Cooking with Flowers

Flowers are stunning additions to your garden, but they can also be tasty treats to serve up in your kitchen. There are many flowers that we regularly eat, including artichokes, broccoli and cauliflower, but there is a rainbow of colorful, edible flowers out there that can be a fun addition to your cooking and baking that you may never have experimented with before. Once you start working with them, you’ll discover that flowers have surprisingly different flavor profiles that can add a lot to a dish, so many find that they are a lot more exciting than they initially would have thought.

Cooking with Flowers: Sweet and Savory Recipes with Rose Petals, Lilacs, Lavender, and Other Edible Flowers gives readers a thorough overview of what you need to know about incorporating edible flowers into your cooking and is full of recipes that make them the star. The book opens with some instructions on how to take your flowers from the garden to the table. If you are buying your flowers, you should always opt for organic. Flowers will always have to be washed carefully and prepped, and there are instructions for prepping each specific type of flower in the book along with the recipes.

The recipes in the book are divided by flower type, and there are more than 15 different types of edible flowers covered, from calendulas to violets. The recipes range from salads to pastas to cakes, with both sweet and savory optiosn in between. All of the instructions are clearly written in an encouraging way, since working with and measuring flowers isn’t an exact science in the way that measuring other ingredients can be. All of the recipes are accompanied by stunning photos that show off the recipes and are filled with pops of color from edible petals that have been incorporated into the dish and used as garnish.