Eat Your Flowers (Loria Stern)

For most of us, “eat your flowers” might mean an edible blossom decorating a restaurant dessert on a night out. For Loria Stern, it is a way to bring her whole garden into the kitchen, to play with colors and flavors, and make every dish beautiful. She incorporates natural plant dusts, pressed and fresh blooms, and naturally vibrant herbs and veggies into her cooking for playful, gorgeous, and nourishing meals. In Eat Your Flowers, she invites you to take advantage of nature’s 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.

In this celebration of natural components, Loria shares how to get brilliantly colorful results usually only acquired through chemical-laden ingredients, such as wilted purple cabbage blended with nuts into a beautiful amethyst spread that magically turns bright pink with a squeeze of lemon. But Loria’s use of botanicals brings value far beyond just the visual—she is a master at incorporating them in ways that make the most of their natural 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.