*Disclosure: This post is sponsored by Burt’s Bees. I am being compensated to develop a recipe and share information about the Wild For Bees Campaign with you; all opinions expressed here are 100% mine.
This week I am teaming up with the folks from Burt’s Bees to bring awareness to the plight of the honeybee. Bees are in trouble, my friends, and that means we are, too: the stark reality is that one-third of our food supply (including much of our healthiest produce and perhaps surprisingly: coffee and cocoa) will disappear if the bees do. This issue hits close to home for me because the bees I was keeping died this past winter.
Through the Wild For Bees Initiative, Burt’s Bees wants to encourage us all to celebrate bees! Wild For Bees is a resource where you can see what honeybees are all about and learn how to help them thrive. You can also find numerous bee-pollinated recipes created by beekeeping chefs.
As part of this campaign, I was asked to come up with my own recipe featuring mostly pollinated ingredients. My garden is brimming with beautiful strawberries and roses right now, so I decided to blend the two into a somewhat non-traditional strawberry rose lassi, a yogurt-based drink popular in India.
Use the ripest organic strawberries you can find for this recipe, preferably from your own garden or your local Farmer’s Market. Bees do best with chemical-free food and so do we! As for the rose petals, these are completely optional. I sneak edible flowers into recipes all the time for their nutritive/medicinal qualities, but in all honestly, the fresh rose petals don’t add tons of flavor here. If you do want to use them, make sure they have not been sprayed with any chemicals (again, organic plants are the healthiest for the bees and for us); another option is to add a few drops of rosewater to your lassi. Should you decide to skip all things related to rose, you can add a pinch of cardamom to your lassi, if you like (cardamom is also pollinated by bees).
