List #6: IN THE GARDEN & IN THE KITCHEN
We recommend these books as seasonal gifts and for summer reading. Click through to our website to reserve or purchase your copies—we will have them delivered anywhere or aside for collection. Let us know if you would like them gift-wrapped.
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Insight into the legendary chef's life, philosophy and exploits through the eyes of his colleagues, family and friends.
An excellent and attractive Gujarati Indian Cookbook transporting authentic Indian flavours to a relaxed family atmosphere in New Zealand.
Flip Grater is a renowned kiwi singer/songwriter, who boasts her own Indie record label and owns Grater Goods, a plant-based delicatessen based in central Christchurch. In her professional life she is a successful chef and recipe writer, developing her vegan recipes and Grater Goods products that are sold in retailers throughout Aotearoa. In her precious spare time you'll find her chilling with French husband Youssef and five-year-old daughter Anais. Flip and Youssef met in Paris in 2012 where she was recording her album Pigalle, and moved Back to Flips native New Zealand in 2018. Grater Goods is a little slice of Paris in industrial Sydenham. Over 60 European-inspired, adaptable dishes, ranging from Seitan sausages, cassoulets and breads to super easy spreadable cheeses, pates, crackers, delectable desserts and plant-based baking and cooking. These recipes are edible activism, ethical hedonism.
Whether you start your day with something sweet, finish it with something sweet, or make sure sweets are within reach all day long, you'll find serious inspiration in the pages of Salma Hage's latest cookbook for home cooks. The Middle East's wide range of cultures, ingredients, and influences informs the array of dishes she includes.
In a celebration of the healing power of nature, New Zealand gardening guru Lynda Hallinan focuses on the gentle delights that bring joy to our backyards, from birdsong to seasonal beauty.
"Gardening, then, is a practice of sustained noticing." In this collection of essays, fourteen writers go beyond simply considering a plot of soil to explore how gardening is a shared language, an opportunity for connection, something that is always evolving. Penelope Lively trains her gardening eye on her gardens past and present; Paul Mendez reflects on the image of the paradisal garden; Jon Day asks whether an urban community garden can be a radical place; and Victoria Adukwei Bulley considers the power of herbs and why there is no such thing as a weed.
In these essays thirteen writers consider the subjects of cooking and eating and how they shape our lives, and the possibilities and limitations the kitchen poses. Rachel Roddy traces an alternative personal history through the cookers in her life; Rebecca May Johnson considers the radical potential of finger food; Ruby Tandoh discovers a new way of thinking about flavour through the work of writer Doreen Fernandez; Yemisi Aribisala remembers a love affair in which food failed as a language; and Julia Turshen considers food's ties to community, Nina Mingya Powles considers the various food traditions of her family.
Irvine's hands-on, often humorous advice steps readers through everything they need to know to grow great produce at home, including garden design, tools and equipment, seasonal planting advice, soil fertility, seed-saving basics, managing pests and diseases, and how to incorporate organic and permaculture gardening methods into any home garden. While documenting a year on her own property, Irvine shows how you can successfully produce bountiful crops throughout the seasons to provide a steady, daily harvest with minimal wastage. The book is illustrated with hundreds of photographs and hand-drawn illustrations that share design concepts and planting plans for gardens of all shapes and sizes.
You can travel the world weekly from your kitchen with dishes such as: Persian noodle soup; Korean carrot and sesame pancakes; African peanut stew; baked dahl with tamarind-glazed sweet potato; and halloumi, mint, lemon and caramelised onion pie. With recipes for every occasion from a weeknight tahini broccoli on toast to the puddings and feasts, these inventive and varied recipes will become kitchen staples. All delicious, whether made vegetarian or vegan, Anna Jones also helps you to reduce waste, use leftovers. and make your kitchen plastic free.
The Arabesque Table: Contemporary recipes from the Arab world by Reem Kassis $60
The Arabesque Table takes inspiration from the traditional food of the Arab world, weaving Reem Kassis's cultural knowledge with her contemporary interpretations of an ancient, diverse cuisine. She opens up the world of Arabic cooking today, presenting 130 delicious, achievable home recipes. Organised by primary ingredient, her narratives formed by her experiences and influences bring the dishes to life, as does the book's vivid photography. From the author of The Palestinian Table.
Niva and Yotam Kay of Pakaraka Permaculture on the Coromandel Peninsula share their long experience of organic gardening in this comprehensive book on how to create and maintain a productive and regenerative vegetable garden. Taking care of the soil life and fertility provides plants with what they need to thrive. The book reflects in the latest scientific research on soil health, ecological and regenerative practices.
Knox's excellent book has been updated and is now fully illustrated in colour.
Inspired by twenty-six fruits, essayist, poet and 'pie lady' Kate Lebo expertly blends the culinary, medical and personal. A is for Aronia, berry member of the apple family, clothes-stainer, superfruit with reputed healing power. D is for Durian, endowed with a dramatic rind and a shifty odour – peaches, old garlic. M is for Medlar, name-checked by Shakespeare for its crude shape, beloved by gardeners for its flowers. Q is for Quince, which, fresh, gives off the scent of ‘roses and citrus and rich women’s perfume’ but if eaten raw is so astringent it wicks the juice from one’s mouth. In this work of unique invention, these and other difficult fruits serve as the central ingredients of twenty-six lyrical essays (and recipes!) that range from deeply personal to botanical, from culinary to medical, from humorous to philosophical. Delightful.
