Grow Cook Eat: A Food Lover's Guide to Vegetable Gardening, Including 50 Recipes, Plus Harvesting and Storage Tips

Grow Cook Eat: A Food Lover's Guide to Vegetable Gardening, Including 50 Recipes, Plus Harvesting and Storage Tips

Grow Cook Eat: A Food Lover's Guide to Vegetable Gardening, Including 50 Recipes, Plus Harvesting and Storage Tips

Grow Cook Eat: A Food Lover's Guide to Vegetable Gardening, Including 50 Recipes, Plus Harvesting and Storage Tips

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Overview

From sinking a seed into the soil through to sitting down to enjoy a meal made with vegetables and fruits harvested right outside your back door, this gorgeous kitchen gardening book is filled with practical, useful information for both novices and seasoned gardeners alike. Grow Cook Eat will inspire people who already buy fresh, seasonal, local, organic food to grow the food they love to eat. For those who already have experience getting their hands dirty in the garden, this handbook will help them refine their gardening skills and cultivate gourmet quality food. The book also fills in the blanks that exist between growing food in the garden and using it in the kitchen with guides to 50 of the best-loved, tastiest vegetables, herbs, and small fruits. The guides give readers easy-to-follow planting and growing information, specific instructions for harvesting all the edible parts of the plant, advice on storing food in a way that maximizes flavor, basic preparation techniques, and recipes. The recipes at the end of each guide help readers explore the foods they grow and demonstrate how to use unusual foods, like radish greens, garlic scapes, and green coriander seeds.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781570617317
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
Publication date: 01/17/2012
Pages: 304
Sales rank: 441,375
Product dimensions: 8.50(w) x 10.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Willi Galloway is an award-winning radio commentator and writer who lives and gardens in Portland, Oregon. She writes about kitchen gardening and seasonal cooking on her popular blog, DigginFood.com, and pens the weekly column, "The Gardener," on Apartment Therapy's Re-Nest blog. Each Tuesday morning, Willi offers vegetable gardening advice on Seattle's popular NPR call-in show, Greendays. She also teaches a joint gardening and cooking class with James Beard award-nominated chef Matthew Dillon at the Corson Building in Seattle and hosts an online garden-to-table cooking show, Grow. Cook. Eat., with her husband, Jon. Willi was the West Coast Editor of Organic Gardening magazine from 2003 to 2010. The author lives in Portland, OR.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction
 
“Without a kitchen garden—that plot of land on which one grows herbs, vegetables, and some fruit—it is not possible to produce decent and savory food for the dinner table.”
—ANGELO PELLEGRINI
 
This book came about because of a radish.
 
I discovered that radishes made seedpods—and that I could eat them—entirely by accident. I simply forgot to harvest a few rows of the spicy little roots. They grew large and woody, their foliage stretching up toward the sky. I thought all was lost, but the radishes had a surprise in store. They rewarded my inattention with delicate pink flowers followed by pods that looked like fat raindrops perched atop slender stems.
 
The appearance of something so pretty and unexpected gave me pause. On impulse, I snapped off a pod and popped it into my mouth. Crunchy, spicy, nutty, and decidedly radishy, that pod changed my perspective on kitchen gardening. I looked around, suddenly aware of all sorts of roots, leaves, blossoms, and seeds I’d never before considered as food, and asked myself a simple question: What else can I eat?
 
Fava greens, fennel pollen, kale flower buds, green coriander seed, carrot tops, squash flowers, and the tender tips of pea vines are now staples in my kitchen. I’ve also given myself license to harvest vegetables during all their myriad stages of growth. I pull garlic shoots in early spring, when they are slight and tender as scallions, and grill them. I rinse baby turnip roots off with the hose and eat them raw right out in the garden. I wait anxiously for my mustard greens to form flower buds because I love the sweet-spicy flavor they add to a stir-fry. Sometimes these delicious extras, as I’ve come to think of them, are available at farmers’ markets. But if you really want to experience the full range of food that edible plants offer, you need to garden. To grow food is to really know food. Not just in the sense of knowing where the vegetables on your plate come from, but how their appearance, flavor, and texture change as they grow.
 
The vegetables found in grocery stores are invariably sold at the stage that requires the least labor to harvest and the most convenience for packing, shipping, and display. The delicious tops of beets, turnips, and carrots are severed and discarded; strawberries are picked early and then artificially ripened; and tomatoes, though red, are too perfectly round and almost always hard.
 
Gardening gives you the chance to reacquaint yourself with food you thought you knew—like radishes. I plant their roly-poly seeds in a thick row and don’t worry about the spacing, because I know I can thin out and eat their delicious sprouts in a grilled cheese sandwich later. I harvest the roots when they are not much bigger than a marble and again later when they reach the familiar grocery store size. I cook their greens just like spinach, use the flowers as a garnish, and eat the pods as a snack. The whole radish plant is eminently edible and delicious—something I never would have discovered if I hadn’t grown my own.
 
I garden because I love food. Or, perhaps I love gardening because I grow food. Either way, I think there is almost nothing more satisfying than cooking with food that you nurtured from a tiny seed or seedling, and then serving it to others. It creates a tangible connection between the environment, the food that nourishes you, and the people sitting around your table. This book is an invitation to explore the amazing diversity of food that becomes available to you when you plant a plot of land with vegetables, herbs, and fruit, and to gain the confidence to experiment in the kitchen with the delicious raw goods your garden will provide.
 
But a garden should reflect its gardener. So think of the guides and advice in these pages as a recipe you can make your own—add a cup more here, a pinch less there—and have as much fun as possible. The most important thing I’ve learned is that in the garden and in the kitchen, mistakes can be the greatest gifts. You just have to have the courage to taste them.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Here’s a book for our times. It schools us to become better cooks by extending our reach beyond the kitchen. Grow the right kind of Swiss chard, not just pick it out at the market. Cook the perfect potato you’ve stored for winter, instead of boiling one that’s stored for you. Eat these recipes and you’ll find them delicious, but the real flavor here comes from the story, and the satisfaction of eating what you grow.” —DAN BARBER, executive chef and co-owner, Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns

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