Product Description: A reissue of the unusual and classic cookbook with hundreds of savory and delectable recipes to help every gardener find ample ways to make use of the riches the garden provides.
Excellent Garden Cookbook I have owned this book for about nine years now, and every summer when the garden really starts to produce it comes back off of the cookbook shelf. Some of my particular favorites are the Fresh Cream of Tomato Soup and the Eggplant Minestrone, which both freeze well if made in large quantites. The Chocolate Zucchini Cake is also very good. In fact there are a lot of good recipes for zucchini and who isn't looking for zucchini recipes when they grow them - one or two plants produce so much. My mother got used to this book when I still lived at home and helped my father grow a garden. Now she has to keep borrowing it to make her favorites. I have also shared some of my favorites with other family members and cowokers who have all been impressed with the variety and quality of the recipes.
Disappointing An inviting cover, but with so many other recipe source options, I'd put this one on my "B" list. The lack of illustrations makes for a very boring read and difficult to visualize the hoped for end result.
Great Gardener's Cookbook This book is a treasure-trove of ideas about what to do with your garden bounty. It goes far beyond tomatoes, with recipes for everything from asparagus to zucchini. The book has a chapter for each common garden vegetable, and the chapters are in alphabetical order for easy reference. At the beginning of each chapter is a brief description of the vegetable, notes for growing and harvesting, descriptions of yield, storage, freezing, and cooking instructions, and suggestions for complementary herbs. Then come about 15 recipes for each vegetable, including soups, appetizers, salads, main dishes, side dishes, and desserts.
The authors are obviously great and creative cooks. The recipes use basic ingredients, and do not call for processed or convenience foods. There aren't many recipes in this book for fancy occasions-most are for simple good home cooking type of meals that don't take a lot of elaborate preparations or require exotic ingredients. The gardening advice isn't quite up to the level of the cooking notes, however. For example, the authors instruct readers to discard the entire cabbage plant after harvest, but you can actually get some baby cabbages by leaving the plant in the ground and cutting an X across the stalk. Alternatively, one way to store cabbages is to pull the entire plant up by the roots and hang it in a cool, dry place. In the corn chapter, the authors recommend extending the corn season by planting corn with different maturation dates. However, corn is wind pollinated, and it is one plant where this year's harvest will be affected by mixing varieties, so if you're going to try to grow several kinds of corn, you need to keep them at least 100 feet apart. That's kind of hard to do in a backyard garden. In short, this is a great cookbook, but for gardening advice, you'd do better to look elsewhere.
Good for CSA members too! My mother in law gave me this book when she found out that we had a membership in a community farm or CSA. That's where you pay a fee up front at the beginning of the season for a "share" of what the garden produces. This book is very handy for coming up with ideas for things you have a lot of, but it also has a lot of good info about preservation and how long certain produce last under different conditions. In that sense it's not just a cookbook, it's a reference book too. And the zucchini enchiladas are pretty popular at our house!
Fantastic concept--poor execution I love the *idea* of this cookbook. It presents chapters organized alphabetically by garden vegetable. Each chapter includes notes on growing and harvesting the vegetable, yield information, a few nutritional notes, information on storage, freezing, cooking, basic preparation, and complementary herbs. The freezing information is perhaps the most useful, in my mind. The one truly great piece of information I got out of this cookbook is that you *can* freeze and then reheat potato dishes, as long as you don't thaw them first; most cookbooks will just tell you that you can't do this. (However, it doesn't give any instructions as to which sorts of dishes work well for this and which don't--and believe me, some work *much* better than others. Let's just say that if you want to freeze potato dishes, freeze ones in which the potato is in as mashed and creamy a state as possible, with few chunks.)
The recipes themselves are all over the map in terms of quality, and lean very heavily on fatty dairy products to make them flavorful--which means that they won't be very useful to vegans or folks on a diet (two major groups of people who are going to want to make heavy use of vegetables in their diet). Most of them also don't use a huge amount of the vegetable in question, and don't state whether they freeze well or not (and if they do, how to alter the cooking instructions for the frozen dish), which means that these recipes aren't any more useful for the cookbook's stated purpose than those in other cookbooks. The only advantage is that in here they're organized by vegetable, and, well, that's what an index is for in other cookbooks. You'd be better off with a copy of the Joy of Cooking--it covers all the vegetables as well, and the recipes are of much more consistent quality.
Speaking of the recipes... Some of the recipes have blatant mistakes in them (like the recipe that called for WAY too much salt--our best guess is that it should have called for one *teaspoon* instead of one *tablespoon*). Others just don't taste very good; rarely have I found a cookbook with such incredibly mediocre recipes. Because of the way the recipes are written up, sometimes it's tough to tell which groups of ingredients go with which instructions. Although the recipes look incredibly simple, sometimes that's because they under-explain things or leave out steps, which means that the kind of cook who'll appreciate having simple recipes will probably have problems with them.
This book is a great concept, and it saddens me to have to give it such a poor review. But it just doesn't stand up to real use.
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