"A beautiful, fascinating read full of surprises – a real pleasure." —Claudia Roden
Strong on regional cuisines and variations, this book brings together 600 remarkable recipes expressing the vibrancy of Latin America and its myriad influences — indigenous, European, Asian and beyond.
Matt's book reflects his extensive research into traditional Icelandic dishes to preserve local culinary knowledge while applying a modern approach for a cuisine to be enjoyed both by locals and international foodies.
With its studious devotion to tradition, craftsmanship, and hospitality, Japanese cocktail culture is an art form treated with the same kind of spiritual reverence as sushi-making. Julia Momose presents a journey into the realm of Japanese spirits and cocktails with eighty-five drink recipes. In this essential guide, she breaks down master techniques and provides in-depth information on cocktail culture, history, and heritage spirits that will both educate and inspire. The recipes, inspired by the twenty-four micro-seasons that define the ebb and flow of life in Japan, include classics like the Manhattan and Negroni, riffs on some of Japan's most beloved cocktails like the whisky highball, and even alcohol-free drinks inspired by traditional ingredients, such as yuzu, matcha, and ume.
Behind the wonderful cookbooks and the iconic restaurant that has made Ottolenghi a household name stands the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen, a team of quirky gifted gastronomes who devise, tweak and perfect the recipes you love. In this new book, the team turn their attentions to the contents of your fridge and kitchen cupboards, showing you how to transform humble ingredients into delicious food. The approach is flexible and relaxed, but imbued with that mix of inventiveness and tradition that we have come to expect from anything Ottolenghi. Visit the kitchen that is Ottolenghi's creative hub and enrich your own.
>>Visit the OTK.
>>Visit the OTK.
From regenerating native bush, through formal gardens and heritage fruit trees, to community gardens and a dry garden in Central Otago, there is a place here to inspire everyone. The stories of their founders and developers bring the gardens to life. Located from Butler Point, across the harbour from Mangonui in Aotearoa's far north, down to Central Otago and Southland, the varying terrains and climates affect which plants flourish, and the exchange of ideas between the gardeners keep things vibrant and ever-changing.
Nigel Slater is always superb company in the kitchen. In this substantial new book, he looks back over his life and presents his culinary experiences from childhood to the present alongside 200 of his ever-wonderful recipes.
"A Cook's Book, all 500 pages and nearly one and a half kilos of it, enters the world as if from the kitchen of someone fresh to the world of food writing, a-brim with ideas, vital and enthusiastic." —Nigella Lawson
"This is a book for life. This, and it's high praise, is Slater's best book. —Diana Henry
From 1936 to 1940, the newly-wed George Orwell lived in a small cottage in Hertfordshire, writing, and tending his garden. When Rebecca Solnit visited the cottage, she discovered the descendants of the roses that he had planted many decades previously. These survivors, as well as the diaries he kept of his planting and growing, provide a springboard for a fresh look at Orwell's motivations and drives — and the optimism that countered his dystopian vision — and open up a mediation on our relationship to plants, trees and the natural world. Tracking Orwell's impact on political thought over the last century, Solnit journeys to England and Russia, Mexico and Colombia, exploring the political and historical events that shaped Orwell's life and her own. From a history of roses to discussions of climate change and insights into structural inequalities in contemporary society, Orwell's Roses is a fresh reading of a towering figure of 20th century literary and political life, and finds optimism, solace and solutions to our 21st century world.
The garden has always been a place of peace and perseverance, of nurture and reward. A garden can provide a family's food, a child's playground, an adult's peaceful retreat. But around the world and throughout history, gardens have often meant something more profound. For Sue Stuart-Smith's grandfather, returning from the First World War weighing six stone, a year-long horticulture course became a life raft for recovering from the trauma. For prisoners in today's justice system, gardening can be a mental escape from captivity which offers, in a context when opportunity is scarce, the chance to take ownership of a project and build something positive up from seed. In The Well Gardened Mind, Stuart-Smith investigates the huge power of the garden and its little-acknowledged effects on health and wellbeing.
Suzanne Turley — one of New Zealand's most sought-after landscape designers — has created many of the country's most desirable private gardens, all set against the spectacular backdrop of the natural environment.
Thirty-four years ago, when they were in their twenties, Niall Williams (the author of This Is Happiness)and Christine Breen made the impulsive decision to leave their lives in New York City and move to Christine's ancestral home in the town of Kiltumper in rural Ireland. In the decades that followed, the pair dedicated themselves to writing, gardening and living a life that followed the rhythms of the earth. In 2019, with Christine in the final stages of recovery from cancer and the land itself threatened by the arrival of turbines just one farm over, Niall and Christine decided to document a year of living in their garden and in their small corner of a rapidly changing world.
In the Baltics, two worlds meet: the Baltic Sea joins Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, bringing culinary influences and cultural exchange. Food is author Zuza Zak's doorway to a deeper understanding of this region, its rich history, its culture and what makes it tick.