I just love the wild and twisting shapes, the intense, slippery flavors, and the bright colors of the late summer garden.

A good late summer garden in Florida should look and feel like anything could happen, like a loud Saturday night party scene.  The crickets and cicadas blare their loud music day and night, and the early morning humidity hangs heavily like remnants of a fog machine.

The bright flowers of zinnias, marigolds, cosmos, and tithonia blaze out of the jungly depths like multicolored street lights, illuminating the deep shadows cast against the towering growth by the late summer sun.   Indeed, you never know just what to expect when you’re stepping into such a garden.

Rambling pumpkins, strangling vines, brilliant colors, and feelings of awe, intensity, and chaos rule the garden space. Everything pushes the edges and boundaries. You try to clear weeds and they wrap themselves around you like the long tendrils of the Green Man’s beard, calling you into the wild..  Paths vanish. Gourds and Suyo Long cucumbers lurk in the foliage like bloated green hippos and small, spiny crocodiles, getting larger and scarier every hour. Rows disappear. Okra turns into a weapon.  Containment is futile.

You have to succumb, release,  let go, let the green wildness wrap around you and twist you along in the dance of abundance.

One of the most beautiful plants in the summer garden is blue butterfly pea.  It doesn’t have a remarkable flavor all on its own (rather neutral – maybe a little beany), but the gorgeous blue color it adds to tea, salads, (soups? I haven’t tried), and grain dishes is only the ornamental side. It is also loaded with anti-aging pigments and things like that.  It seems to me the garden gives us these protective foods at the season when the sun radiation is the strongest, and the heat is so stressful.

Other than tea, I haven’t seen a great recipe for blue butterfly pea. The tea is amazing, mind you. Gorgeously blue, like blue Gatorade – like those gross frozen ice pops that come in tubes of plastic and turn kids mouths obscenely blue, it looks like it must be fake. You cannot possibly imagine that color coming from something hand gathered by an old hippie in a food forest, but it does.

My favorite way to use blue butterfly pea this year is to cook it into rice. It makes the most gorgeous rice – blue as a summer sky.

SKY BLUE STICKY RICE

25 blue butterfly pea flowers
1 1/4 cup of water
3 cups of short grain rice
2 extra cups of water for cooking

1. Wash the rice. I like to do this in a bowl with a whisk. I put the rice in the bowl, cover with water by a couple of inches, and whisk it around like I’m making whipped cream. The water turns cloudy, and i pour it off after a minute and fill it up again. I repeat about 3 times, and then cover the rice with water and set aside to soak while I cook the butterfly pea.
2. Put the flowers in a pot with the 1 1/4 cup of water, and bring to a boil. Cook for a minute, and then remove from heat and strain. Press the water out of the flowers to get all the blue color out.

3. Drain the rice a final time. Put it into a cooking pot with a good lid. Add 1 cup of the blue water,  and 2 cups of regular water (you can add more of the blue if you have it – you just need 3 cups of liquid total).

4. Cook rice on medium with the lid on until it boils. Turn the heat down to low and simmer for about 10 more minutes before lifting the lid.

5.  Take the lid off and fluff the rice with a wet wooden spoon to let more steam off (it makes it stickier).

Enjoy! And stay cool!