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Chives grow in the garden every year and produce many, beautiful purple blossoms.  Today, for the first time, I tried eating them.

The chive blossoms also attract bees.  I was happy to see a busy bee visiting the garden with me.

Well, it turns out that the flowers tasted good to me, too!  They taste and smell like chives, but add a different color to your plate.  I added 5 flowers to my lunch, leaving most of the blooms behind for the bees to inspect.

With lunch, I also ate up the last of my spring radishes.  Here is a picture of some radishes I ate on a previous day.

I cooked the greens with garlic and ate the radish bulbs raw.  But that was a previous day.  For today’s meal, I collected the last of my spring radishes along with the chive blossoms and returned to the kitchen to cook lunch, as shown in this video…

While this is my first time consuming chive blossoms, I regularly enjoy chives with the following foods:

• tacos
• nachos
• sprinkled over a stir fry
• in sandwiches when no onion is available
• mixed with tuna casserole
• mixed with french onion dip
• just about anything that contains cheese or sour cream

… and my favorite:

• sprinkled over a baked potato with sharp cheddar cheese and sour cream

I bet the blossoms would work with any of the foods above.

Update, Apr-21-2010

I used the blossoms again, this time on a mix of chicken and potatoes.  Here is the lunch before the blossoms:

I used 10 blossoms fresh from the garden.

And here is my plate with the blossoms sprinkled over it.

It tasted good.  The chive blossoms gave a taste very similar to onions, especially the after taste.  When I was done eating, I still could taste an onion-like flavor that lingered awhile.  The purple blossoms added flavor to an otherwise boring dish.  Besides flavor, it also added nutrients.