The Cook's Garden
A Gardener's Guide to Selecting, Growing, and Savoring the Tastiest Vegetables of Each Season: A Cookbook
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
From the critically acclaimed author of Saving the Season comes an accessible, comprehensive, and inspiring guide to growing your own garden and incorporating homegrown produce into everyday cooking—no matter how much or how little space you have.
For Kevin West, the surest path to a successful garden leads through the kitchen door. And preparing for a fantastic meal of homegrown vegetables—the kind of meal that leaves you not only satisfied, but grateful—is just what he wants to help you learn to do.
In The Cook's Garden, West gives readers the tools and confidence they need to grow food for their own meals. From gardening basics and advice on harvesting, to delicious recipes showing how to make the best use of produce in any season—including primers on freezing surplus vegetables, making pantry staples such as canned tomatoes, and effectively using stored produce—this book promises to inspire anyone, even if their growing plot is as small as a window box in a city apartment. West’s erudite yet practical guide is interwoven with meditations on the beauty, poetry, and spirituality inherent in growing and preparing one’s own food.
The Cook's Garden guides readers through jumpstarting their gardens and revolutionizing their kitchens—while also nourishing their minds and souls.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Cooking with homegrown food is a shortcut to becoming a more creative and more instinctive home cook," promises West (Saving the Season) in this stunning how-to. West draws from boyhood memories and lessons learned from his grandparents and their community of East Tennessean farmers: "I grew up with my ears full of the old-timey phrase ‘cooking from a garden'.... There was nothing so good as what had just been picked." Part one offers a comprehensive overview of "gardening basics." West advises starting small, offers tips on seed selection, and goes over climate and seasonal considerations, soil management, and upkeep. He also discusses which vegetables and herbs to grow according to cuisine preference and cooking needs. Part two provides more than 125 recipes organized according to vegetable families alongside growing charts and tips for harvesting, preparing, and storage. There's green bean gratin topped with parmesan and bread crumbs, roasted carrots with chimichurri and lemon yogurt sauce, and a pan-roasted tomato sauce that comes together in just 10 minutes. West's lively prose contains bites of food history, agricultural science, and food politics and the garden fresh recipes are mouthwatering. This essential guide will enable anyone to have a farm-to-table experience. Correction: An earlier version of this review misidentified the location of the author's grandparents' farm.
