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Cooking With Flowers Adds Beauty, Flavor, Nutrition And Interest

If you want to make your recipes look really gourmet and give them flair, try cooking with flowers. Edible flowers add beauty but also lots of flavour and interest. Flowers make wonderful additions to all kinds of dishes. You can use them in soups, salads, main dishes, appetizers and desserts. Flower bouquets are not only beautiful but they are a nutritious ingredient for your cooking.

Even though not every flower you see is going to be safe to eat there are lot of flowers that are both beautiful and edible. They make decorative additions to your recipes and they add great flavours as well. Soups are spectacular with flowers floating on top. Edible flowers are not just pretty and tasty but they do add nutritional value to your ingredients. The next special dinner that you make will be very remarkable with the addition of a few edible flowers.

Flowers that have been grown without the use of pesticides, organically grown will work the best for your cooking purposes. Be sure to tell you florist that you plan to use the flowers in your cooking and they will give you directives. Make sure that you take care to clean your flowers well before cooking with them just like you would with your vegetables.

In general, adding the sweeter flowers to your dishes is both easy and effective. These are petals of carnations, the blossoms of the apple or citrus fruit trees and violets. For any main dish recipe, you can use herbs and broccoli florets. The vegetable that have flowers that are good for eating are broccoli, male squash flowers, okra and arugula. The arugula blossoms have a horseradish kind of taste. The entire fennel plant is good for cooking with the tiny flowers much like aniseed and this pairs well with salmon.

Herbal flowers add freshness to your dishes. The leaves of the herbs are often used but some produce edible flowers like mint, dill, lavender, dandelion, basil, rosemary, sage, thyme and chives. Many of the flowers of the herbs can be preserved in oil for use in cooking. Lavender sugar is wonderful to sweeten jellies, cookies and making tea. The tiny buds of the rosemary are great on any meat dish or on salads. Dill flowers are good in omelettes and dandelion flowers are buttery smelling but like pepper when eaten. Chives have flowers that are crunchy and have a delicate onion flavor great for salads.

The ornamental flowers that are edible are pansies, calendula, day lilies, hollyhock, chamomile, impatiens, bergamot, , chrysanthemum, nasturtiums, violets, tulips, violas and scented geraniums.

The petals are good floating in soup or spicing up salads. Hollyhock flowers can be crystallized and used to garnish desserts. Rice dishes, omelettes, breads and souffles are even better with calendula. Nasturtiums have a peppery and sweet flavour good with cheese or guacamole. Day lilies have the flavor of asparagus and go will with soup or a stir-fry.

Edible flowers from trees include apple, hibiscus, honeysuckle, roses, lilacs, plum, pear, and peach. Rose petals can be crystallized and then made into jellies or jams. Of course, edible roses are wonderful for decorating cakes. No matter what flower you choose to add to your recipes, it is always the best idea to buy from a reputable dealer who can give you expert advice.

For a wide variety of flowers to choose from for the perfect gift, visit Adam Fowler’s Online Florist at ModeFlowers.com!