Nasturtiums taking over the yard? Fight back! Eat ‘em!
Seriously, nothing here will make a serious dent in a marauding nasturtium population, but you might as well use what you’ve got growing in your yard while you have it, right? They are not only beautiful, exuberant flowers, but also have a nice, peppery taste that adds interest to salads. This is well known. I’m going to offer a recipe below for what we call “nasturtium pasta,” as well as some other ideas that are a bit more arcane.
[tl;dr: one pasta recipe, pickled seeds, fresh basta with petals embedded, links to pizza, risotto and pesto, plus links to several sites with possibilities]
Now, “nasturtiums taking over your yard” is a very Californian/mild-climate assumption, I’ll admit. When I was growing up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, my Dad and we kids used to plant sort of “traditional” flowers in the spring — nasturtiums and marigolds, say — in soil that was basically a brick, and they’d get to be cute little plants with a few pretty flowers. Little round nasturtium leaves an inch or two across. Very nice. Decades later, my adult sister was visiting our California home from New York, and I drove her to the pottery studio of an old college friend of hers. As we approached, she saw a sight that she found almost disturbing: “Are those … nasturtiums???? “
Let’s just say they rejoice in the mild climate. Below are Mr pixxer’s hands, holding a lunch-sized (8”) plate and a backyard “volunteer” nasturtium leaf. They replant themselves, and in that particular year, as in many, their enthusiasm knew no bounds. We have planted them only once, and they take over every spring.
So anyway, when a recipe says “pick 10 nasturtium leaves and 10 flowers” — you have to take that with a grain of salt…
These plants grow in long vines in California, which I highly recommend cutting for decoration. Mr pixxer made a startling discovery once, while trying to draw a vase of the flowers. They move. They track the sun or something — so when you start a drawing you have a different arrangement than when you finish it.
This has the advantage that you can put them into a vase and they sweetly arrange themselves. A glass or pitcher on a sideboard can become a dramatic display.
OK, they’re edible flowers. Salads, bouquets. So, what else is new?
Pasta in a Piquant Cream Sauce (“Nasturtium Pasta” — 2 servings)
Here’s a pasta recipe I make at least once (usually more often) per nasturtium season, that we really love. It’s from The Pasta Bible, by Teubner, Rizzi, and Leng, which was a Costco impulse buy one very lucky day many years ago. It’s widely available for purchase used, online. (I linked Half Price Books b/c I have had excellent luck with their books recently — fine quality!)
My version is for two people, one of whom likes lots of pasta (so I cook 5 oz for two, instead of 4 oz). You can take most of the amounts as advisories to be played with a bit. [I can’t make this all into one “quoted” grey panel, sry. It skips the photos, so I’m skipping that usual format.]
Ingredients in bold.
Pre-prep
Clean leaves and flowers from nasturtiums. The original recipe, for 1 lb penne, says to use 10 flowers and 10 “leaves” but we know that “leaf” is too unspecific a quantity. I am not at all shy about using more flowers than called for, and leaves, too. I try to end up with about as much leaf-matter as flower-matter. Here’s how many I used most recently, near the end of our season so these leaves are on the small end. (B/c we don’t water them, being good Californians, they give up not long after the rains do.)
Pull or pinch the petals off the flowers, and julienne, or just cut in half. YMMV. Julienne the leaves. I used make long julienne strips b/c they would look cooler, but the fact is that they tangle up and all end up in one place in a bunch, so don’t leave them too long. I think I cut the leaves in half this time, and then cut crosswise to julienne.
Peel and mince a moderate clove of garlic; peel and finely chop a couple Tbsp of shallots.
Stem, seed, and mince one small red hot pepper. I use a dried one, perhaps 3” — 4” long, and perform this exercise with a rubber glove on my pepper-hand. The recipe seems to think this is a fresh pepper. Whatever you like. I think that you could easily substitute 1/8 tsp or so red pepper flakes.
Cube about 1 oz Fontina cheese. I prefer Italian fontina, such as an opinionated Fontina Valle d’Aosta or perhaps Fontal. Danish fontina seems almost unrelated — very gentle and mild, but use it if you prefer it. (The original recipe does not specify.)
Grate about 1½ Tbsp Parmagiano.
Have ready for the end: about 2/3 oz French Roquefort. I learned the hard way that the quality of the Roquefort matters in this dish. We use “Societe” brand.
Prep:
Three threads come together here: cooking the pasta, cooking the cream/cheese sauce, and cooking the savories and flowers. Sorry about the dishwashing step.
Heat 2 tsp butter in a small frying pan, and saute the shallots and garlic till translucent. Stir in nasturtiums and pepper flakes and remove immediately from heat. Set aside.
Cook 5 oz penne in boiling, salted water, according to package directions.
In a small saucepan, boil 1/3 cup heavy cream to reduce by about 1/3, and then whisk/stir in the cubed fontina, letting it melt slowly; reduce the heat to very low, add the grated Parmagiano and keep warm.
The serving bowls should be well-warmed. Also, use a bowl that can tolerate a very brief stint under the broiler. I scoop pasta water from the saucepan into the serving bowls a minute or two before the pasta is done, and let it heat the bowls, then drain the bowls and wipe with a clean cloth right before serving. You could also warm the bowls in a warming oven or not-very-hot (!!!) toaster oven.]
