Edible Bouquets: Beauty You Can Taste

It’s one thing to admire a beautiful bouquet, but another to taste it. With this organic autumn bouquet, you could decorate your table, throw it on your salad, or both. (Photo © Kuzsm | Dreamstime.com)

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By Robbie Harris

It’s one thing to admire a plant for its beauty, but another to appreciate it for its taste. With this organic autumn bouquet, you could decorate your table, mine it for your meal, or both. The orange and yellow nasturtiums offer a mouthwatering combination of sweetness with a bitter finish and their bright green round leaves can be used like a dash of pepper.  Whether decorating your plate or being sprinkled on your salad, these well-known edible flowers are also a feast for the eyes.

This edible bouquet includes purple basil, in which the flowers as well as the leaves are edible. In this arrangement, some of leaves have already been removed and are simmering for pesto. You can keep the vase within reach, so if you can pluck up an extra leaf if need be. The water in the vase keeps these edibles fresh for use for up to week. Also pictured here are the tips of a stevia plant. Use them for a sweet break or to dress up dessert.

Growing edible flowers yourself guarantees that what you’re eating or drinking when you use edible flowers is organic. If you decide to buy the plants, sticking to organic ingredients is extremely important. You may have no compunction about buying non-organic flowers for the vase on your table, but don’t extend that to the flowers on your plate. Check to see where you are on the green spectrum.

Photo 107-877 Goes here.Caption:  Cutting the leaves from the purple basil  “Ocimim basilicum Purpurascense) オンライン ブラックジャック to fill a small vase and eat the clippings.

There are so many edible plants that double as decoration for edible bouquets. They are accents to your home or workspace as well as you plate.  Most are easily grown in almost any garden; the ground’s the limit. You can also plant them in containers if you don’t have the outdoor space to raise these beautiful edibles.

And while your eyes drink casino online in these plants, you can also imbibe a burst of vitamin C from a cup of hibiscus tea. Karen Graber, author of The Cuisine of Puebla studied the flower’s many incarnations.

She writes, “Dried hibiscus flowers, known in Mexico as jamaica (pronounced ‘ha-ma-ike-ah,’ rather than like the name of the Caribbean island country) have long been available in health food stores in the U.S. for making a tea that is high in vitamin C. With the advent of interest in south-of-the-border cuisine, hibiscus flowers are now sold in bulk in most large supermarkets.

Jamaica is usually translated as hibiscus, but more than 300 species of hibiscus are found throughout the tropical and subtropical regions of the world, and only the edible variety, Hibiscus sabdariffa, is the one used in Mexican cooking. This species is variously known in English as roselle, red sorrel and Jamaica sorrel, which is probably how it came to be known in Mexico as Jamaica (pronounced ham-EYE-kah.)”

Karen Graver’s Recipe for Hibiscus Tea

Ingredients:

• 2 cups dried hibiscus flowers
• 8 cups water
• 3/4 cup sugar or equivalent amount of sugar substitute

Steps:

• Rinse and drain the hibiscus flowers in a colander.
• Put them in a saucepan with 4 cups of the water and the sugar.
• Stir and bring to a slow boil, lower heat and simmer, covered, for 15 minutes.
• The flowers will have lost their color into the water, which will be a deep red color.
• Let the liquid cool, then strain it into a pitcher.
• Discard the flowers.
• Add the rest of the water and stir.
• Chill thoroughly before serving.

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