The Edible Flower Garden (Edible Garden Series) - Softcover

Creasy, Rosalind

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9625932933 ISBN 13: 9789625932934

Publisher: Periplus Editions, 1999

Synopsis

Learn how to grow lovely and fragrant flowers then use them create delicious meals with this beautifully illustrated flower gardening and cooking book.

Anyone who picks up The Edible Flower Garden will be tempted to grow, harvest, and sample at least a few of the more than forty varieties of edible flowers. Among them, you'll find more familiar food plants—dill and mustard, for example—in addition to common flowers, such as tulips or roses. Author Rosalind Creasy's stunning photography and detailed plans for an edible flower garden make this a must-have book for any flower gardener or home chef.

Come along with Creasy on a tour with colorful pictures and careful diagrams and descriptions of her own flower gardens. Included is a tour of the edible flower gardens of Alice Waters famed Chez Panisse restaurant.

Creasy catalogues each variety of flower and how to grow it, plus gives a myriad of delectable ideas on how to use the flower from candied violets and roses to decorate appetizers and cakes, to nasturtiums for a colorful shrimp salad, to daylily buds, pink clover and wild mustard flowers that are tossed together in a spectacular stir-fry.

Favorite Recipes Include:

• Flower Butters
• Candied Flowers
• Tulip and Endive Appetizer
• Pineapple Sage Salsa
• Rose Petal Syrup
• Lavender Ice Cream
• And much more...

About this title

Review:

Author Rosalind Creasy has written extensively on edible gardens: The Edible Herb Garden and The Edible French Garden are some of her past titles. The Edible Flower Garden focuses on plants that not only enhance recipes, but also turn the plate into a painting--a visual as well as gastronomic enterprise. For the reader who thinks such things are only for true gourmets or Metropolitan Home magazine aesthetes, one look at the photographs in this book will seduce you. The images are so beautiful and unusual as to be hypnotic: rose petals served as a bowl of ice cream (Rose Petal Sorbet); salads that look like wildflower meadows.

Creasy interviews Alice Waters of Chez Panisse about her use of flowers in meals at her famous Berkeley restaurant; Waters recounts the curious effect cooking with flowers has on diners. "The flowers are a fascination. People really focus on them and are curious." This curiosity stems from a cluster of superstitions: that all flowers are somehow poisonous, that beautiful things should not be touched or consumed, that vegetables are the sturdy, useful plants while flowers are "for show." Reading The Edible Flower Garden, I remembered the summer I forgot to pick my artichokes, and they basked in the sun long after they were ripe. One day I looked out and it was as if a spell had been cast: the ugly green artichoke scales were gone, transformed into blinding purple flowers. Color is always hiding somewhere, and it is wonderful to allow it to flourish, like Creasy does, in places where it is not expected. --Emily White

About the Author:

Rosalind Creasy, a resident of Los Altos, California, is a landscape designer and leading authority on appropriate gardening techniques as well as a widely published garden writer and popular lecturer. Creasy specializes in residential landscapes that include edible, native, and drought-tolerant plants. She is a winner of the Garden Writers of America's award for excellence, and her articles have appeared in Organic Gardening, Family Circle, Woman's Day, Country Living Gardener, and Horticulture magazines. In addition to Cooking from the Garden, Creasy is the author of Earthly Delights: Twelve Distinctive Theme Gardens, The Gardener's Handbook of Edible Plants and a book for young gardeners, Blue Potatoes, Orange Tomatoes. Her Complete Book of Edible Landscaping received a Garden Writers Association of America's award and has become a contemporary gardening classic.

About this edition

• Publisher: Periplus Editions
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 9625932933
• ISBN 13: 9789625932934
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112