Preheat your broiler.
Drain the pasta and return to the saucepan. Fold in the cream/cheese sauce, and then stir in the nasturtium/savories mix. You can salt and pepper at this point, but I never do. Serve to the heated bowls. Dot with Roquefort, and place under the broiler till the Roquefort melts slightly — Watch! This happens quickly!. Garnish with nasturtium flowers, and serve immediately.
Nasturtium Pizza
I made up the pizza at left based on the penne pasta recipe above. It worked well, according to the blog post with the recipe in it. I’ll have to do this again! I used the same cheeses as are in the pasta, onion/shallot, garlic, oil, and of course, nasturtium leaves and flowers.
Since it was tomato season, I added sliced tomatoes to increase the moisture in the pizza, and we thought that was a good idea.
Here’s a link to the recipe and what I wrote up at the time about it.
Instead of ON the pasta, how about IN the pasta?
This is another idea from The Pasta Bible, which is where we learned to make our own pasta. (We use a much simpler dough recipe now: 1 cup flour, 1 egg, as little water as you can manage; sit, wrapped, 1 hour; roll.) Mr pixxer found a wonderful idea in the book: embedding flower petals and leaves, as well as herbs, in the pasta itself! Not an everyday recipe (these photos are from 2009), but very pretty and entertaining. The book instructs you to roll your dough to 1/32 to 1/16 of an inch.
Place the cleaned petals or leaves on one sheet of dough, and place a second sheet over the top. The dough must be very fresh to be sticky enough (only slightly sticky, though — regular dough). If necessary, you can mist water onto one layer.
Re-roll the pasta back to the original thickness. The petals/leaves will be stretched in the direction of the rolling. The picture above shows one of the problems — you kinda never have two sheets of pasta exactly the same size, and you can see where one edge leaves a nasturtium petal sticking out. But that just proves you made these yourself rather than buying them (where would one do this, I wonder?) Mr pixxer just cut these sheets into “maltagliate” (mahl tah lyAH tee — “badly cut”) to emphasize the pretty pasta. I’m guessing he served it with sage butter.
You can see the box for our well-loved Atlas pasta machine up there in the corner :)
Some other ideas:
Back in 2015, we were getting our backyard ready for some major construction, and large areas of volunteer/marauding (take your pick) nasturtiums had to be removed. pixxer-DIL saw all those seeds on all those plants and wondered if they could be successfully pickled. We collected a pile of them in this little herb-collecting basket, and pixxer-DIL took them over.
The next day, she returned our basket with the arrangement below, including (you can barely see it) a jar of pickled nasturtium seeds.
pixxer-DIL doesn’t have the recipe she used, but it’s likely similar to this one, using bay.
These were peppery (of course) and slightly acidic (from the vinegary brine) and sparkled up our salads nicely.
But that’s just the seeds!
A dinner using many parts of the nasturtium:
I hunted down ways to use up the nasturtiums — some of them, anyway — that we were forced to tear out from the back yard prior to construction. I found a set of recipes on Martha Stewart’s site using different parts of the plant, and four of us cooked them all. It was kind of fun, but I can’t say I was enthralled by the finished products. And actually, they weren’t all separate recipes. For example, the nasturtium pesto was intended to be served over the nasturtium risotto. Plus, the nasturtium boullion and the nasturtium butter recipes were both actually ingredients in the risotto. And the boullion is an ingredient in the butter. Whew!
Martha Stewart’s site has a faulty risotto link, but only fair to list the original pesto recipe.
- Pesto ingredients are nasturtium leaves and stems, toasted pine nuts, and olive oil.
This blog post I found has both the pesto and the risotto recipes.
- The risotto is made from arborio rice, olive oil and unsalted butter, leeks, garlic, white wine, salt, Parmagiano, plus the nasturtium boullion and the nasturtium butter.
- The nasturtium boullion is simply the calyxes of nasturtiums soaked overnight in the fridge in mineral water. The word “simply” is operative only after the calyxes are isolated!
- The nasturtium butter is made from nasturtium petals, some nasturtium boullion, unsalted butter, and lemon juice.
More stuff
I’m pretty sure those are all the things we’ve done in the pixxer house with nasturtiums, with the exception of salads, salads and more salads. A pretty little flower can always be called in as a garnish, too. I poked around on the web and found some sites that may be of interest, so here are the links and descriptions:
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Wikihow points out that the leaves make an excellent substitute for watercress. Considering what a pain in the neck it can be to clean up watercress, this might be an excellent idea.
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UrbanCultivator provides some history (no idea about accuracy) and some recipes. Commenter Russell points out that nasturtium leaves can substitute for mustard in a sandwich! Double-thick for hotter mustard :)
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GeniusKitchen thinks you should “stuff” the flowers (more like, provide creamy centers for them) with a mix of cream cheese, garlic and chives, and lemon verbena. Pretty! This is for guests, clearly.
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Yummly provides links to a positive gold mine of ideas! Perhaps you actually could make inroads on the marauding nasturtiums… There are salads, pastas, condiments, etc. I totally want to try their stuffed nasturtium leaves!
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So, what’s for dinner at your house tonight?
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