Grow Cook Eat

The brilliance in the title of Willi Galloway’s gorgeous new book–and the part that too often earnest vegetable gardeners focused on digging up the backyard and plotting complicated crop successions sometimes overlook–is the COOK – EAT part. It’s all about the FOOD, people.

Grow Cook Eat: A Food Lover’s Guide to Vegetable Gardening is a logical–and delicious–continuum at the very heart of this book about growing and preparing fresh, healthy homegrown food. Galloway’s attention to what she calls “extra edibles” is worth the cover price alone. As she writes in the introduction:

This book came about because of a radish.

I discovered that radishes made seedpods – and that I could eat them – entirely by accident.  I simply forgot to harvest a few rows of the spicy little roots. … I thought all was lost, but the radishes had a surprise in store.  They rewarded my inattention with delicate pink flowers followed by pods that looked like fat raindrops perched atop slender stems.

The appearance of something so pretty and unexpected gave me pause. On impulse, I snapped off a pod and popped it into my mouth. Crunchy, spicy, nutty, and decidedly radish, that pod changed my perspective on kitchen gardening.

From pea shoots to green coriander, radish pods to kale blossoms, Galloway’s tips for harvesting vegetables at every stage of their growth is the fastest way to grow your garden’s yield without expanding your growing space or your seasonal chore list.

Galloway imparts her extensive knowledge of garden and kitchen basics with enthusiasm and generosity, sharing her tried-and-tested varieties and favorite recipes in a down to earth “if I can do it, so can you” manner. Growing information and recipes alike are beautifully illustrated with photographs by Jim Henkens. Whether you’re new to the garden or a seasoned pro–life is about to get a whole lot more delicious if Willi has her way.

Lorene Edwards Forkner, editor