This festive season has got me reminiscing about my childhood and the good old days when the weather was fairer tempered, nature more appreciated and life less complicated.
These days everything is about packaging so food doesn’t just serve to delight the tummy, it’s got to delight the eyes as well. That means the more colours and the brighter they are the better! Which coherently also means more toxic because we’re talking about the use of synthetic food dyes!
Just as in nature where those vibrant coloured frogs are lethal little creatures of the rainforest, well so are the hyper-coloured cupcakes of our concrete jungles.
So for those of us who care about how harmful synthetic food dyes are to our health and that of our loved ones (especially the children- kids are suckers for colours), we’ll go out and make sure we buy bottles of ‘natural and organic’ food dye.
But it wasn’t always so easy. Back then you probably couldn’t just go down to the store and buy ‘health’ off the shelf. If you wanted natural, you made it yourself with your own hands. It was a task but a very rewarding one.
I remember how we had a bed full of these lovely blue flowers called butterfly peas or clitoria flowers (in Malay it’s called Bunga Telang). They were always an amazing dark blue almost purple in colour.
Easy to grow creeper plants, it’s a perennial so the flowers blossom effortlessly all year round. We grew it on the ground in a flower bed without giving it any creeping host because it was much neater and prettier that way, but I’ve been told that the plant would flower more if allowed to climb.
I loved the sight of them in the garden (remember I said I had that odd love for all things purple stage?) and it was fun using the petals to make blue food dye. It was tough work but I loved the colour so no complains.
As with anything natural, you need a lot of it to make the teensiest amount of extract. If I remember correctly 1 to 1 1/2 cups of petals would only give you about 1 tbsp of blue extract.
Now, I’m not sure how other people do it because I’ve heard some extract through boiling dried flowers but in my family, we were taught to pluck the fresh flowers, wash them clean, blot them dry then pound them in a mortar with a pestle.
The flower dye is organic and safe yet these days you rarely find them being used anymore. Maybe it’s because there’s the easier option of buying colours in a bottle or maybe we just can’t make them anymore because the flowers are becoming so hard to find (people have stopped growing them), but whatever the reason the bottom line is, it’s a shame and our loss.
Flower dyes would allow us the luxury of eye candy foods whilst sustaining our health and the environment.
Image source: Herbalistics.com
