupying sex-hormone binding globulin.[citation needed]

Paper
Nettle stems are a popular raw material used in small-scale papermaking.

Textiles
Nettle fibre has been used in textiles. This is more experimental than mass-market. Unlike cotton, nettles grow easily without pesticides. The fibres are coarser however.

As well being the fibre, Nettles were also used as a dye-stuff in the medieval period.

The Year in Food
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