Tips & Tricks: Revive your wilted lettuce or flowers

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Hello fellow foodies! I’ve been living in New York with my boyfriend Chris for over a month now. We live in a cute apartment in Manhattan’s East Village, and there is a lot of cooking going on! Not just by me…Chris is also a foodie. Yeah! He cooks a lot (and recently discovered his love for pickles!)… I mainly bake burgers, New York cheesecakes, banana pulp cakes etc. all items that I’ll post on the blog soon! It’s great to be together after so many months apart. One day he brought home flowers…three super beautiful hydrangeas. If you look below you’ll see the picture I took when I received them.

Wilted hydrangeas

Dried hydrangeas are nice right? I think so. That made me decide to try hanging the hydrangeas upside down in order to dry them and preserving them for a longer period of time. That’s what you do when you want to have dried roses, right?! Easy does it. The next morning I ask myself…”What was I thinking? Who says drying hydrangeas works the same as drying roses, particularly in a super hot and humid New York?”

Making assumptions is never a good idea.

Revive your wilted lettuce

I can’t stand it and I think of the lettuce liven-up-trick. “Would this trick also work with flowers?” I wonder.
The lettuce liven-up-trick:

Let’s say that you want to make a salad. You have some lettuce left in your refrigerator, but it’s wilted lettuce… if the lettuce is not in the worst shape, I would never throw it away (zero waste!). Even though you could still make a pesto (using arugula instead of basil), you can also “fix” the lettuce:

Put your lettuce in a bowl with ice water and leave it there until it starts becoming strong again. Wait 15 minutes or so and voila! It works brilliantly. Your lettuce will probably be more beautiful and stronger than it was when you bought it.

Now the hydrangeas…

I thought I’d experiment applying the lettuce liven-up-trick to hydrangeas:

Three hydrangeas. One sadder than the other.

I soak the hydrangeas in the sink with ice water….in this case, I decide 15 minutes is not enough so I let them soak for a few hours. Later that night, I notice that one of the flowers had started to bloom. I am secretly very proud. The other two are nearly as weak as they were before so I leave them in the ice water overnight. The next morning Chris wakes me up and tells me that all three flowers are in full bloom again. And this is the result… Pretty amazing right?!

Share Love,
Marleen

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