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Comment by s_dev | Hacker News Reader

The key is to add lots of onions and garlic and some butter to give it base flavor. The nettles give off great colour and a more subtle flavor and of course add more nutrients.

The real key though is stinging nettles just simply grow like crazy in your backyard (at least in Ireland) so it's a two birds with the one stone kind of deal, you're gardening as well as cooking. There is also the 'badass' feeling of eating something that previously was dangerous. The heat will denature any stingers in the soup.

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As a kid is somewhat rural western washington our backyard bordered on a many acred wood and just beyond our backyard fence was just a huge tangle of blackberry and nettles. As kids we'd get our dads machetes and carve a path into the woods proper every spring and every few years our family and the families on either side would spend a day trying to eradicate the encroaching blackberries to no ultimate avail.

We never ate the nettles, just had 1000 remedies for stings, but we did eat a lot of blackberry jam, cobblers and pies.

I'm in western washington and some people (not me) do eat the nettles. The blackberries are of course, delicious and well used. Always a good idea to pick above waist height of dogs. ;)

I'm originally from W. WA. too, and I never heard about people eating them until I grew up.

I remember dreading them when we'd go through the ravines with friends to our hideouts. :D

Or have small dogs.

These blackberries are everywhere so if you're walking down the road in season, you'll be able to snack on them (and you'll find lots of people stopping to harvest them).

Can't control the size of other people's dogs.

I was told as a child not to eat berries near roads due to being exposed to exhaust fumes, but never check if there is any science behind it.

There was, due to lead compounds in vehicle exhaust. Nasty stuff.

These days, tyre microplastics and diesel particulates are still a concern, but there's little hard science around the hazards of eating them in small quantities - there's microplastic in basically everything, to some degree, so you're not making it appreciably worse - and agricultural farm machinery is a worse diesel PM offender by far than a street's worth of modern cars.

Some commodity chocolate is dried out along the ride side, some heavy metal settling on from exhaust.

One would hope that more expensive chocolate would have a value chain to show that it’s been dried in a proper manner.

Nothing beats random sampling though.

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