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A New Love: Jacques Pépin's Fast Food
Talking Him Into It - Feeding The Guy
Another Change, and Two Summer Shortcakes
« Pasta with Corn and Leek Cream Sauce | Main | A Prix Fix Present »
This weekend while I was playing houseguest in Boston, my hosts sent me to the store to buy flowers to decorate a cake. I got to browse the whole selection at Whole Foods and picked out some beautiful roses.
Of course, I myself almost never buy flowers. There are a million beautiful flower shops that I pass every day, but flowers are an expense I just can't justify if it's not a special occasion.
A few days ago on Apartment Therapy, Ali commented that in Berkeley everyone just picks flowers from their neighbors' yards. And that's basically how I grew up. You weren't supposed to loot and pillage in other people's flower patches, but taking a flower or two from a fully blooming bush was absolutely fine. Unfortunately that's not really possible in New York. The few flowering bushes you find in front of brownstones and in parks are precious and should be left alone. (When we planted a rosebush outside our basement studio and someone took the one and only bloom, we were devastated.)
Thank goodness I discovered that there is a New York variation on the theme of flowers from the side of the road. Every night the flower guys at your corner grocers and delis go through the flowers and spruce them up, and one of the things they do is throw out the roses with broken stems. After becoming friends with my local flower guy, I realized that he was only too happy to give me the buds that were destined for the trash. I took them home, trimmed the stems (or what was left of them) put them in ice water to revive them or warm water to help them open up, and floated them in a glass bowl. I had beautiful flowers and a new friend to wave to on my way home at night.
Posted by georgia to Tips on August 23, 2005 01:31 AM | permalink | Email this post
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