Eat Your Flowers
A Cookbook
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Cook with botanical ingredients for stunning visuals and delicious flavors—and let your creativity blossom!
For most of us, “eat your flowers” might mean enjoying an edible blossom decorating a restaurant dessert on a night out. For Loria Stern, it’s a way to bring nature into the kitchen, to play with colors and flavors, and to make every dish beautiful. She incorporates natural plant dusts, pressed and fresh blooms, and vibrant herbs and veggies into her cooking for whimsical, gorgeous, and nourishing meals. In this endlessly creative book, she invites you to take advantage of this edible bounty to create your own, providing both her own recipes (and her favorite variations) and the foundational knowledge on how to incorporate botanicals into any dish.
Loria shares how to get brilliantly colorful results from all-natural ingredients, such as a gorgeous amethyst spread made from wilted purple cabbage and blended with nuts, which turns bright pink with the squeeze of a lemon. But Loria’s use of botanicals brings value far beyond just the visual—she is skilled at incorporating them in ways that make the most of their true flavors, enhancing each dish in taste as well as aesthetics. Blending freeze-dried raspberries into flour makes her cookie dough a sultry red and gives it a perfect tartness. Breakfasts; appetizers; soups and salads; breads; vegetables; pasta and grains; meat, poultry, and seafood; desserts; and beverages all get floral enhancements, with recipes including:
Rainbow Coconut GranolaFloral Summer RollsGardenscape FocacciaBotanical Steamed Tamales Filled with Hibiscus JackfruitBasil Flower Eggplant in Hoisin SauceRose Pistachio Verdant BarsFlower-Pressed Shortbread CookiesPrickly Pear Cocktail
Eat Your Flowers shows you how to transform botanical ingredients—root to stem—into recipes that are a pleasure to make, eat, and share.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
California chef Stern uses botanicals to craft eye-catching dishes in her offbeat debut. She starts with a guide to edible botanicals, outlining their flavor profiles and typical uses, and many of her recipes come with the option for several variations: gluten-free crackers can be made in an array of colors, while doughnuts baked with almond and coconut flour are tinted with "colorant dust" glazes (the chart showing how to achieve different tones using botanical ingredients is a handy reference). Some of Stern's dishes are familiar, like a kale Caesar salad with vegan dressing, and chicken poached with herbs, though others draw from more unconventional ingredients, such as turkey meatballs with lemongrass atop a coconut carrot sauce or flank steak rubbed with dandelion tea. Baked goods provide the best canvas for Stern's visual artistry, as she presents buttermilk biscuits with fresh herbs pressed into the surface and various desserts decorated with flowers, including shortbread cookies and a vegan cheesecake made with raw cashews. The recipes are as whimsical as they are unusual, and Stern's creativity is spotlighted throughout: long beans are braided into wreaths, purple potato disks are dotted with orange salmon roe, and a dark chocolate tart incorporates mushroom powder said to possess "magical superfood health powers." Nature-savvy chefs should give this a look.