May 12, 2015, posted by Michelle – I have a cousin who lives next door to me, relatively speaking. She lives in Northern Italy and it’s just a five hour drive from Lyon. She’s a great cook and she has a huge vegetable garden (perhaps there’s a connection there?). I love visiting her anytime but especially in the summer so I can help her and her husband enjoy all those fresh veggies. Last summer she made a delicious lunch of things from the garden including some fried squash blossoms.
Apart from having the squash blossoms and eating a salad or two with a few flower petals sprinkled on them, I don’t really know much about using edible flowers. Yesterday I was in Monoprix, my favorite French grocery store, and saw these pretty edible flowers in the produce section: pansies, pink and white carnations and marigold. I found some recipes online that call for edible flowers that sound really nice like lavender honey cake, cold chocolate soup with cardamom and chocolate covered pansies and hibiscus, raspberry and vanilla mousse. Now that I know where to get the flowers, I may try to use them in some recipes. I’m having some ladies over for lunch next week which seems like the perfect occasion to make some flower accented dessert.
Can you find edible flowers where you live? Have you ever eaten any? Do you have any edible flower recipes you’d like to share? To leave comments just click on the title of this post and the comment form will appear at the end of the post.
Nice post! It would be pretty to decorate a cake with edible flowers. I have had pansies tossed in a green salad but that is all I can remember. Wait, rose was used in ice cream once at a large function. How cool is it that the culinary and floral worlds can join as one?