Customer Reviews

The Kitchen Garden Cookbook

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Sylvia Thompson's Kitchen Garden Cookbook will be an invaluable tool for avid gardeners who wish to expand the variety of vegetables grown but who are reluctant to do so because they have no idea how they would use the more unusual vegetables that are increasingly finding their way into even the most staid seed catalogs. In addition, Thompson shows ways to use flowers, herbs, and fruit also. A perfect complement to her previous work, the Kitchen Garden, this volume is packed with relatively easily prepared recipes that highlight various international cuisines and while it is not a vegetarian cookbook there are many recipes that will fit the vegetarian's needs. Since I bought this book two years ago hardly a week has gone by when I heve not cooked one or more recipes from this book. If you garden, have a really great vegetable department at your local supermarket, or just want to expand your kitchen repetoire, this book deserves a place on your kitchen bookshelf.

Thompson offers tips on harvesting and preparing everything from artichokes to turnip greens. General advice, which can easily be adapted to the innovative cook's inspiration, is followed by Thompson's own favorite recipes, from traditions like scalloped cauliflower, or black-eyed pea soup in turnip greens pot liquor, to international dishes like Sicilian caponata, spicy mustard leaf soup, and chicken with tarragon cream. And some recipes are just plain unusual like scented geranium bread pudding, or fresh herbs and flowers pressed between leaves of pasta, or purslane and ambrosia salad.

A book that will provide hours of fun for the daring gardening cook. And a good cookbook for anyone interested in cooking with fresh produce.

This companion to Sylvia Thompson's "The Kitchen Garden" moves beyond telling you what to plant in practically any garden to showing you how to prepare it for the table.

The recipes employ all manner of fanciful and rare edibles you will be able to grow in your own little Eden, should you consult the wealth of knowledge in "The Kitchen Garden." The two books really are best used in tandem. I will let Thompson speak for herself on the subject of her recipes, as she does it so eloquently:

" . . . you can believe that when I bring a vegetable into the house, it's been hard come by. You can be sure that I want to taste it . . . [Supermarket produce has been] raised and handled with one objective: To get it into those bins without physical damage. Flavor is not the point. Flavor is the point when it comes to your kitchen garden. In most books, vegetable recipes have been designed to disguise lackluster store-bought produce--it's smoke and mirrors with razzle-dazzle seasoning. In other books, vegetables are but one element in a complex of ingredients creating a many-leveled taste. In this book, there are no disguises; there's little that's complex. I've gathered
notions from all over the world to show off the flavor of your harvest simply."

So although Thompson expects your diligence in the garden, she implores you to use a light and restrained hand in the kitchen. Included among the recipes are Perfection of Baby Beets, Mustard Flavored Celeraic and Sweet Red Peppers, and Red Bean Ice Cream, among many others. The recipes are graceful in their simplicity; in fact, most have six or fewer ingredients.

"The Kitchen Garden Cookbook" is an intelligent, useful, and instructive volume. Sylvia Thompson, in having written this superior book and its companion "The Kitchen Garden," has performed an invaluable service for every American gardener who also loves to cook.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and will value it as a reference for cooking fresh produce from the garden as well as the wonderful seasonal produce available in the grocery stores. Sylvia Thompson has not wasted one page; something new and innovative is included throughout the entire book. This is a book I will treasure and keep in the favorites section of my collection of cooking and gardening books.