Cooking from the Garden: Best Recipes from Kitchen Gardener

by Kitchen Gardener

Rising food prices, the slow food movement, and the green movement have revived interest in finding delicious food close to home. The backyard vegetable garden is making a comeback even in urban areas. Why grow grass (that you have to mow) when you can pick the best tasting tomatoes right outside your door? Taunton's "Kitchen Gardener" magazine was ahead of its time in trying to raise the bar on food prepared with home-grown food. The recipes collected in Cooking from the Garden are innovative and tasty, and most are relatively simple to prepare. Not only do they help home gardeners find ways to make use of abundance, they show how to do it with style and expertise. The recipes apply equally to good seasonal buys in the supermarket or farmer's market as to produce from a home garden.

Genres: Cookbooks, Nonfiction

304 pages, Hardcover

First published March 2, 2010

Reviews

[Ronda Tutt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Make It From Scratch Cook Book!

With the bad economy many individuals have started doing their own gardening in the back yard or even on their patio. This is the book to have to help you put your harvest in great wholesome recipes. Some of the recipes are quick and some are time consuming depending on the kitchen equipment you have. I found all the recipes to be very informative and easy to follow. The only down fall I have with this cookbook personally is that I love having photos next to my recipes but the illustrations in this book are real nice. The cookbook has several categories to choose from whether it be from starters to Main Dishes and even an equivalency chart to compare to. The categories are listed below:

Starters, Snacks & Drinks
Breakfast, Brunch & Egg Dishes
Sauces, Salsas & Vinaigrettes
Salads
Breads & Sandwiches
Soups
Side Dishes
Pasta, Grains & Beans
Main Dishes
Desserts & Sweets
Preserving
Seasonal Menus

[Linda B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cooking from the Garden takes the best recipes from a publication called The Kitchen Gardener, published from 1996 to 2001. Recipe categories include:
Starters, Snacks & Drinks,
Breakfast, Brunch & Egg Dishes
Sauces, Salsas & Vinaigrettes
Salads
Breads and Sandwiches
Soups
Side Dishes
Pasta, Grains & Beans
Main Dishes
Desserts and Sweets
Preserving

This is definitely a make-it-from-scratch cookbook that includes recipes for homemade ketchup, Thyme Mayonnaise, dressings and sauces. The recipes have easy to follow instructions and a short list of a few basic ingredients. There are no photographs of finished dishes, but there are tips and menu ideas. Most of the recipes contain ingredients that can be grown most anywhere or can be found at a local farmers market. These are good, wholesome family recipes.

[Stephanie White · Rating 4 out of 5]

Boy my review is a little more newer than some on here :) lol.

And as we look at WWIII and rising food costs, and rising everything costs it is important to get the most from your money.

I found this to be a good book of recipes to find inexpensive meals - and also to tickle my brain into making my own recipes to save money.

Typical cookbook - I am sure you will like it!

[raccoon reader · Rating 2 out of 5]

apple chipotle salsa
warm shrimp salad with ginger tarragon dressing
cream of lovage soup (what the hell is lovage?)
fresh tomato and walnut soup with rosemary (did someone play spin the wheel on the ingredients?)
creamed spinach (please, cream only corn and potatoes. please for the love of all southern gods)
Brussel sprouts braised in red wine and 40 cloves of garlic (40! cloves?!)
Lemon geranium strawberry jelly
etc. etc. etc.

Maybe you cook like this in your kitchen. We don't.

Or Maybe you *really* like these recipes- they sound delicious and you'd be willing to cook them. We won't be. In our house I like to cook basic simple unadorned southern recipes. I enjoy learning how to do things from scratch with ingredients I actually have on hand. So when I take home a book entitled from "cooking from the garden" I think it will be the typical garden I grew up growing, and still try to have in a smaller form. But this one was a bit too... okay I use this word to much, but I like it "frou frou" for us here. Perhaps a bit more gourmet than I'd prefer. I shy away from any fancy recipe book's "salsas" and I shudder at what these books do to sturdy dependable fruit jams. I don't believe that just any vegetable you like should be "creamed." And keep your lavender out of my desserts too. I do grow lavender, but for other things.

Now don't get me wrong, these type of recipes are certainly fun at fancy restaurants and I've had my share of them. They are also fun and admittedly delicious when made by our friend who is undeniably one of the best cooks we know and he *loves* to make these sort of recipes. So I don't think the recipes are bad. I just don't want to cook like that in my kitchen. Maybe in 20 years when I'm bored with the staples of my heritage, and I've exhausted my patience with tried and true seasonal, realistic Alabama garden cooking that I grew up with. But for now I'm much more interested in how to figure out how to get my greens to taste as good as other peoples (mine admittedly suck), when the right time to pick poke salat so it won't kill us is, how to perfect my mothers chocolate and lemon pie so it tastes just the same, or how to make my pork chops perfect, or make the German, Celtic, and Native American dishes of my childhood than the fancy recipes listed above.

But if the recipes listed above look good to you, then you'll no doubt love this book. But for me, I'll be over here trying to season this skillet perfectly so my cornbread keeps getting better.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book will make you want to start your own garden. I know that with my limited space I'll never be able to plant all the goodies in the recipes in this book, but I'd sure like to. If you're lucky enough to have a huge plot of land and an orchard or two (or just have access to a good farmer's market) you'll love the recipes in this book. Some of them are familiar, but others, using vegetables or fruits that I've only peripherally heard about, are very new and interesting. I'll certainly give the recipes a try when I have a chance at fresh produce this summer.

Received as an e-arc from Netgalley.

[Kathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The recipes in this cookbook are all taken from the magazine: Kitchen Gardener. One of my favorite things about cookbooks are the pictures of the recipes and this book does not have any! There are some good recipes though particularly in Chapter 3: Sauces, Salsas and Vinaigrettes. There are recipes for Thyme Mayonnaise, Aoili, Red Wine Vinaigrette, and a delicious Tomato Sauce as well as a homemade Ketchup. There are of course plenty of great salad recipes. There is a section on preserving as well as section on using the recipes seasonally. I am not the world's biggest fan of vegetables so probably not the best cookbook for me. This would be a great resource for vegans!

[Diana · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some really great recipes in here! that being said, most of them involve only one or two ingredients from the garden...and a bunch of stuff that isn't, so it isn't as useful as I'd hoped it would be as I'm trying to get as independent as possible in my food preparation. The lack of pictures made the book less fun, too, but that doesn't kill it for me.

[Reading For Sanity · Rating 4 out of 5]

read this review and others at http://readingforsanity.blogspot.com/...

[❆ Crystal ❆ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoy this cookbook. 4 stars good recipes

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to eat this book!!! It gets 4 stars for having some odd veggies that aren't easily available. But most of the recipes are things that are easy to come by.