A few tips for this recipe: If you cannot find fresh nettles, you can substitute spinach, or your favorite dark greens. Also, make sure you wring out as much water as possible from the cooked nettles.

I know you have probably heard of Mark Bittman’s No-Knead Bread recipe. It makes a great loaf, and for many people, the recipe revolutionized their beliefs about the quality of bread they could produce at home. With one loaf, they understood that they too, the home baker, could make beautifully crusted bread with an open crumb, at home, in their own oven. I love it.

This process is an adaptation of his loaf.

Not everyone enjoys a good raw radish pulled straight from the soil. However, I have not met anyone who hasn’t enjoyed the good ol’ cooked radish. These little bundles of joy can be roasted in the oven, grilled, or sautéd in a hot pan. Delicious. A game-changer, for sure.

This week I decided to make a batch of habanero hot sauce with some of the habaneros I have sitting in the freezer from last season. I use this master hot sauce recipe as a guideline to make almost all of my hot sauces because I believe it creates the perfect base for you to create your hot sauce masterpiece.

Surprisingly delicious, unless told, most people have no idea that these fruit leathers are that different from the store-bought ones. Maybe they have a little bit more sourness and zing to them, but honestly, I find them way better than that over-processed, dyed, sugar-filled store version. The tangy flavor and chewy texture of SCOBY is perfectly suited to these on-the-go probiotic-rich snacks.

A 6-hour drive with no air conditioning across the Mohave desert in over 100-degree heat brought us to our new front door. We didn’t even unpack a thing. We were sweaty, dusty, windblown, and exhausted. I grabbed our camping stove, the camping kitchen set, and the soup.

We set up on the back stoop, overlooking our beautiful green backyard as the sun set, and ate this soup. It will remain on my favorite soup list forever.

One of my absolute favorite springtime soups, this bowl of emerald green feeds my soul.

I dropped a batch of homemade pasta off at a friend’s house, and her wife answered the door. She looked incredulously at me as I told her the pasta was made with stinging nettle. She is a huge trail runner and only knew the plant as something you didn’t want to stumble in. She almost looked like she wanted to hand the container back, and I don’t blame her, but I urged her to try it. Later I got the text. “Rachel, the pasta, it’s so incredible.” I felt like I had just won the plant a new friend, and put a huge smile on my face.

I have noticed that if I eat a proper meal for breakfast, I do a much better job with the rest of my day. More often than not my morning time becomes jam-packed and unless I plan ahead, breakfast is often the first thing that gets compromised. Once I started making these overnight oats any excuse to skip breakfast was non-legit. What is great about this recipe is that you can make a batch that will cover you for a few days.