A Bouquet of Motherly Gifts

About author / Amy Powell

World traveler; gourmet 30 minute meals; lover of exotic ingredients; winner on FoodTV's Chefs vs City; graduate French Culinary Institute. Her recipes will tantalize your taste buds.

Spring is a lovely time of year for many reasons. One reason is that, unlike the “holiday season” where big events pile up back-to-back, post-Easter brings a bit of a lull in festivities until the Fourth of July. Two minor bumps while cruising the calendar occur with the celebration of the people who brought us into this world, first in May for the Moms, then in June for the Dads. And since (hopefully) we love the people, the celebrations are not so much a nuisance but rather are a nice excuse to give a little something back to those who have given us so very much.

The only problem with this is that it seems harder as we age to come up with novel gift ideas to please the parent on the receiving end. Take my mom. She is always the picture of gratitude, but how many years in a row can I get away with giving her socks? The cleverer I try to become (the avocado tree that three years later has yet to bear fruit), the more I stray from the essence of the day.

Enter new philosophy: Mother’s Day is a celebration of women who made a choice to take advantage of their womanly gifts and give birth to us whether we liked it or not. Since they used their womanly gifts we should therefore gift as womanly as possible in return. So as much as we might try to resist the clichéd feminine presents from chocolates to flowers, let’s face it, that’s what women like! And truly, chocolates and flowers (as long as they aren’t carnations) can’t ever really be bad now, can they?

This got me to thinking about food and flowers and how to roll these all into one. After all, many flowers are edible, and what a beautiful bouquet-cum-meal a flower-based Mother’s Day menu would be.

You might cook with flowers already and not even realize it. Lavender in its dried form, for instance, finds its way into Herbs de Provence, a common French dried herb mixture most often used for the seasoning of gamey meats such as lamb. Chives, which happen to be in season right now, if you let grow long enough produce alliums, little puffs of flowers that share the onion-y flavor of the long green grassy leaves that surround them. Think of how delicious a crunchy spring herb salad sprinkled with the petals of lavender alliums would be both to eat and to look at.

I can’t think of eating flowers without remembering the pivotal role that orange marigolds played in the delightful Indian movie, Monsoon Wedding. One of the many love connections in the movie involves a young man who has been hired to construct the marigold adorned setting for a backyard nuptial. He mindlessly but provocatively snacks on the marigolds as he is working to string them together into elaborate garlands. So seductive are his mouthfuls of marigolds he eventually wins the love of a young servant girl who has also been set upon to prepare for another couple’s wedding.

But most alluring of the flowers is the most classic of all: the rose. One does not have to eat mouthfuls of rose petals (although candied they are quiet nice), but can use the petals mostly as decoration in conjunction with rose water or syrup as an ingredient in a dish. For dessert, the use of rose water can add a complex dimension to what is otherwise mostly an overly cloying course. Not to mention that the visual effect of rose petals can be either romantic or simply beautiful.

If one can never go wrong with flowers and food for the main woman in our lives, then combining the two in one spectacular Mother’s Day meal would be a winning gift indeed. A flower themed meal is a gift as clever and beautiful as the mother it honors.

Serves/Makes: 4

• 8 sheets phyllo dough, defrosted
• 4 tablespoons butter
• non stick cooking spray
• 1/2 cup white sugar PLUS
• 1/4 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup water
• 1 tablespoon rose water
• 1 pint organic strawberries
• 1 tablespoon Grand Marnier (optional)
• 1 cup whipping cream
• petals from fresh picked rose, white base removed
• powdered sugar