Eating flowers

Flowers - so beautiful to look at ... 

 

Yes, great, that's the way to do it. Let flowers talk! I like that. Then I don't have to talk so much, as I am very shy ... I think so.

Well, of course we can not go on like this forever. Sometimes it is even necessary to talk. However, flowers can be used to say "sorry". Maybe those who are married have heard about it. Whatsoever, flowers are a real delight!

Delight? Are they also delicious? What about eating flowers. OK, those shown above are not for eating. Still there are many edible flowers. When you think about herbs, usually you can also eat the flowers they have. You could for example put some chives' flowers in a salad.

Yet there is much more available. What about lavender flowers to decorate cakes?

Then there are corn flowers, borage, and for sure many more. Last year I sowed out some of those on my tiny garden patch. Some of the borage flowers went to a salad and some were frozen to be used in ice cubes to make a drink look lovely.

Not forgetting to mention courgette flowers which can be stuffed in a lovely kind of way. I will have a go at that one as well as soon as I manage to get hold on some nice flowers of those.

Now, at this time of the year there is something else available - at least around here - for free. What is it?

Elderflowers. Just make sure, when you go pick some, that you leave enough hanging in order to make it possible to have enough elderberries later on in the year.

Good, it's free. What are we going to do with it? Elderflower cordial or syrup. I read about this in the latest Jamie Oliver Magazine.

In here apart from sufficient elderflowers, lemons, oranges, 1 kg of sugar and 1 l of water is involved. The recipe in the magazine mentioned 1,5 kg of sugar, but I didn't have that much available. No worries!

It took me over 24 hours, to get to the final result.

Well, it's about 2 l of it. You can mix it with mineral water or if you want to have it in eating, you can use it for a nice cake. There was a recipe as well somewhere in the above mentioned magazine.
As things are, I'm not so much into baking - mid-week. I would rather do it at the weekend, and most probably will have a go at that cake.
In the meantime I thought about something else: mixing some cocktails. As the general opinion is, though, alcohol is no solution. Fine, it might help at that moment - for a brief moment only.Therefore, better have a bit of it just for taste sake.
First try was with a bit of peppermint liqueur and mineral water. I put about four cubes worth of crushed ice to a cocktail glass, added some peppermint liqueur and filled the remaining part with mineral water leaving just enough space for a splash of elderflower cordial.

OK ... you have to try it to find out how it tasted. The elderflower syrup was clearly recognisable.
Second try: a Elderflower Martini: extra dry vermouth, gin and elderflower syrup.

Wait, wait! I've got another idea: Elderflower Caipirinha. Just do a Caipirinha as you would do normally (a quartered lime into a glass, slightly crush it, crushed ice on top, ...). Simply replace the brown sugar with elderflower cordial and balance it with the Cachaca until it tastes perfect.
Of course there would be many more options. Considering that I still wanted to write down these few lines, not ending up in complete nonsense, I had to stop. The result would have been fatal had I tried to go through my whole collection of spirits. You might come up with ideas of your own. Just let me know, when you found something worthwhile trying.
Did I call this post "Eating flowers"? From what I wrote down here, I could have rather called it drinking flowers. On the other hand I don't want to give the impression that I always need alcohol ... oh, oh, I have quite a lot of recipes on here that involve alcohol, when I just think about the red wine cake or the ouzo cookies.
Let us not dwell on that to much! It can add a nice taste, but you have to know your limits. By the way, you can use a lot of other things to get a nice taste ...

Oh, just found that here ...




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