There are many important dates in the calendar of the gardening cook: the last frost date and the first frost date, the first rhubarb harvest, the first asparagus, first ripe tomato… And just this week we reached another one: we…
Pumpkin sage soup
Categorie: Fall
Speculoos pumpkin butter
Look, I don’t say you should lie to your children. But sometimes… it’s necessary to give them a slightly moderated version of the truth. Unfortunately, the older they get, the more difficult it becomes to fool them. They figure out…
Edible garden in November
November is the month when we put the garden to bed before winter. I did a little weeding of the empty beds and put in a layer of mulch. This year, besides straw and cocoa shells, we’ve also used shredded…
Brussels sprouts, winter squash and quinoa salad
This salad is what I think of as a vegetarian (vegan even) all-in-one holiday dish. It’s colourful and festive. It’s got some traditional components and some less traditional.The bitterness of the Brussels sprouts is nicely balanced by the sweetness of…
Caramel Apple Jam
Apple is a fruit of mind-blowing variety – some six thousand (or more) apple cultivars exist spread throughout the world. It is therefore infinitely sad that the shops only give us access to about a dozen of them. In the…
Kale bruschetta
Kale is one the most popular Dutch vegetables and it’s grown a lot and eaten often during the cold months. It is apparently one of the things that the Dutch miss the most when they move to another country. I…
Edible garden in October
In the month of October, I am sorry to say, our vegetable garden has been sorely neglected. I was teaching forest gardening at a permaculture design course, and right after that, we left for a week in England to visit…
Roasted grapes with camembert and herbs
This year has been a great year for almost every kind of fruit. Everyone with an apple tree of any size is overwhelmed by the harvest and giving fruit away. We have the first ever mini kiwis on our kiwi-vines.…
Plum and hazelnut brown butter cake
I once read a cookbook by a French pastry chef where he narrated how he made up new desserts in his dreams. I don’t make up new recipes in my dreams, at least as far as I know. But during…
Rotolo di pasta with squash and spinach
We slaughtered the first winter squash. I hereby declare the fall season open. No matter fall officially started three weeks ago, but the moment I start cooking with squash is the moment I truly embrace the change of season.…
Elderberry buckwheat pancakes
There’s so much to pick and enjoy in fall, apple orchards and pumpkin patches to visit. But it would be a shame to forgo supernutritious fruits that you can usually get for free: elderberries. The large shrubs/small trees are so…
Danish pastry tarte tatin
My daughter loves tarte tatin. My sister, conditioned by having worked in Paris as an au pair for a year when she was eighteen and studying French afterwards, loves it even more. Upon their request I made tarte tatin several…
Edible Garden in September
The above photo shows a typical September harvest from our allotment: kohlrabi, spring onions, Asian radishes, zucchini, lemon cucumbers, beets, beans and herbs. September harvests are still bountiful – the absence of frost so far means that even frost tender…
Tomatillo pizza with cilantro pesto
Judging by the number of views the hot tomatillo chutney recipe from last year gets these days, there are currently many gardeners somewhat struggling with the tomatillo harvest. Tomatillo falls in the same category as zucchini: vegetables that are so…
Gingerbread Guinness Cake with Poached Pears and Cream Cheese Icing
When I was little, we used to spend a good chunk of every summer vacation at my mother’s friend’s house in a very small village in the western part of what was then the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. There were always…