Breakfast With Edible Flowers by Katja Meier

Katja Meier is the person behind Breakfast with Flowers. She is a certified dietitian, trained teacher, hobby gardener and nutrition expert specialized in plant-based nutrition. She started her blog in 2016 to share her passion for healthy breakfast recipes and edible flowers. Then she created an Instagram account and started posting random photos of her breakfast on a daily base and she fell in love with food styling and food photography. Her recipes are all vegan, often gluten-free and always free of refined sugar. Her goal is to inspire people to include more plant-based whole foods into their diet. In an interview with Nature Restore, she told how she became interested in edible flowers as follows; “Since I was a little kid, I loved to spend time in the garden, picking flowers and creating flower bouquets. When I finally had my own garden, I immediately started to lay out flower beds. In the beginning, I used flowers for decorative purposes only but soon realized that many of them were actually edible. Today I always use flowers (fresh or dried) as an essential ingredient in my recipes.” She also stated her favourite flower to use in a recipe and the flower with the best flavor with these words; ” My favourite flower to add to a recipe is cornflowers, because it’s very easy to grow them and they have a mild flavor that goes well with everything. Cornflowers come in different beautiful colors – rose, purple, blue and white. Freshly picked tulip petals taste amazing, like a salad, only sweeter. Freshly picked rose petals also have a delicate flavor. In order to create these fantastic breakfast tables, she starts with picking flowers and she designs a color matching or contrasting dish around them, but sometimes it’s just the other way round. It usually takes her about 10 minutes to prepare such a tablescape and shooting takes her about 10-15 mins. She gives the following tips for the ones who likes maintaining a healthy plant-based diet; “Keep it simple. You don’t really need complicated recipes with fancy ingredients. Pasta with tomato sauce, brown rice with stir-fried vegetables or oven-baked potatoes with a big salad is just fine. Reserve vegan cakes or cookies for special occasions only; indulge in fruits instead. Minimize your oil intake – there is no other food on the planet with a higher caloric density as oil. Nuts, seeds, olives, and avocado are a much healthier source of fat.”