A remarkable number of common flowers are edible, and they make wonderful taste and color garnishes for your cooking.
Case in point: I recently attended a potluck to which I contributed a salad composed primarily of fresh-from-the-market lettuce and spinach. For color and added flavor interest I added some end-of-season orange slices, chives, goat cheese and, from my yard, violets. They’re approaching the end of their spring bloom, but what a great addition to the salad’s eye appeal.
Other common flowers that you can eat include the famous, peppery nasturtium, peonies, day lilies and the flowers from lots of culinary herbs. (Don’t eat anything that’s been sprayed.) What’s Cooking America offers a a list with notes.
Do you say it with flowers?
Georgeous salad, Janet. We get great blossoms for our salads from the chives, which are blooming right now, as well as from our spring greens-arugula, mizuna, tat soi-which like to go to seed this time of year here in the District of Columbia. We’d rather have a few more weeks of greens, but might as well eat the flowers.
Janet Majure // May 13, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Thanks, Ed. Those are some pretty good looking herbal flowers you’ve got up on your site, I must say!