Budding chef

Make your dishes special with petals

DO your flower pots look good enough to eat?

Well if you are growing the right plants, they could well provide you with a meal or two.

Take nasturtiums, for example. Their leaves have a peppery taste, making them an excellent choice for adding a bit of pep to mixed green salads and savoury dishes.

You can also tuck in and eat the colourful flowers, which have a slightly stronger flavour.

They are especially good packed with cream cheese as hors d’oeuvres and can be used to garnish potato salad and vegetable dishes.

The sunny orange and yellow daisylike flowers of pot marigolds or calendula, which are known as poor man’s saffron, can also be used for colouring and adding a warm, aromatic flavour to food.

Pick off the petals and sprinkle them on salads and omelettes or add to pasta and rice dishes. Sunflowers are also amazing plants.

As well as the giant sunflower, there are dwarf varieties such as Choco Sun and Solar Flash which, even when growing in a pot, will turn their heads to follow the sun. And their flowers are delightfully edible.

Toasted

The buds can be served up as a vegetable, tasting similar to Jerusalem artichokes, while the petals, which have a bittersweet flavour, can be used to decorate salads and in pasta.

And of course the nutritious seeds are great toasted for a healthy snack.

As well as pots, your culinary urges can take you further afield to plunder your flowerbeds for food.

You are probably aware that roses and lavender are used in perfume –

but did you know they make a delicious teatime delicacy? Try rose petal jelly on homemade scones, or crystallise the petals to decorate iced buns.

Make meringues with lavenderflavoured sugar or make lavender oil to baste barbecued chicken.

The petals and buds of daylilies are crisp and crunchy with a slight pea-like flavour and are great in salads, hot and cold soups or served up in Chinese style stir-fry dishes.

The buds will open in hot water, so you can pick them in bud and store them in the fridge or freezer.

The showy scarlet flowers of bergamot are not only a firm favourite with bees and butterflies – the flowers and leaves are impregnated with a delightful minty fragrance, which some say tastes similar to oregano.

Use the leaves to make a refreshing tea and add a few flower petals to fish, pork and chicken dishes to give them a more robust flavour – or simply use

them to add colour to salads.