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Featured Title Scotland's Larder What’s in season? What can you grow in the garden? Or harvest, or preserve, or even collect? Suki Urquhart’s passion for the land, for the garden, and for food and cooking, all come together in this wonderful, erudite, amusing and useful book. She mixes recipes, anecdotes, and country lore with good advice about making the most of Scotland’s rich natural bounty.
Taking a month a chapter, then November, for instance, is the month when root vegetables are in plentiful supply. They can be cut into fat chips and roasted with or without their skins, mixed with garlic and shallots, brushed with olive oil and flavoured with strong-tasting herbs such as rosemary, sage or thyme. In July, there are pears and apples, apricots and nectarines to be harvested. Onions, garlic and shallots are ready for picking as well.
The amount of vitamins and minerals contained in wild food cannot be over-emphasised. Seaweeds, for instance, are very prized in Asian diets, but here they are left to the ‘knit your own yogurt brigade’ who still make laver bread or an occasional carrageen pudding. But apart from being delicious, some have a higher protein content than soya beans, others contain more B12 than is found in liver.
Nuts, berries, mushrooms, seaweeds, herbs, fruits, salad leaves, roots. Suki tells you where to look for them, and what to do with them. Birch bark wine and pine needle tea, comfrey leaf fritters and steamed rock samphire. Mushroom collecting and cooking. This is a delicious, up to the moment book, accompanied by equally mouth-watering photographs.
Publication date: Autumn 2008
UK Publisher: Birlinn
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Suki Urquhart is a freelance journalist who writes about gardens and property for the Sunday Times. Her first book, Scottish Gardener was published by Birlinn in 2005. 