Some years we're eating quite a lot from our garden by the end of May. Not so much this year. It's been very cool and rainy for the entire month of May. Even the kale and chard have been sluggish. What I do have in abundance right now, though, are chives and chive blossoms. So, I've been brainstorming different ways to use them in meals. Here's what I've been doing with the chive blossoms:
I began with making chive blossom vinegar. Each year I make two or three kinds of flavored vinegar. Chive blossom is always one of them. I also make a green herb vinegar (usually rosemary and/or thyme). And some years I make a fruity vinegar (plum, blackberry, raspberry, or blueberry). Flavoring plain white vinegar is both inexpensive and extremely easy. And having a variety of flavored vinegars on hand throughout the year provides a head-start in making salad dressings from scratch. The above is one week old chive blossom vinegar. I'll leave the blossoms infusing in the vinegar for another three weeks before straining out the blossoms and decanting the liquid into a bottle. BTW, I use repurposed commercial pickle jars for the infusing process. One of the problems many folks have with reusing pickle jars is the vinegar odor is sometimes hard to eliminate from those jars. Well, no problem when making a flavored vinegar, right?
I've also been adding chive blossoms to salads. Monday night I made a lentil, barley, greens, and chive blossom salad. The blossoms have a fresh onion flavor when raw.
We did burgers for dinner this weekend. I'm down to the last few whole onions, and I don't want to spend too much money on more onions until I can buy a 50-lb sack of the new crop in late summer. In place of sliced onions on our burgers, I made a 1000 Island type dressing for the buns, subbing chive blossoms for the relish I might normally use. The chive blossoms added a mild oniony flavor to the burger toppings.
I've also been cooking the chive blossoms. Cooking the blossoms mellows the oniony flavor. This is a potato and chive blossom soup. I used about 2 cups of fresh chive blossoms, cooked in almost a quart of veggie stock. I added about 1 cup of potato flakes, salt, and pepper to the soup. I simmered for about 15 minutes. At that point I removed the pan from the heat and allowed it to cool for 10 minutes. Then I pureed the soup in a pitcher blender. I estimate this soup cost about 25 cents (for the potato flakes) and made enough for 4 servings. This could also be made with leftover mashed potatoes or 1 potato diced and simmered in the stock. My stock for this soup was also a bargain. Last week, I peeled 7 large carrots to make a bucket of carrot sticks for snacking. I saved all of the peels and used them to make a stock. After simmering and then straining, I had about 1 quart of carrot stock, which I kept in the fridge until I made the soup over the weekend.
So far, these are the ways I've found to use my abundance of chive blossoms. I'll continue to seek out new uses over the coming week or two. Using what we've been given and grateful for it.
