recipe: nettles on fresh pasta with cream sauce, garnished with fresh herbs

Augh!!! “…taste like Canada”? What is there about our food that distinguishes as Canadian? What is it about me that distinguishes me as Canadian?

Yikes! My first thought when I saw the event announcement was: “Too hard!! Too hard!!!” I already wiggled and waffled about this a few years ago for Jennifer’s (Domestic Goddess) Taste Canada event!

Tastes like Canada, eh? Hmmm. Well, what can I say about this… I grew up in Alberta in an Anglo-Saxon household where the primary food seasonings for savoury dishes were salt and pepper (pre-ground). In the summer we snipped chives and mint from the garden (never used mint for savoury dishes in those days though). Nutmeg emerged to season squash and turnip (I learned years later that we were eating rutabaga; I didn’t knowingly taste turnip until this year and I’m not sure that I ever really tasted squash in those days, pushing my teaspoon portion of it around on my plate, watching it congeal until I was banished to the kitchen to stare pathetically at the plate and finally, with pinched face, cough it down, while gulping milk to hide the horror).

Vegetables were generally turnip, carrots, green beans, peas (sometimes canned!!), cauliflower and beets. And for special occasions: parsnips, sweet potatoes, mushroooms, Brussels sprouts and asparagus. And horseradish for my parents. (The special occasion ones were particularly loathed by me when I was little; WHAT an unadventurous and picky eater I was!! How did my parents stand it?!).

I still remember the dusty box holding one head of garlic (minus a clove or two) that was housed on a top shelf. The garlic was for the dinner parties that my parents threw. The dinner parties we were not invited to. The dinner parties we didn’t want to be invited to. They were eating weird things… like broccoli, spinach and garlic.

And the starch? Potatoes or long grain white rice (NOT minute rice). Bread (sandwich-style made by my mom) was for breakfast and lunch. Pasta? Mom made the best macaroni and cheese from scratch but it was always a lunch item. For years, I thought spaghetti was supposed to come in a tin….

Fish? Frozen cod filets or breaded fish sticks, canned tuna or shrimp. Every Sunday we had roast beef or chicken, sometimes ham.

Those were the early years. Happily, when I was in my teens, our family saw the light. And started branching out. Even I saw the light. And started branching out. Real pasta. Fresh garlic. Why, we even had curry… (not the kind of curry your mom makes, Jasmine; more like the kind of curry that the Milk Calendar suggests…)

When I moved to Ontario, I was introduced to a whole new set of dishes: Indian, Chinese, Viet Namese, Korean, Ethiopian, Moroccan, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Hungarian, Polish, Jamaican, Brazilian… in short, the cuisine and spices of the whole world.

Which is why it’s impossible now to say what dishes taste like Canada to me. Unless it’s that we have the nerve to combine different cultures’ spice mixtures and flavours to reflect our melting pot existence. (For instance, I invariably throw a little garam masala into my “Mexican” pot beans and we use lemon verbena instead of lemon grass in our “Thai” curries.)

Initially, when Jasmine made the announcement, I thought about one of my favourite potato salads as a child: new potatoes, Miracle Whip salad dressing (I know. Why would anyone choose Miracle Whip over mayonnaise?) salt, pepper and chives. Did we sometimes sprinkle on paprika for colour too? I LOVED that potato salad! I LOVED going out to the garden to cut the chives. I LOVED that it was with scissors.

(click on image to see larger view and more photos)

The first day that we went to our newly established weekly farmers’ market, we were very excited to see nettles. The woman at the Sartoria stall (at least I think it was Sartoria that was selling nettles) said she had picked them the day before on Toronto Island where she lives. I believe she almost squealed with delight that we knew they were nettles AND were planning on buying some. I believe that we actually squealed with delight that we could buy nettles. We were lucky because apparently, the nettles on the island were beginning to flower, which meant that by the next week, they would probably be too bitter to eat.

Here’s why we were excited about the nettles: some years ago, when on a walking holiday in Italy, we were served the most wonderful ravioli stuffed with nettles. Since then, I’ve toyed off and on with planting nettles but have never gone any further than that (frankly, having been stung by once nettles – the same day that we ate nettles, in fact – I’m a little afraid of having them in the garden…).

It seems that nettles will grow just about anywhere too.

excerpt from Plants for a Future: Urtica dioca:

Urtica dioica – L. Stinging Nettle […] prefers light (sandy), medium (loamy) and heavy (clay) soils. The plant prefers acid, neutral and basic (alkaline) soils. It can grow in semi-shade (light woodland) or no shade. It requires moist soil. The plant can tolerates strong winds but not maritime exposure.

