Edible Flowers

redbud

Plough to Pantry
Spring 2015

 
Flowers are a festive way to celebrate warmer weather, brighten up a room, and fill our senses with intoxicating aromas. To add even more delight, edible flowers can be a culinary adventure full of flavor and whimsy…

Wild foraged flowers can be eaten and look inimitably cheerful on your dinner plate. A visit with local forager and teacher Alan Muskat of No Taste Like Home is a lesson in backyard floral foraging. Springtime yields many types of flowers so it’s time to look around for some delicious salad embellishments.

“The obvious appeal of wildflowers is their color, shape and aroma. But there is a deeper allure in how they open with such willing tenderness to the world. One wonders how anything so delicate can survive, but they do, teaching a valuable lesson,” says Muskat. “Flowers are the premier wild food of spring, just as mushrooms are the supreme edible in autumn. Flowers are also (in general) the most ephemeral of the wild edibles. Many of them are ‘here today, gone tomorrow.'”

Wild redbud flowers from Muskat’s tree adorn a wild edible salad. The flavor is sweet and similar to lettuce with a hint of berry. Wild violets and dandelion flowers and leaves are also abundant through spring and summer and can be eaten. The purple blossoms of the “money plant” and wild mustard with its yellow petals are bright and festive and add a blast of color as well as delicate-to-intense flavor to your mix.

Malcare WordPress Security