Did you know that flowers are not just for beautifying your house and garnishing the food? To add icing to the cake, you can eat flowers as well. People can eat every part of many plants including the flower. Flowers are also used in juices, teas, stir-fry dishes, desserts and the like.
Adding flowers to your food can be a great way to add color and flavor. Some are spicy, some are herbaceous, and some are floral and fragrant. You will be surprised with the wide range of taste flowers can offer. The culinary use of edible flowers goes way back, thousands of years ago. These are Greeks, Romans and Chinese, whose cultures use flowers in their traditional cooking. Most edible flowers are best eaten raw. Now, before picking up flowers in your garden and add it your dish, just remember that: not every flower is edible and avoid flowers that have been sprayed with insecticides, fungicides and /or herbicides. You just do not want to ingest all those harmful chemicals, do you?
Interesting Facts About Flowers
Adding edible flowers to your diet can rejuvenate your health and palate. These flowers contain a variety of nutrients. Few varieties of flowers are known to support emotional well-being along with health. The valerian flowers help to heal anxiety and insomnia. They also aid to heal migraines and tension headaches. Chamomiles are known to calm stress and boost the resistance of the immune system. The rose waters help our liver and digestive function while cooling anger. Begonias provide support to liver health and they eliminate toxins from our body. Chrysanthemums are well regarded as a great tonic for healing colds and fevers. Wait, it does not end here. There’s more!
List of Flowers You Can Eat and Snippets of Their Health Benefits
Here are some more recommended edible flowers and their health benefits:
Violets decorate a fresh, grass-like flavor to desserts and garnishes. These delicate flowers supply rutin which have been believed to strengthen capillary structure.
Lavenders soothe the nervous system. They can be relished in Herb de Provence spice blend, which exude a savory and complex flavor to soup and potatoes.
Borages are used as tea or ingredients in salads. These beautiful blue beauties have a resemblance of subtle cucumber taste, and are pretty useful in balancing the hormones and helping to fight upper respiratory tract infections such as colds and coughs.
Roses are abundant in antioxidants that aid in the prevention and combating cardiovascular diseases and cancer. Roses are classic flowers that come in a variety of colors wherein each has its own distinct bioactive pigments with white having the least. Roses are well-loved flowers of all time.
Nasturtiums, lemon gem marigolds, and calendula petals provide a bright flamboyant contrast in salads, thus projecting an earthy, peppery flavor. The orange pigment possesses the important anti-cancer compound lycopene while yellow varieties are rich in nutrient called lutein, which is known for protecting our eyesight.
One thing is for certain, growing such flowers you can eat can be an enjoyable indoor project, and at the same time another addition to a healthy diet which provides a bounty of beauty and healthy well-being.
Resource Links:
- http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/hort/hil/hil-8513.html
- http://homecooking.about.com/library/weekly/blflowers.htm