Recipes

Green Salad with Nasturtiums (Gorgeous)

Salad 

• The salad: a blend of lettuces from the farmer’s market, nasturtiums, violets, feta, avocado, toasted pistachios, and a lemon-lavender dressing. Dan absolutely loved it; what was left in the serving bowl he ate in a second helping. The flowers tasted like . . . flowers. That wasn’t a bad thing, but it did freak my mouth out a bit. “Oh my god, you’re eating the centerpiece! Stop that!” I ate it anyway. It was quite good.
• Lemon-Lavender Dressing
• the juice of one lemon
• 2 teaspooons of lavender sugar (sugar that has been mixed with dried lavender petals and left for a few weeks)
• 3 times as much olive oil as lemon
• a few grinds of salt

Today, I dared.n “Would you eat it if I put these in a salad?” I asked my husband. “Are they edible?”

“Well, yes, sweetie. I’m not feeding you poisonous flowers.” *shrug* “Okay, sure.”

Nasturtiums taste peppery, I read, and go well with other foods that play off the pepperiness. So . . . here goes nothing.

The salad: a blend of lettuces from the farmer’s market, nasturtiums, violets, feta, avocado, toasted pistachios, and a lemon-lavender dressing. Dan absolutely loved it; what was left in the serving bowl he ate in a second helping. The flowers tasted like . . . flowers. That wasn’t a bad thing, but it did freak my mouth out a bit. “Oh my god, you’re eating the centerpiece! Stop that!” I ate it anyway. It was quite good.

Lemon-Lavender Dressing:Shake well together. Add more of ingredients to taste

A Turkish cookbook from the 1800’s reads: “Put a plate of flowers of the Nasturtium in a salad bowl, with a tablespoonful of chopped chervil; sprinkle over with your fingers half a teaspoonful of salt, two or three tablespoonsful of olive oil, and the juice of a lemon; turn the salad in the bowl with a spoon and a fork until well mixed, and serve.”

Me? I’d never heard of such a silly thing. One time, my sister Becky brought home a book of ridiculous cookbook photos from the 1950’s. They were hysterical. A few days later, when I found a 1990’s salad recipe–with a photo–calling for nasturtium blossoms, I howled with laughter when I showed my mother. She laughed along with me.

Well, these times, they are a-changin’. At the local farmer’s market for the past month, I’ve looked each Saturday at tiny boxes of beautiful, colorful, perfectly formed Nasturtium blossoms. Did I dare? Oh, no, that’s just too strange. Then I googled it. Oh. Maybe it’s not so unusual to use nasturtiums in food.