If you like seasonal eating — and let’s face it who doesn’t? — then squash blossoms should be on your radar about now.

Yes, squash blossoms, those vivid yellow flower buds from whence the tender gourd emerges.

What are they, exactly? Well, for one thing, they’re the reproduction organs of a plant that can have sex with itself? How cool is that?

To be more specific:

Blossoms, or flowers, are the reproductive organs of plants, haha, gross. All fruits begin with flowers, though not all flowers become fruits. The basics: A flower is fertilized, which triggers the formation of a fruit, which is designed to be delicious and full of seeds so animals will eat the fruits and shit out the seeds somewhere else, thus allowing the plant to produce offspring. Many plants are capable of having sex with themselves in order to fertilize their flowers, but some plants have a harder time doing that than others.

There are a few different categories of flowers, relating to their gender. Monoecious plants have both male and female flowers on the same plant, which means it can fertilize itself. Dioecious plants have only one gender, male or female, and female plants must be fertilized by a separate male plant.

Within the monoecious category, we have a botanical difference between “perfect” and “imperfect” flowers. Perfect flowers have both male and female parts within the same flower; tomatoes and peppers are both perfect plants, botanically. This is one reason why tomatoes and peppers are very good choices for tiny shitty urban gardens; you don’t need to worry about pollination or, really, anything but sunlight and water. In both tomatoes and peppers, the fruit thrusts right through the center of the flower. (ELV would add: “…as it breathlessly heaves and disgorges its turgid mass into an emission of life.” Whew. I think I need a cigarette.)

Regardless of how the darn things get made, all we know is that this by-product has a fresh, distinctive, floral sweetness to it that makes it emblematic of summer eating.

And the two best examples of the form we’ve come across this summer are the squash blossom omelet at PublicUs (at the top of the page), and Brett Uniss’s ricotta-stuffed, tempura-fried, and caponata-enhanced beauties at B&B Ristorante: