But if you keep snipping off the blossoms it keeps on living to reproduce another day. If you let it, the bush senses its purpose is over - no doubt a chemical signal - and retires. It’s making enough energy to reproduce and send forth seeds. At some point your Basil plants begins go to blossom. It was a practical matter besides culinary. That workhorse of the kitchen and Italian cuisine has edible flowers s why not use them. I will admit to being lazy and throwing Basil blossoms into my pesto, and soups and stews. Germinating shoots and tender shoots are eaten. The seeds are used as a coffee substitute or as a baking powder substitute. The fruit is eaten, the leaves boiled as a potherb or dried and ground and used like file, to flavor and thicken sauces, stews and soups. Like the Kapok tree it is pollinated by bats. The Baobob Tree, Adansonia digitata, is extremely odd looking and versatile.
With so many readers around the world I have to include an exotic or two though this next flower does grow in Florida and other warm areas. The flavor is not of the Banana but rather more of a vegetable. Usually it is peeled to get the more tender parts then shredded or sliced thin and soaked to reduce the bitterness. The blossom can be eaten raw (bitterish) or cooked, less or no bitterness. Look closely at the stalk end of the blossom and you can see what will eventually become a hand of Bananas. The entire flower/fruit arrangement of the Banana is odd with the blossom being a purplish torpedo. The Balloon Flower is so called because before the petals open are fused at first making the blossom look like a balloon.įew people in temperate North America ever think of eating a Banana blossom, but a lot of folks in warm areas do, and it does not prevent your banana tree from producing fruit. Its blossoms are sweet in taste, have a bit of texture, and are used in salads, stuffed, candied or dipped in butter. In the greater Campanula clan, the root of the Balloon Flower, Platycodon grandiflorus, is very popular in Korea where it is cut into strips, seasoned with chilis, vinegar, sesame oil and soy sauce and eaten as a salad (which also tells you you can can get the root still alive in Korean markets, plant it, and get blossoms.) It is also used in soups, stews, dishes with vinegar, and is one of the ingredients in Toso, or sweet Japanese sake. Their flavor is spicy, sweet, reminds one of cloves. The flower also reaches back into history in that it was used in the funeral wreath made for Pharaoh Tutankhamun, about 3,300 years ago. His son John John wore one at his wedding to honor his father. Bachelor’s Buttons were the favorite flower of President John Kennedy. Another version is that if the flower retained it color while worn his love was true, but if it faded it was not… sounds a bit rigged to me… Then again, I might not have been a lifelong bachelor if I had picked a few of these. Married women covered up, single women advertised. How did she let them know the same thing? Curiously, she showed cleavage. Long before wedding rings were common bachelors indeed did wear a cornflower in a jacket button hole to let the ladies know they were single. They got the name cornflower because the hardly species grew in English grain fields, and corn once meant any grain. Also called the cornflower, they have been tossed into salads and used for a garnish for a long time. When you’re a kid you’re told everything is poisonous, and for me that included Bachelor Buttons. And young Norma Mortenson got her start in 1948 when she became the first “Artichoke Queen.” You know her as Marilyn Monroe
Zeus (said Zeff in Greek) turned a scorned lover into an artichoke. Artichokes have been around for a long time. Young artichoke leaves are fed to snails to improve their flavor.
The flowers themselves are used for a substitute for rennet, meaning they will curdle milk. The inner portion of the flower stalk is also edible, much like true thistles. In Europe they are dried and used in soups. When marinated they are called artichokes hearts. We eat them raw, boiled, steamed, baked, fried, stuffed, and marinated. We eat the floral bracts, read fat leaves below what will become the flower. They are actually bitter but if you want to have at it. That said we really don’t eat the blossoms of the artichoke. If I don’t include artichokes among the edible flowers several will gleefully write and tell me I missed one.
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