“What do I do with it?” says a customer holding kohlrabi, celeriac or cardoon. A good recipe or two can help you make that tough sale at the farmers’ market and keep your CSA members happy. In addition to recipes for the more unusual vegetables, it’s useful to have tips on how to use kale, zucchini, chard and any other abundant produce. I just found three wonderful new cookbooks which taught me new ways to enjoy the vegetables I grow.
I like both the recipes and organization of Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables. Recipes are grouped according to season (with summer being broken down into early, mid- and late) with separate sections on each vegetable. The structure shows that the author recognizes that vegetables vary through the seasons — e.g., a baby beet needs to be treated differently than a winter beet. When I’m not sure what to have for dinner, I just start flipping the pages of the relevant chapter.
The author, Joshua McFadden, is a chef and a farmer, and has worked with Eliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch. He includes many recipes for the less popular (i.e., hard to sell) vegetables, such as radishes, turnips and rutabagas. I particularly like his recipe for green fava bean and pistachio pesto and the broiled salad of bitter greens. The book is around 400 pages long and contains many recipes and beautiful pictures.
Market Cooking contains mostly French recipes — classic, simple and elegant — although there is a wonderful section on spicy foods which includes recipes from around the globe. “Market cooking” is a French term used by chefs (and maybe home cooks as well) referring to the practice of going to the farmers’ market, checking out the produce and then creating a menu based on what looks best, rather than buying ingredients for a pre-conceived menu. The recipes focus on vegetables but there are also recipes for lentils, meat, fish and even octopus. Market Cooking is another big book, nearly 500 pages, but I think fewer recipes and more pictures than Six Seasons and a hefty price of $40US.
The Harvest Baker provides recipes on how to use vegetables in baking —everything from yeasted breads to scones, pizzas and quiche. The baked goods are beyond the ordinary with roasted carrot tea loaf, cauliflower parmesan pizza, and shortbread thumbprints with tomato ‘jam’ (more like chutney). The book offers delicious ways to add value to your produce or to encourage your customers to experiment.
Reviewed here:
--Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables by Joshua McFadden with Martha Holmberg. 2017. Artisan Publishing and Thomas Allen & Son in Canada.
--Market Cooking by David Tannis. 2017. Artisan Publishing and Thomas Allen & Son in Canada.
--The Harvest Baker: 150 Sweet & Savory Recipes by Ken Haedrich. 2017. Storey Publishing.