Product Description

No book has ever made it so easy for the gardener-cook to get the most from fresh veg, herbs, and leaves. Britain's favorite gardener, Carol Klein, considers every stage in the process - from harvesting through storing to cooking. In the first chapter, on gardening, she demonstrates how and when to harvest each plant to get the best flavor while encouraging growth for next year (for instance, use a small fork when unearthing your roots and you'll protect the worms who will give you great soil for next year; leave onions on the soil to dry out before transporting them into the house for storage).This is followed by four seasonal chapters, each covering approx 10 veg, leaves, and herbs. For each food, she details all the parts of the plant you can eat, how to cook the food when its young, how to cook older specimens, and how to store it (usually on the plant or in the soil), enabling you to enjoy all sorts of ingredients you could never find in a shop. Plus there are over 80 fresh and easy recipes, enabling you to make the most of your seasonal produce.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #154559 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

About the Author
Best-known as co-presenter of BBC TV's Gardeners' World, Carol Klein is an internationally renowned gardener. Manchester-born Carol moved to Devon in the late 1970s with her two daughters. She started propagating plants because she couldn't afford to buy the ones she wanted for her own garden. Friends suggested she sell the spares, so Carol opened a stall in the local market, and eventually she opened her own nursery which is now a thriving business. Carol has designed four commercial show gardens at Chelsea, won five Cheslsea gold medals. Carol has presented several gardening shows since her television debut on Gardeners' World in 1989, including Garden Party, Wild About the Garden and Real Gardens. In 2007, Mitchell Beazley published Carol's hugely successful Grow Your Own Veg, which has sold in excess of 200,000 copies. Carol also writes regularly for Gardeners' World magazine and House & Garden, and is a frequent contributor to the Daily Telegraph Gardening section.

Customer Reviews

Simple vegetarian cookery with plenty of hints on getting the most from your vegetables!
The precis of this book is very good and an accurate description of the book. Looking through it I can almost hear Carol's distinctive accent from Gardeners World reading it to me.

Carol starts off with providing some general guidance on growing - enriching the soil, companion planting etc. This isn't thorough advice - and of course, there is her other book which takes you through the entire growing process.

Vegetables are dealt with by season - even if you don't grow them, by doing this Carol lets you know what is in season when. For each vegetable she includes (limited) details on how to grow it, how to store it, how to prepare it, how to harvest it, the main cooking technique and other cooking methods and uses. Where possible she'll also give hints on eating other parts of the plant (eating sprouting broccoli when it's the size of cress, pea pods). She then gives a couple of recipes for each vegetable.

For the size of book, I was expecting more recipes. But the book has turned out better for not being crammed with them. I've learnt far more about the vegetables I'm eating from Carol's writing, and, as with her other book, I feel even more inspired to get growing. In addition - in case it isn't obvious - this is a vegetarian cookbook.

I can't say that I'm wild about all the recipes - some of them don't seem particulaly inspired: the two asaparagus recipes are steam-boiled asparagus and barbecued asaragus (the first includes salt as well as asparagus and suggests the addition of a dressing (she does include some recipes later in the book), the second is just asparagus). I can partially understand this - you let the flavours sing for themselves. I'd have liked to see a couple of proper recipes for each item though, with the basic, plain cooking of the vegetable as an extra. The recipes appear simple and those that I have tried are delicious.

Recipes include (I have intentionally avoided the 'steamed spinach', 'roast potato' and 'steamed broccoli' type recipes - rest assured that they are there though!):

Globe artichoke buds with garlic and lemon
Stuffed nicoise globe artichokes
Courgettes with pine nuts, onions and raisins
New potato spring stew
Caramelized onion jam
Garlic soup
Green gazpacho
Harissa paste
Roast pumpkin gratin
Squash and lentil tagine
Turnips in garlic sauce
Brussel sprouts salad

Riverford Farm Cook Book: Tales from the Fields, Recipes from the Kitchen does contain some meat recipes, but it is also a very good example of the more adventurous things you can do with vegetables!

Cook Your Own Veg
A really good book, full of informative information, a good book to bypass the credit crunch & help those thousands who can't but would like learn.