Flower Salads

This is really just to point you to my web site bkafka.com and encourage you to click on vegetable tip for notes on arugula flowers and others.

I was walking through the vegetable garden yesterday when I realized to my dismay that the arugula had gone lanky and flowery. I stopped to see how many leaves I could rescue. I idly started munching one of the white flowers and realized that it was delicious much like the leaves with a slightly more peppery taste. For good measure and contrast I would pluck some of the seeming endless supply of young leaves and tendril tips from the green pea plants.

I didn't do it last night because I had already picked and washed most of the salad greens; but I though what a gloriously beautiful salad I could make this time another year with the arugula flowers, chive flowers, Johnny-jump-ups or violets and unsprayed rose petals.

Don't discard the flowers of edible plants without tasting them. Herb flowers such as the brilliant blue of the prickly borage or the purpler blue of sage as well as all parts of the nasturtium are excellent.

I may have forgotten the tender onion-tasting lavender of chive flowers. Hold the base, calyx, of the the ball of chive flowers and pull off the flowers which can be sprinkled on the flower salad, on omelets and lobster salad. Good taste and gorgeous tiny lily shaped flowers.