Cooking with Roses: How to Use Rose Petals, Leaves and Hips

Reader Contribution by Leda Meredith
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Rose hips are what rose flowers grow up to be: they are the fruit of the same plants in the Rosa genus that grace parks, gardens, and front yards with beautiful flowers throughout the summer. And as well as being tasty, they bring a hefty dose of vitamin C to the table.

Rose hips contain a whopping 2000 mg of vitamin C per 100 grams of fruit. That vitamin content goes down some if you expose the rose hips to heat while you are making jam or tea, but enough remains to boost your C intake. If you want to preserve as much of the vitamin content as possible, try making infused rose hip vinegar (recipe below) with the raw fruit. You can also make rose hip freezer jam with the raw hips. If you had kept an eye on any single rose this past summer, you would have noticed that once it dropped its petals the base of the former flower began to swell into a green orb. That was a rose hip in the making.

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