Genre: Non-fiction, Cookbook
Published: 2007
Personal rating: 5/5
Yearly count: 3
Serving Up the Harvest is a delightful book that is so much more than just a cookbook. It is divided into seasons, but not your ordinary spring, summer, fall and winter. No, it has gardening seasons, like early to mid-summer and fall into winter. Each of the seasons have chapters devoted to specific vegetables that are bountiful in that season, as well as a height of the season chapter with recipes that combine in-season vegetables to the max. It makes cooking in tune with the seasons (and thus with cheap vegetables) easy.
The recipes are simple, clear and concise – it’s hard to screw them up even if you don’t have a lot of experience in the kitchen. Oftentimes the recipes are vegetarian, but just as often a suggestion to add meat is made, or you can simply serve up some meat with the vegetables like you’d normally do. And from experience I can say the recipes in this book are very tasteful. Recipes range from side-dishes to main dishes to deserts for each vegetable, how much of each category depending on how a vegetable can be used.
Aside from these recipes there are some ‘introductory’ chapters, talking about stuff to keep in your pantry as well as some basic methods and recipes that serve as a base for many other recipes. There’s a bit about preserving the harvest in the back of the book, as well as a list of resources and an index. There’s even some anecdotal interludes and a short anecdotal intro to each vegetable that are fun to read. But what makes this book more than your ordinary cookbook is the fact that for every vegetable in the book there’s a page with information about growing the vegetable, harvesting it, how much weight/size equals cups, how to use it in the kitchen, how much time different cooking methods take, and some notes on nutrients. Everything from seed to food on one handy page for each vegetable make this into one of the most useful, basic cookbooks I’ve ever seen.
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