In my recent posts, I mentioned how I was plucking my butterfly pea flowers all along the fence at the back of my house and giving them to my friends at Payung and also to another friend who said she wanted them.
Somebody commented somewhere that I could make tea with them as they would be good for my eyes. Well, I have no problem with my eyes, not dependent on glasses still even at 68 going on 69 but anyway, I went and googled and came across this link that listed the health benefits of these flowers…
I also read somewhere that I must pluck the flowers or else they will wither and grow seeds and the leaves will not grow well. No wonder I noticed that my plants were not looking too good, all the dead vines, all dried up, with lots of seeds dangling from them. Ever since I have been plucking them every day and drying them…
…the leaves have started to grow pretty well and generally, it is looking good again. Another thing that struck me is how after plucking all the flowers in a day, they would bloom with a vengeance the very next day and I would be getting more and more!
According to my friends at Payung, they could keep them in the fridge for a few days but I guess because I have been sending a whole lot to them every day, I heard they have resorted to boiling them in water to get the colour and storing that for use eventually when they cook their nasi kerabu. They probably can use them to brew tea to serve to customers but at a terrible time like this in our current deplorable situation, around 100 cases a day, I don’t think they will have a lot of customers dropping by.
My cousin in Brisbane grows these flowers too and she says that she stores them in the freezer and takes out the number she needs to boil. She says that by boiling, one will get a bluer than blue colour and it will kill whatever toxins there may be.
To dry the petals, I would pull out the middle part…
I read somewhere that that part should not be consumed. My missus said she saw online that some people may be allergic to the pollen in that part of the flower and that is why, nothing too serious. Having done that, I would arrange the petals nicely as in the above photograph to dry. If I just dump them all in a basket and put them out in the sun, they would all stick together in clumps and it would be hard to pull them apart.
I don’t know how much they are selling this at the market but I did see at a supermarket here once these dried petals being sold in small packets of 300 gm each for RM13.50. Needless to say, at the time, I was shocked by the fact that it was so expensive. However, after drying all the flowers I plucked for around a week, I can now understand why – after all this time and effort, I have only managed to collect this much…
It is such a chore but I guess good things don’t come easy.
...STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS! 