Edible Flowers - Frugal Living, Simple Living Tips. Home & Garden(featured column by various guest writers) Edible Flowers by Jennifer A. Wickes Have you ever been to a restaurant where they have served you a beautiful salad with flower petals scattered around the plate? Or maybe you have had a cake decorated with flowers on top? The amazing part to edible flowers is that in spite of it being the new rage, eating flowers has been going on for centuries. In regions such as the Middle East, Eastern Europe and India, floral waters such as rosewater and orange flower water are used to flavor candies to meats to beverages! There are a few cautions one should remember before harvesting any flowers: (a) Do not harvest any flowers that could have been exposed to animal excretement. (b) Do not harvest any flowers that have had insecticides sprayed on them.
(c) Do not harvest any flowers that have had fertilizers sprayed on them unless specified for food consumption. (e) If you are unsure if it is edible, then do not eat it. Yields: 4 - 5 half pints. Minimally Invasive » Search Results » ramp. No pictures (from me, anyway) to commemorate our wonderful dining experience at Tabla last night, but the memory of that meal will stay with me for a long, long time. Gil was less impressed than I and thought he’d had better at Café Matisse , but that’s just because he lost the ordering war: Why would you go for a scallop (that’s one ginormous scallop, btw) when there are more flavorful items on the menu?
But hey, that’s just me. The chef sent around an amuse bouche of cauliflower soup that surprised me on every level. It was brothy rather than creamy, spicy and tangy, and nothing like any cauliflower soup I’d ever had. Because I didn’t feel like drinking wine last night, I skipped the foie gras (I know! My entrée was Smoked & Slow Cooked Scottish Salmon (with French green lentils, fennel, and orange tamarind glaze), served medium rare.
And then it was time for dessert. I stuck to one drink the whole evening, a pomegranate gimlet, which was — of course — a work of art. Ramps Recipes. Yahoo - it's that time of year again when ramps are in season. I just got 6 bunches at the greenmarket yesterday and am looking forward to cooking with them. Last year I made a baked dish using the ramps, some purple potatoes, garlic, olive oil, a dash of red pepper flakes and vegetable stock in a casserole dish and baking. It was wonderful, truly allowing the ramps to be the dominant flavor. Today, I'll make a frittata with ramps (I'm making a nice brunch for DH who just ran a RR race this a.m.). I have a potted lemon thyme plant; so I think I'll use some of that with it.
I am also eager to try monavano's ramps crepes from this thread Sometimes we just eat them sauteed with a little garlic. What are you making with your ramps? Black Locust. The Pope’s Risotto. Ramp Compound Butter. Dirty, dirty ramps. Ramps are only in season for about a month or two, but there are a few ways to preserve them so you can enjoy their flavor all year long. My favorite long-term preservation technique is making ramp compound butter and storing it in the freezer.
The ramps, locked inside the confines of the frozen butter like Han Solo in carbonite, are essentially stored indefinitely, capturing the "rampy" essence of early spring at any time of year. The most common compound butter is beurre maitre d'hotel, or hotel butter, composed of shallots, garlic, fines herbes, lemon zest, salt, and pepper; the recipe that follows is a variation on this theme.
Generally used for broiled or grilled meats or fish, hotel butter functions as a sort of flavor-inducing sauce. Ramp compound butter is great in a pinch, as you can easily pull a log out of the freezer and cut off a slice or two. The ramps are cleaned and then blanched, ready to be chopped. Ramp butter mise en place. Garlicky Wild Fiddlehead Ferns (my answer to GMO’s) Fiddlehead ferns gently sauteed with garlic and herbs are tender, flavorful, with just a bit of a crispness left to them.
They taste a little like asparagus. Very delicious……and very wild. And yes, they really are from ferns! They are fern shots from a certain ostrich fern (not all ferns are edible, by the way, so take come classes before you start trying to gather them yourself!). Fiddlehead ferns are only available for a short time, so grab them while you can! My fiddlehead ferns were bought from my local farmer’s market where a lady coordinates a booth selling products from different professional wild food gatherers. But more than just their culinary value, I feel that wild food is on the opposite spectrum of genetically modified food.
Unfortunately, unless you are eating an all organic diet, you are probably consuming far more GMO’s then you realize (about 75 percent of the food in the supermarket contains GMO’s). Meanwhile, here is the perfect antidote to GMO’s. KimiHarris.