Newsletters: November - December 2007

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Celebrate with Edible Flowers

Natural Times-November/December 2007

By Bridget Kamke

Nothing brightens up a meal like edible flowers. Festive, colorful, and zesty, they are a party waiting to happen.

From your vegetable crops, squash, gourd and zucchini flowers can be eaten raw, lightly sauted, or dipped in batter and cooked tempura-style. Toss a salad and add yellow broccoli flowers, nutty arugula, or fiery nasturtiums.

From your colorful flower garden, add some new hues to your salads with violets, pansies, and snapdragons. For breakfast guests, make multigrain pancakes and garnish with a sprinkling of marigold petals for a gourmet touch. Some other flowers to use are hollyhocks, sunflowers, and lilacs.

The following flowers are known for their flavors: gladioli taste lettuce-like; tulips taste like asparagus or peas; clover is reminiscent of honey; daylilies have a chestnut flavor; dianthuses taste of clove.

From the herb garden, eat blossoms from borage, chives, calendula, lovage, thyme, dill, basil, bee balm, mint, cilantro or rosemary. Sprinkle the savory ones on salads and the sweeter ones on fruit salads or desserts.

Host a tea party with the help of your herb patch. Mix rose petals, lavender or violets in dough for cookies, scones or biscotti. Serve them up with tea made from chamomile, lavender or calendula.

Enchant guests with candied flowers as dessert decorations: brush on lightly beaten, frothy egg whites, then sprinkle with superfine sugar. Let dry on a rack or screen, and store in an airtight container.

For ice blossoms, fill an ice tray halfway with water and freeze. Then insert a violet, borage flower or rose petal in each section. Sprinkle each flower with about one teaspoon of water and freeze again. Then add the rest of the water and freeze. Float them in punch.

For a delicious bread spread, fold calendula, nasturtium, or arugula flowers into soft butter or cream cheese.

For stuffed nasturtium flowers, make a soft herbed cream cheese, then using a pastry bag with a round tip, carefully fill each nasturtium with about one teaspoon. Serve immediately.

Here's a fun gift idea: flavor herbal vinegar with not just the leaves, but also the flowers of herbs. Pack a jar full of herbs and fill with vinegar. Let it soak at least two weeks. You can strain it and put the vinegar in fancy jars or bottles with fresh sprigs of herbs and some edible flowers inside. Herbed vinegars can be used as marinades, in the cooking water of pasta or rice, in soups and stews, with oil or yogurt as salad dressing, or can replace lemon or wine in many recipes.

Get creative with edible flowers, but please be sure you carefully identify your plants. Many flowers can be poisonous. And, of course, use organically grown flowers. You can do your own research on- line or in gardening books. It is best to identify plants using their Latin names to be sure you are picking the right flowers to eat. Use common sense, and then let the flowers bring your meals to life.