Spring is here and the nettles are up. This Friday I’m popping up at Black Cat Ceramics in Fort Bragg with one dish: Nettle Split Pea Soup with wild boar ham, Hot Cross Buns, and Greensauce. Come eat something seasonal. April 3rd, food 5–7PM, event til 8. 334 N Franklin. Free.
There’s a particular feeling that comes with early spring on the Mendocino Coast. The fog is still there in the mornings, the air still carries that cold edge off the water, but something is waking up. You can feel it in the soil. You can see it in the nettles.
I’ve been thinking a lot about nettles lately. They come up every year right around this time — pushing through the damp ground along creek beds and forest edges like they own the place. Which, honestly, they kind of do. They’ve been here longer than any of us. They sting you if you’re not paying attention, but treat them right and they’ll give you something deeply nourishing — earthy, mineral-rich, a green that tastes like the land itself.
That’s the dish I’ve been sitting with this season. Nettle Split Pea Soup with wild boar ham. It came together the way the best things do — slowly, practically, with ingredients that made sense together. The nettles bring that deep, almost grassy richness. The split pea gives it body. The wild boar ham does what a good smoked meat always does — it makes everything around it taste more like itself. Served with Hot Cross Buns and a bright Greensauce, it’s a bowl that belongs to this exact moment on the calendar.
I’ll be serving it this Friday at Black Cat Ceramics in Fort Bragg as part of their First Friday pop-up — a collaboration under Nettles for Mona. If you haven’t been to Black Cat, it’s a ceramics collective right on Franklin Street — the kind of creative space that Fort Bragg does quietly and well. There’s something right about eating a bowl of foraged soup out of a handmade ceramic bowl. That’s the idea, anyway.
Food has always been my way of saying: this is where I am. This is what the season looks like. Come eat it with me.
Friday, April 3rd. Food from 5–7PM, event runs til 8. Free to attend. 334 N Franklin, Fort Bragg.