Cook with botanical ingredients for stunning visuals and delicious flavors—and let your creativity blossom!

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

Loria shares how to get brilliantly colorful results from all-natural ingredients, your guide to natural food coloring from plants, such as a gorgeous amethyst spread made from wilted purple cabbage and blended with nuts, which turns bright pink with the squeeze of a lemon. But Loria’s use of botanicals brings value far beyond just the visual—she is skilled at incorporating them in ways that make the most of their true 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. Breakfasts; appetizers; soups and salads; breads; vegetables; pasta and grains; meat, poultry, and seafood; desserts; and beverages all get floral enhancements, with seasonal recipes including:

Rainbow Coconut Granola
Floral Summer Rolls
Gardenscape Focaccia
Botanical Steamed Tamales Filled with Hibiscus Jackfruit
Basil Flower Eggplant in Hoisin Sauce
Rose Pistachio Verdant Bars
Flower-Pressed Shortbread Cookies
Prickly Pear Cocktail

Eat Your Flowers shows you how to transform botanical ingredients—root to stem—into recipes that are a pleasure to make, eat, and share.