The Blue Voice: Butterfly Pea, Blue Rice & the Ivy's Hold
A Note on Eating Blue
This week we're opening the Throat Chakra (Vishuddha) with blue food — the rarest colour on the plate, and the most magical. One little flower, the butterfly pea, runs through the whole table: turning the milk bread sapphire at breakfast and the rice electric blue at lunch, before a squeeze of lemon turns the iced tea violet before your eyes. Blue is the colour of the voice and the truth, and this week's table speaks with a blue accent from Malaysia, Sweden, Japan and Scotland — with a sapphire pearl of caviar on top. Here's the week:
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Download this week's Recipe Card (PDF) and Shopping List (PDF) to take with you to the kitchen or the shops.
Welcome to Cook in Colour — Series 3
Week five, and the wheel turns blue — the rarest and most theatrical colour in the whole series. This is the week the table performs: bread that's blue inside, rice the colour of the evening sky, caviar like sapphires, and a royal cocktail that glows violet in the glass. Each week brings four colour-themed recipes, a cold soup from somewhere in the world, a seasonal brew, medicinal herbs in bloom, and a Celtic tree to sit with. The Ivy (Gort) month continues — its flowers have turned to berries now, feeding the birds through the coming winter.
The Throat Chakra (Vishuddha)
The Throat Chakra is the seat of the voice — truth, expression, and being heard. Its element is Ether, its colour is blue, and its seed mantra is HAM. Affirmation for the week: I speak my truth with ease. My voice is clear and kind.
This Week's Recipes
Breakfast: Japanese Blue Milk Bread
Japan's fluffy milk bread with its surprise inside: a swirl of butterfly pea powder turns the crumb a vivid sapphire blue that's only revealed when you slice through the brown crust. The pea adds colour but no taste, so it's milk bread as you love it — toasted, buttered, and quietly astonishing at the breakfast table. Get the recipe at mybluetea.com.au
Lunch: Nasi Kerabu
Kelantan's famous blue rice: jasmine rice steamed in butterfly pea brew with lemongrass, served with an ulam salad of fresh herbs, salted egg, cucumber, keropok crackers and a sweet-spicy coconut sauce, with grilled fish or fried chicken alongside. Malaysia's most beautiful plate of food, and the bluest rice on earth. Get the full recipe at elmundoeats.com For a quick weeknight version, stir the pea brew straight into the rice cooker: umamidays.com has it in fifteen minutes
Dinner: Garlic Butter Lobster Linguine
Lobster tails seared in garlic butter, folded through linguine with cream, parmesan, lemon and parsley. Every lobster is secretly a blue creature — their shells run from muddy blue to navy before the pot turns them red, and one in two million American lobsters is born electric blue. A dinner worthy of the ocean's rarest armour. Get the recipe at littlesunnykitchen.com
Supper: Blinis with Blue Caviar
Little Russian blinis, warm from the pan, topped with crème fraîche and the sapphires of the ocean: blue caviar, the naturally blue roe of wild Australian scampi, hand-harvested and brinier than sturgeon. It's the garnish the world's top restaurants serve on oysters and scrambled eggs — order it from a specialist caviar supplier online and serve it on the smallest, smartest plates you own. Get the blini recipe at bbcgoodfood.com
This Week's Brew: The Queen of Scots
I first drank an electric blue cocktail at the Balmoral, Edinburgh's grande dame on Princes Street — one sip and it was obvious what blue week's brew had to be. The Queen of Scots is the royal pour named for Mary, Queen of Scots: blended Scotch, aged Old Tom gin, lemon, honey syrup and crème de violette, shaken silky with egg white and finished with Peychaud's bitters. The crème de violette is the magic — it turns the glass electric blue-violet, and the honey carries the hedgerow into the glass. For the alcohol-free table, the butterfly pea iced tea does the same trick: brew it blue, then watch a squeeze of lemon turn it violet before the eyes. Get the Queen of Scots recipe at alscocktailclub.com · Butterfly pea iced tea at enchantedlivingmagazine.com
Cold Soup of the World: Blåbärssoppa (Sweden)
Sweden's blueberry soup, served ice cold: blueberries simmered with water and sugar, lightly thickened with cornstarch and chilled until it drinks like a fruit cup and eats like a soup. It's the classic of the Nordic ski trails, carried in thermoses through the winter — and the Swedish blåbär is our own wild blaeberry, the bilberry that shades the Scottish hills blue in high summer. Eaten cold from a mug on a bright October day, it's the bluest spoon of the week. Get the recipe at carolinescooking.com
Medicinal Herbs in Bloom
Thyme is the Throat Chakra's own herb — herbalists have prescribed it for the throat for as long as there have been throats. Its leaves are rich in antiseptic oils (thymol is named after the plant), and a thyme tea or gargle remains the classic remedy for sore throats, coughs and winter chest complaints. It's still green and harvestable in Edinburgh gardens right now, and a sprig steeped in honey is the old country cure for a lost voice — fitting work for the week of the voice itself. Rosemary is its companion on the windowsill: the great warming herb of remembrance, taken to sharpen memory and steady circulation, and the reason the ancients wore it for remembering the dead as the dark half of the year opens. Its variety the Tuscan Blue rosemary carries the week's colour in its name — a rosemary with the bluest flowers of them all, still blooming in sheltered corners of the city. Both herbs ask almost nothing of the gardener, and both belong on the blue table: thyme over the linguine, rosemary in the cocktail's rosemary twist.
