Product Description

Allotment gardening is becoming increasingly popular and there are many obvious benefits to growing your own fruit and vegetables. There is nothing quite like picking your own apples or unearthing a batch of new potatoes. The freshness and flavours of home-grown produce are second to none. Keeping an allotment is also a great way to help keep fit and healthy! So this is a cookbook with a difference. A comprehensive A-Z glossary covers all the most popular fruit and vegetables grown on an allotment. Each entry features tips on storage, freezing, preserving and preparation techniques, along with quick and original ideas on how to make the most of the produce while it is in season without getting fed up with it! Next comes the recipe section, featuring 60 delicious recipes (32 of which are photographed) to give readers greater instruction and fantastic new ideas on cooking their produce. There are soups, starters, light meals, salads, main meals, accompaniments, desserts and preserves, using only the tastiest ingredients, fresh from the allotment!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #149877 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 192 pages

About the Author
Kathryn Hawkins is an experienced cookery writer and food stylist. She has worked on several women's magazines and written a number of books. Kathryn is currently setting up a cookery school at her home in Scotland, where she plans to run residential and oneday culinary workshops. She is the author of Pancakes!, Bread! and Fruit!, all published by New Holland.

Customer Reviews

`A cookbook with a difference, using fresh produce from your allotment or kitchen garden....'
192 shiny high quality pages, consisting of an introduction and an alphabetic listing of fruit and vegetables, followed by a 60 recipe section, sections on `Preservation Techniques', `Useful Addresses and Bibliography' and a full index.

Most of the book is in easy to read bold black text, with pages 97 -128 being full colour plates of the delights to come in the recipe section!

The glossary is packed full of all the information you need for a successful harvest including tips on varieties, harvesting & storing, preparing and basic cooking techniques, classic recipes, freezing and top recipe tips.

Did you know the Jerusalem Artichoke was a member of the Sunflower Family?

Each recipe is clearly laid out with opening narrative:-
e.g.
Beetroot in Raspberry Jelly
This might sound a bit weird but it really is delicious!
It's based on a recipe given to my Mum by a friend who makes it with blackcurrant jelly. It's always a talking point and makes an excellent accompaniment to thickly sliced ham or smoked chicken.'
Then follows the list of ingredients and the method.
Any variations are given, along with 'Cook's Notes', if applicable, and whether freezing is suitable or not.

All in all an excellent, no nonsense reference for those wishing to start on the path of self sufficiency.

A taste of the other recipes within:-

Roast Asparagus and New Potato Salad
Alsace Onion Tart
Peppered Steak with Fried Cabbage and Turnip Chips
Corned Beef, Neeps and Tattie Pie
Crispy `Seaweed' and Pak Choi with Oyster Sauce
Venison with Blackberry Sauce
Sweet Potato and Spinach Curry
Ratatouille
Blushing Apples with Strawberry Rose Ice Cream
Oaty Scottish Berry Cream
Rhubarb and Custard Tarts
Wild Strawberry Jam
Blackcurrant Cordial
Spiced Plum Chutney

Every allotment owner should have this book.
Great..helps me use up my excess production. A boon and a blessing to alotment owners everywhere!

Not an allotment cookbook but a 'back garden and freezer' cookbook
This is a book which could have been so much better. Kathryn Hawkins certainly knows her subject and if she had been a little bit more comprehensive this really could have been something worth getting for every allotment.

She neatly divides her subject into the growing and the cooking. On the growing she provides a tidy discussion of harvesting, storing and basic preparation of various allotment produce and therein lies the first problem. She only discusses it after it has been harvested there's no consideration of site selection, planting methods, shade and water considerations for a crop and so on. Now it might be reasonable to say that those are not topics that she should consider but if so then it would have been better to not include the sections on harvesting produce. What she does, which is very good, is provide a quick summary of how to store that produce, albeit that it's heavily oriented towards an approach that says freeze everything.

Another problem is that she has a very limited range of produce that she considers. She only considers 43 crops, which might sound a lot but my usual allotment reference (Joy Larkcom's Grow your own vegetables ) considers twice as many, and a lot of what she considers are not things that would be considered common allotment crops; herbs, apples, pears, blackberries (who grows these you just get them free from hedgerows!), peaches and so on are not common allotment crops. Ignore the allotment bit however and read it as a 'kitchen garden' cookbook and it makes a lot more sense.

In the second half of her book she starts to give some recipes. Most of these to be honest are fairly pedestrian affairs but where she does win over a lot of books is that she gives some thought to how to preserve them. Principally this is by telling us which recipes are suitable for freezing but she does give a little more detail where required, such as omitting the cream from soups which are to be frozen, even if she doesn't explain why (in case you're wondering in that example it's because cream goes rancid relatively quickly even in a freezer but Hawkins doesn't explain that)

If you really want an allotment cookbook then you may well be better off with separate guides for the allotment and kitchen. All in all this is a book which promised a great deal and delivers half of that promise very well. It is not such much 'the allotment cookbook' as 'the back garden cookbook for people who freeze everything'. The main problem is that it too heavily relies on freezing everything as a preservation method and the crop range is limited and includes items which are not typical allotment crops. Still a very worthwhile book but not as comprehensive as it could have been and probably more appropriate to someone trying to grow and cook from their own back garden.