Habitats

Woodland Garden; Sunny Edge; Dappled Shade; Shady Edge; Meadow; Hedgerow;

And so, we brought our nettles home. Carefully. And here’s what we did with them:

Pasta with Nettles and Cream Sauce

pasta
correction: The total amount of flour should work out to 1 cup for every egg

• ½ c semolina flour
• correction: 2 Tbsp ¼ c unbleached all-purpose flour
• correction: 2 Tbsp ¼ c whole wheat flour (or unbleached all-purpose flour)
• 1 large egg

filling

• nettles
• good shot olive oil
• onions, minced
• seasalt and pepper, to taste
• grated Ilha branca (or any hard cheese)
• finely grated Parmigiano Reggiano

cream sauce

• ¼ c olive oil
• 1 medium onion, chopped finely
• 3 Tbsp flour
• 1 c skim milk
• 1 tsp chicken stock powder (or seasalt)
• splash of 10% cream
• pepper, to taste

for assembly

• good shot butter
• fresh herbs to garnish

Preparation

1. pasta Mix flours together. Stir egg in with a fork. Knead with hands to form a ball. Cover tightly with plastic and allow to sit on counter for a couple of hours.
2. Put dough through handcrank pasta maker. Leave as sheets and hang to dry a little. Cut into squares and lay loosely on a tray. Sprinkle a little flour over top to keep it from sticking to itself.
3. filling Rinse nettles. Caution: When nettles are uncooked, their tiny barbs on the leaves DO sting. Use tongs of gloves to transfer them from place to place! Put the nettles in a small amount of boiling water for about a minute, turn them a couple of times in the water to ensure that all the leaves have been blanched. Drain and set aside in a colander.
4. Sauté onions in olive oil.
5. Add nettles to the onions and sauté until the nettles look done. Season with chicken stock powder (or seasalt) and pepper. Set aside until it is time to cook the pasta.
6. Melt the butter in another frying pan. Continue heating until it turns light brown. Watch carefully to prevent burning!! When the butter is dark gold, remove from the heat, and set aside til it is time to cook the pasta.
7. cream sauce (béchamel) Finely chop the onion. Pour milk (we use skim milk powder and water) into a small pot. Add a quarter of onion. Heat the milk just until it is smiling. Remove from heat and allow to steep for about 15 minutes. Set aside.
8. Heat olive oil in a frying pan. Add the rest of the onion to the oil. Sauté onions til soft and just beginning to turn golden.
9. Add flour and stir with a wooden spoon to get rid of lumps.
10. Add milk and chicken stock powder (or seasalt); cook til sauce is the right thickness. (This can be done a few hours before serving.) Cover. Set aside till it is time to cook the pasta.
11. cook the pasta In a large pot, boil well-salted water. Add pasta and cook until just tender (very short time).
12. As the water is coming to a boil, warm up the pans with the nettles, brown butter and cream sauce. Add a splash of 10% cream to the cream sauce and stir to heat through; grind in some pepper.
13. Gently drop pasta into the boiling water and cook until just tender (very short time).
14. Drain the pasta squares and toss in the brown butter. Lay a square of pasta on each serving plate. Spoon some of the nettle mixture into the center of each square of pasta. Add a little grated cheese (we used Ilha branca) any hard cheese would work – just bear in mind that you don’t want to overpower the delicate flavour of the nettles. Place another pasta square on top. Spoon on more nettle mixture. Top with pasta square. Pour cream sauce. Scatter grated parmesan overtop and garnish with fresh herbs (we used savoury, parsley and/or thyme).

Serve immediately as an appetizer, or as accompaniment with a grilled chop and green vegetable.

• recipes from OUR kitchen
  * fresh pasta
  * mushroom ravioli
  * recipe index

The only thing I’d change would be to leave a little of the nettles to scatter overtop of the cream sauce. It would be aesthetically more pleasing, don’t you think?

And the taste of the nettle stuffing? It was like a cross between spinach and really good black tea. Not really wild tasting at all. And delicious. Absolutely delicious.

In fact, the whole dinner was absolutely delicious.

So, there it is. A dinner that tasted particularly Canadian to me: pasta made with flour that was most probably made from Canadian wheat and local eggs; pork chops from somewhere in Ontario rubbed with spices from anywhere else but Canada; herbs from our garden; nettles from Toronto Island; onions from somewhere in Ontario; cheese – imported from Portugal and Italy; green beans – imported from Texas (I think). Washed down with imported wine – Chilean “Cono Sur” cabernet sauvignon merlot.

Because that’s really the Canadian thing to do; buy imported just-about-everything almost all year round…

(Stay tuned for ranting and raving about the usually higher cost of buying local ingredients.)

 

Heh. Clearly, I need an editor with a large blue pencil! Congratulations if you held on right to the end of this voluminous post.

edit 4 July 2008: Whoohoo!! I see that Jasmine has posted Mmm…Canada (savoury edition) roundup. (Jennifer has also posted the Mmm…Canada/SHF#44 roundup.) Take a look at both; there are several wonderful looking dishes!