At every wedding and every funeral I've ever been to I distinctly remember thinking/saying at some point, "Why don't we get together like this more often? Why do we wait until a wedding or a funeral?" And I guess the answer is pretty simple: people have their lives. Work needs going to, study needs to be done, chores need to be completed (or at least procrastinated about), kids need to be nurtured, relationships don't maintain themselves, clubs/sports/hobbies/church fit in any other spare gaps...we just get on with living our lives. Gathering a bunch of family and friends together for no real reason can drop off the end of the priority list.
...Unless you invent a reason, set a date and COMMIT. Stare down the fear of no one turning up. Welcome the opposite anxiety of a multitude of people coming into your house. Bathe in the terrifying potential that, if people do turn up, they may stand awkwardly about and pick their fingernails. Or worse, their noses.
Such were the feelings we embraced in the lead up to our Flower Feast Tea Party to celebrate our Edible Flower Thing. Not everything was going in our favour. The weather was quite cold, the puff pastry had been forgotten, our toddlers were fighting over Every. Single. Toy. In. The. House. But great tea parties don't happen to those who quit, so we battled through, and tossed together a seriously lovely spread of food that showcased our discoveries over the past few weeks.
The menu
Onion flower and parmesan buckwheat crackers with cheese and dried figs
Goats cheese rolled in violas
Caramelised red onion and garlic flower focaccia with nasturtium pesto
Sweet things
Rhubarb and rose petal jam in a sponge with vanilla cream
Lemon and lavender curd tarts
Citrus flower and white chocolate shortbread
To drink
Elderflower cordial with lemon and fancy flower ice cubes
For the little ones (to drip everywhere)
Elderflower cordial icy poles with all the edible flowers from Jess' garden suspended majestically within
We committed to creating things that really made use of what we had available in our gardens. Personally, everything that had been flowering so enthusiastically in my garden a few weeks ago was finished, aside from the garlic and onion flowers. I raided Mum and Dad's rose garden for the jam, bought a couple of punnets of edible garnish from Bendigo Wholefoods (who stock B&B Basil micro herbs and can order in the flowers if you ask them to), and for the curd I appropriated some lavender from a friend who may/may not have 'borrowed' it from a stranger's garden.
Jess has planted out her garden with gorgeous edible flowers though. She didn't have to beg, buy or steal her flowers. So she wins this round. (Jess here: YASSSSSSSS WINNER!!!)
Below is the recipe I created for my onion flower and parmesan crackers. I'm including it here because they were really, really good and I want everyone to eat them as often as possible. This recipe highlights my fairly approximate approach to some of my cooking.
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Ingredients
1 cup plain flour
1 cup buckwheat flour
1/2 cup (ish) onion flowers - snip the little flowers off the big flower head (a quick google search tells me this is called the 'infloresence')
1 cup finely grated parmesan (but serisouly, we all know that more cheese is rarely a mistake)
Enough milk to form a pliable dough
Olive oil for brushing
Salt for sprinkling
Method
Preheat oven to 160℃ and line two large oven trays with baking paper.
In a large mixing bowl, combine flours, parmesan and onion flowers. Gradually add enough milk to form a pliable dough. Avoid over-mixing as the dough will turn elastic and be hard to roll out.
Take about 1/4 of the dough at a time and roll it out on a floured board. You want to roll it as thinly as possible without it tearing for the best wafer-thin results. Transfer to the baking tray. Using a knife or a frilly pasta cutter, cut the dough into desired shapes. 4cmX4cm squares, 3cmX5cm rectangles, long skinny triangles. (I don't recommend using a cookie cutter. Who can be bothered gathering up and re-rolling the leftover bits?)
Brush tops with olive oil and sprinkle with salt.
Bake for as long as it takes for the crackers to turn golden brown and to be crisp all the way through (this will vary from oven to oven, and it will depend on how thinly you rolled your dough - it took mine about 30mins).
When cooked, cool on a wire rack. Store in an airtight container for...I don't know...a week? This is not my area of expertise.
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Over the course of this Thing, we have answered many of the questions we posed at the outset, but there are some that remain. We have also made some interesting observations:
- Using the flower of something that will eventually turn into something awesome feels indulgent and wasteful. And a little bit exploitative.
- Garlic and onion flowers are tops - the flavour is mild but distinct, you can use them independently of the garlic and onion themselves and they last quite a while.
- The flowering season of lots of plants is really short. You have to be ready to pounce to make the most of them (think kale, rocket, herb flowers).
- You can't use delicate flowers in situations where the temp gets too hot. They are destroyed.
- Quite hard to find edible flowers in nurseries, not really a section for the home enthusiast.
- Cannot buy in my local supermarket, making it hard to track them down if you don't grow them.
- A wonderful way to add colour to your garden without feeling like you're wasting it on "just flowers" if you're afflicted with the it's-gotta-be-edible/useful illness.
- An interesting way to extend the use of plants like coriander/kale.
- Control potential abundance like citrus flowers. We will be looking for ways to utilise our plants fully.
- Potential whole other field to explore in medicinal flowers. But, hey, googled backyard flowery remedies would make for a pretty odd tea party.
- We didn't even touch on foraging for native edibles. Next spring, maybe?
During the conversations over our tea party, we noted that lots of people associate the flavour of flowers (especially rose and lavender) with soap, and they would probably prefer that their food didn't resemble their bathroom. I get it. Luckily the lavender in the curd could be avoided by not chomping down on the little bits of flower, and the rose and rhubarb jam was more rhubarb than rose. And let's be honest, that jam was just an excuse to slap another sponge together.
Thanks to our people for their contributions of ideas, expertise, attendance at our tea party and for indulging our head-scratchingly philosophical discussions about edible flowers.
