so many of us grow squash in our backyards or even pick it up at the
farmers market or at the grocery store but did you know that you can cook with
the blossom and that they're available at these places plus you can find them
online today on Colorado martini living I'm going to show you how to make
blossom soup so good and nutritious have you ever thought about the parts of the
plants that we eat we love the leaves in the form of lettuce we eat the roots or
tubers in the form of potatoes and carrots we even eat the stalk such as
celery or rhubarb and we even like to eat bark oh my goodness if you're like
me I'm in love with cinnamon well that comes from the inner bark of a tree but
if you ever thought about flowers but flowers do we do we need any and how
nutritious are they well in this series edible flowers I'm going to show you how
to cook and harvest them and today on edible flowers I'm going to
teach you how to make a squash blossom soup oh my goodness it's so good so you
can actually buy these online you can get them canned or there's a brand out
there goes them in the jar I've actually never used those and I'm probably going
to I'm very curious it's a lot cheaper than buying the blossoms online I'm
putting links down below where you can get those and we appreciate if you use
those links because it helps support this channel you can also you know no
matter your own garden or friends garden or you can go to your local farmers
market and see if they have them there and if they don't approach the farmer
and tell them that you're looking for squash blossoms and if you could get
some from him and he'd be more than happy to pick them for you you know so
all you have to do is ask if they you know don't have them there you can
probably go buy the farm and pick them up or tell me you'll come pick them up
the following Saturday or the the next farmers market if you don't have farmers
market near you ask your grocer if maybe they can order them for you and then
again there's the online option and I have the links down below for the
flowers I'm gonna look at the back ends and you
can see that these are males they don't have a fruit growing on the bottom and
then I would cut them about right here and then put the stem in water just like
you would any other flower here's one that's fallen off as you I mean I could
use this one easily let's see if we can find one that's got that's a female so
this one who originally had a flower on it but it the buds falling off the tip
but she usually will see this on the back end of the flower I think I see
some better female see if you look right down here you can see you can see that
that one's female because it has the fruit going on the back end
and then same with that one let's see if we can get this and focus that one right
there so you can see the fruit now I picked them to you know make something
out of these are all males that are in here you usually need a lot more than
this usually recipes call for about 12 to 24 so my girlfriend just brought me
these amazing male flowers off of squash plants this one is off a patty pan and
this one I believe is from a pumpkin a sweet pumpkin and they're all males so
in other words they're not developing any kind of fruit and then she's got
some Sookie nee zucchini ones in here so I'm gonna go ahead and make a soup out
of these so I'm roasting this pepper and I've got it on one of my flat irons you
can do this in an iron skillet or another pan but it works best in an iron
skillet so I have this on on a high heat and I'm just gonna keep turning this and
you can see that it's blistering if I felt close you can really see the
blisters and what the reason you do this is to
peel the pepper but I personally like the flavor of the roasting and I love it
in my cooking so I don't really kill much of it off even when I'm making a
chile relleno because I want this to really have some good flavor I kind of
take a spatula and push it down to give it even more so you can see it's gotten
really blustery and I'm kind of making that popping sound and that's about you
know you could take the skin off but I personally just love that flavor so you
want to cut up two stalks of celery to medium sized zucchinis this is the
pepper that we roasted all chopped up and then I always shred my carrots I
actually bought these packaged already shredded if you do buy them that way
make sure you rinse them well even if they're pre-washed always winsome this
anything when you get it home no matter what it is aways clean up under cold
water
and then once the butter is melted we are going to add our chopped red onions
purple kind they're sweeter onion give a lot of flavor to the soup I've also
already added two stalks of chopped celery so the next thing you're gonna
put in once the onions have cooked in the celery you've cooked for about six
minutes and brown is some Yukon Gold potatoes so you cotton ball just has
more of a big yellow tip to it and what's nice about these is that they're
very creamy so we're gonna use these to help thicken the soup if you're trying
not to eat root vegetables because your keto leave out the carrots and you can
replace this with some other kind of thickening agent that you can have on
your diet another healthier alternative but it is
a root vegetable is a turnip a turnip will also act as a thickening agent if
you're not eating potatoes so we're going to go ahead and cube these and
they'll be part of our soup
so our onions and so we have been cooking and I has browned them for about
they've been cooking for six minutes and I've let them Brown a bit to give them