What the Land is Offering Right Now
Late October is the forager's last rich week: sloes black-blue on the blackthorn and at their best after the first frost touch, rosehips fat and softening, hawthorn berries heavy on every city hedge, and the last damsons still hanging in the allotments. The apple glut is at its peak — bags of them on neighbours' walls — and the ivy's black berries are ripening for the winter thrushes. It's a quietly blue week on the hedge too: the sloe is the bluest thing Scotland forages, and this week's cold soup remembers that the Swedish blåbär is our own blaeberry. Take a basket on a dry afternoon, pick above knee height, well away from the roadside, and leave the lower branches for the birds.
Where to Meditate: Throat Chakra
The Throat Chakra asks for sound and space. Element: Ether. Colour: blue. Seed mantra: HAM. Start your week with Lorna's Sunday morning chakra workshop on Instagram: @lorna.mckey — the perfect place to open the throat before the week begins. For a blue meditation, go where Edinburgh speaks. The sea says one thing at Portobello — walk to the tide line and hum with it. The Water of Leith says another at Dean Village, where the weirs never stop. Dawn on the Meadows is all birdsong before the traffic wakes, Blackford Hill holds the wind in its pines, and the Hermitage of Braid keeps the burn's small conversation under the alders. Chant HAM at the water, or simply listen — the throat opens as much in silence as in song. The trees do their quiet work as you go: time among them measurably lowers stress and settles the nervous system. The map below keeps the full living calendar wheel of Edinburgh's Ogham trees turning through the Ivy month, so every meditation spot has its healing trees nearby.
Tap any pin to get Google Maps directions. Open the interactive street map →
The Ivy (Gort)
The Ivy month deepens into its third week, and the flowers that fed the last bees of autumn have become berries — black-purple clusters ripening now on every old wall, and the single greatest winter feast for the blackbirds and thrushes of Edinburgh. The ivy is the tree that keeps the green when everything else lets go, and there's a throat-chakra lesson in how it lives: ivy doesn't shout. It holds on, quietly, and holds everything else together. You still won't find ivy in the council's street-tree register — it climbs, it doesn't stand — but it's on the walls of the Old Town right now, berries gleaming. The ivy heart of Chesil's Court is still on its wall, photographed below by Sharon. Go and stand under it and hear what the city sounds like when you stop talking.
A Sacred Table in Blue
This week is a feast week — set the table properly and let the blue do the talking. The milk bread sliced thick on a wooden board with the swirl showing, nasi kerabu in wide bowls with the herbs in separate little dishes so everyone can build their own, the lobster linguine in the middle of the table, and the blinis with their sapphire pearls passed round last, with the chilled blueberry soup in small cups and a Queen of Scots in a coupe glass at every place. Save the iced tea for the drivers and the children — it turns violet at the table, which is exactly the kind of trick that gets a young person to drink something good for them.
Until Next Week
Next Sunday the wheel turns indigo: the Third Eye Chakra (Ajna) — and blue corn tlacoyo is already waiting on next week's table. Recipes land here every Sunday at 9am, selected each week by Sharon for thenofussgourmet.com. Recipes selected each week by Sharon for thenofussgourmet.com
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