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Edible Flowers: The Red Velvet Rose of Love

By Melissa in Panama

I discovered flowers were edible back in my early pre-chef adventures, when I had the perfect height to hide in my great grandmother's garden and eat her favorite miniature white roses without being found. Those were great days full of pure innocent adventure and joyful rewards from mother and father nature.

The diversity and mystery of our tropical rainforest always captured my attention. Learning the value of natural medicine through my life, the healing benefits of plants and flowers, have helped me develop a natural instinct to preserve the traditional knowledge that has been carried by our cultures over the ages.

In the kitchen, this beautiful flower has a very important roll. It might sound a little odd because of the rose's romantic connotations, but in fact, roses have been eaten since ancient times. Romans were used to sprinkle rose petals on food, the table, and all over the banquet hall.

Rose petals, fresh, dried and crystallized can be added as a garnish to a salad, made into an infusion for tea and other beverages, desserts, as well as prepared into candies, marmalade, sauces, rose sugar, and soups. Rose petals, rose water and rose syrup are still widely used in the cuisines of the Middle East. Greek baklava, for instance, is originally served with a drizzle of rose syrup.

The best quality flowers for consumption are the young and fresh. Consumers have to be cautious to eat only flowers that were produced for that purpose and to avoid flowers from retail florists where they may have been treated with modern systemic pesticides and chemicals not intended for consumption; they have made the flowers highly toxic.

For some edible flowers, it is important to eat only the petals to avoid the bitter taste found in the rest of the flower. But, when it comes to roses, petals from all varieties are edible as well as the leaves which are used in some concoctions with curative properties that are prepared in Latin America.

The following excerpt has been extracted from "Rosita Arvigo's: Rainforest Remedies, One Hundred Healing Herbs of Belize":

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The Chopstick Chronicles: Ten to the Dozen

Taiwan's produce markets sell eggs loose. You can buy as many fresh chicken or duck eggs as you like. The supermarkets, like supermarkets everywhere, sell eggs in cartons. I must have brought eggs from the supermarket twenty times before I realised that a Taiwan egg carton is exactly two eggs short of a dozen. Eggs are sold ten to a carton.

The association of dozen with eggs is so strong in my mind that the two words almost seem glued together. I certainly never questioned this, until the day came when I needed exactly ten eggs. After I had prepared whatever dishes I was making, I went to put the remaining two eggs from the carton into the fridge but found they had vanished. What followed was five minutes of utter confusion before I decided to count the cavities in the empty carton. "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten … ten?" No wonder a dozen eggs had always seemed cheap.

by Stephen, Taiwan

Late Fall Hike

Early morning hike 25-Nov-05, Cedar Mtn. (Utah)

Daikoku-sama Festival

by Obachan

Local kids performed traditional dances on a river bank to entertain Shinto gods.
November 23, 2005
Sugimoto Shrine in Ino town,
Kochi, Japan

Original post

The Chopstick Chronicles: Book Review

The Food of China by E. N. Anderson

One of the Key Works on Chinese Food History

Published in the late 1980s, The Food of China remains one of the key modern works on Chinese food history. This was the first book I read on Chinese food. That was a mistake, if only because the book is so dense with information that the reading experience was quite overwhelming at the time. So if you are a novice like I was, start with something lighter such as Francine Halvorsen's The Food and Cooking of China before taking the deep plunge with this more academic book. But E. N. Anderson remains on of the two or three authoritative references in my bookshelf that I know I will be reaching for many years to come.

by Stephen, Taiwan

d.i.y. art

Try your mouse at art
A _Javascript application, simply use your mouse to draw, and clear the screen with a click.

http://eigelb.at/HP/Links/SpecialEffects/Grappa/BlueRandom/index.html

Autumn Beauty

by Obachan

Sunset

Just in case you havent seen this on spittoonextra - shame on you - a snap taken through the window right in front of me; leaning over the monitors and wide desk, without spilling the coffee...

A dramatic range of colours.

[Andrew Barrow taken with a Canon EOS350D on auto landscape settings]

Young Saturniid

Saturniid

Paris Artists' Ateliers

In "la Miroiterie", a collective artist studio in Menilmontant

There is something you should not miss if you are interested in Art and stay in Paris at this time of the year . Every year at the end of summer , a group of artists working in the Menilmontant neighbourhood organizes three days of "portes ouvertes" (open doors) with visitors welcomed in the ateliers, to see the works , the places , and chat with the artists . The event is very well planned, with massive printing of a detailed map of the neighbourhood with exact locations of the studios . The event takes place in the vicinity of Menilmontant street , in the 20th arrondissenent, a district wich still retains today its popular parisian touch and was immortalized through famous photographers works like the ones by Willy Ronis . Even today, when you walk across this part of Paris , you can often feel the ghosts of this bygone era, wich most of us know only through the photographs .

Frederick Holmes, who is from New York

The first artist I spoke to was Frederick Holmes . It was at "la Miroiterie" a defunct mirror factory transformed into a collection of ateliers . I was taking pictures and we talked together , that's when I asked where he was from . He was leaving soon for a few days in N.Y. before coming back here .
I love these "portes ouvertes" because you can not only speak with artists, but also visualize living and working spaces in the back alleys of this old Paris neighbourhood that you can't even imagine  when you walk in the street . And it is quite refreshing to look at the decors and  the details in the different studios ( the view on the right was taken in another studio a few blocks away ).