some flavor so now we're gonna remove half of this onion mixture and set aside
and it's gonna go back into our soup later and then we're gonna leave half of
the mixture in here for flavor when we blend all this so the next thing we're
gonna add is four cups of our chicken broth now this is low-sodium chicken
broth I can't low-sodium because it's it is
salted with either table salt or some kind of chemicals and I don't like table
salt because of all the chemicals in it so I'm gonna be adding my own salt and
I'm going to be using Himalayan which is very high in nutrients and doesn't have
all the chemicals in it but you can also use sea salt or a Celtic salt or kosher
salt and those also don't have chemicals in it anti-caking agents so we just put
in the broth and now we're going to put in our cubed Yukon potatoes
and we're just er this up
and we're going to bring this to a boil and cover and let it simmer for about 20
minutes so basically what we're doing is we're cooking the potatoes and that
we're going to end up blending these with an immersion blender so while our
broth is boiling we're going to go ahead and prepare the blossoms so we're gonna
remove these stems and we are going to remove these back leaves behind the
blossoms these are called the c-pulse and so they're these kind of wavy leaves
are on the back end so I am just going to chop off the back and it's okay if
the blossom gets you and erect in the process because they're going to be
boiled to anyways we're also inside here we're going to be removing this
statement which is the male portion of the plants and if you were using the
female which you don't really want to use because that's the fruit of your
plant and so you don't want to ruin your harvest but we're gonna remove this out
to where we're just we have kind of a hollow hole here and we just have the
leaf part itself or the UM the petal part we're going to do this with all 24
of these blossoms now this can also be done by hand you can just kind of pull
off the back make sure that you get all the pieces off and you really
want these back petals off because they they do have like a little bit of a
thorn on them now that you remove the seed pull and the stamen and the stems
we're going to slice these into small strips now I refrigerated these
overnight my girlfriend gave them to me yesterday and I wasn't able to make the
soup last night so I just put them in a sealed bag and put them in the
refrigerator and they stayed pretty you know pretty much intact but I wouldn't
leave them in any longer because they start to brown and especially if you're
going to be stuffing these with cheese and deep-frying them which isn't a whole
nother recipe I would when you if you're gonna do that I would use them
immediately but I knew I was making soup so I knew they'd be okay overnight now
if you were to taste these they're they really don't have that strong of a
flavor and they have a hint of the squash flavor so I have patty-pan squash
in here I have sugar pumpkin which is the type of small pumpkins that you use
for like pumpkin pie or you know just to get the pumpkin mash and we also have
some zucchini flowers in here so when I taste them
you know they basically just taste like the squash plant they come from but not
very strong so now we're gonna remove our lid and we're going to add half the
sliced blossoms and we're gonna cook them for about three minutes so we're
gonna put in half the amount I'm actually doing a little bit more than
half the amount so we're gonna let them cook in here in the potato soup mixture
for about three minutes to soften them and now we're gonna break this all up
with an immersion blender which is just basically a hand blender if you don't
have one of these they're they're so awesome I'll put a link down below in
the description on where you can get one of these but you just basically put this
in and it totally breaks everything up just like you would use a blender so if
you don't have one of these just um you're gonna break this all apart you
can put it in a blender in batches and then when you're done you're gonna put
the mixture back in here so you want to blend and you know pulverize all these
in some kind of blender if you have a plastic blender you know the blender
itself is plastic be very careful because you can actually destroy your
blender on because this is a hot mixture I would hope you have a class 1 and that
will you're not break so now we're going to
add our zucchini and our carrots and the roasted pepper and then we're also going
to add the reserved onions and celery and we're going to stir all this up
and bring it to a boil then turn it down to simmer and we're going to simmer it
for 15 minutes so or until the vegetables are tender we want our
zucchini to break apart and our carrots to be tender so now we're going to add 1
cup of milk this has been simmering for about 25 minutes 2:30 until the zucchini
was translucent we're gonna put in the rest of the blossoms and our pan and
stir up and we're gonna let this cook for 3 to 5 more minutes so now we're
going to add some seasoning we're going to add a teaspoon of salt and we're
gonna use the Himalayan salt okay and we're also going to put in some 1/2 a
teaspoon of pepper stir that in and we're gonna put a teaspoon of curry
all right so we let that simmer for just a couple more minutes we're gonna turn
off our heat and then we're going to add our whipping cream that are known as
heavy cream okay and now I give you your purple awesome soup you can serve it
right away if you'd like or it refrigerate swell or you can even freeze
it