| By :
Nick Vassilev
While many people know of the virtues of lavender as a natural means of scenting the home and as a source of antiseptic, stress-beating essential oil that's delectable to put in the bath, not many folk realise that you can also eat lavender and use it in your kitchen. "You can eat lavender?" is a common reaction when the topic of using lavender for culinary purposes arises... if it ever does. However, the culinary uses of lavender refer only to the dried or fresh plant. NEVER use the essential oil of lavender - or any essential oil, for that matter - in cooking. While some specialists prescribe essential oil for internal use, in general, one should not try eating or drinking the essential oils, not even just a little bit. This applies even if the herb or flower the essential oil is derived from is not poisonous and is something you use in your kitchen every day, such as lemon, clove or cinnamon. The most obvious and therapeutic place for using lavender in the kitchen is as a tea, and if you've never tried using it in cooking before, this is a good place to start. Drunk as a tea, lavender has many of the same properties as the essential oil: it's soothing and clears the airways. Dried lavender can be used to make a tea on its own, or you can mix it with other herbs. It tastes good mixed with regular China or Indian tea, either black or green. Sweeten with honey. If you're making tea with straight lavender or with China/India tea, you can add milk if you like. The next place to try is making a lavender vinegar. This can be used in marinades or as a salad dressing, or you can just keep the lavender vinegar for making your own cleaning products. To make lavender vinegar, cram a jar full of lavender and pour vinegar over the top. Leave it in a dark cupboard for a week, then strain out the vinegar and replace the old, spent lavender with fresh. Do this twice (total of three weeks to infuse, in other words). Then bottle the vinegar and use how you like for the home cleaning. White vinegar and cider vinegar are the best sorts to use. Next comes using lavender with a herb butter. Simply soften a pat of butter in the microwave or in a double boiler and add in a few teaspoons of loose lavender flowers (fresh or dried). Stir together. Blends well with either cheese or honey (but not both, of course) or on its own on toast. Lavender flowers can also be added at the last minute to jams and jellies. Apple combines well with most herbs, including lavender, but one food writer swears by adding lavender into marmalade. Lavender is good friends with rosemary, and can combine with it. It goes well with lamb and chicken, and it can be used as a marinade or as a stuffing. One Moroccan recipe calls for lamb kebabs (and you could probably get away with using beef, pork or chicken) marinated with lots of lavender and cooked over a barbecue grill which has dried lavender added to the hot coals. The fresh flowers can also be added into salads, like most edible flowers, or can be used for cake decorations. And after that, it's up to your imagination. Adding lavender into apple crumble? Using lavender water instead of rose water for Turkish delight? Added into porridge or tapioca? It's entirely up to you...
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