Grow Cook Eat: A Food Lover's Guide to Vegetable Gardening, Including 50 Recipes, Plus Harvesting and Storage Tips

by Willi Galloway, Jim Henkens (Photographer)

Overview

The conscious foodie’s guide to growing and harvesting their own urban vegetable garden—featuring 50 profiles of common vegetables and herbs, plus 50 recipes for garden-to-table meals you’ll want to make again and again.

From sinking a seed into the soil to enjoying a meal made with produce harvested right outside your door, this gorgeous kitchen gardening book is filled with practical, useful information for both novices and seasoned gardeners alike. Grow Cook Eat will inspire people who already buy seasonal, local, and organic food to grow the fruits and vegetables they love to eat—even if they live in a city. Dynamic, young gardening expert Willi Galloway reveals the ins and outs of growing your own food, sharing need-to-know information such as: 

• 50 profiles on how to plant, grow, and prepare common vegetables, herbs, and small fruits 
• specific instructions on how to harvest all edible parts of a plant 
• advice on storing your harvest in a way that maximizes flavor 
• basic food preparation techniques, including tips for unusual foods like radish greens and garlic scapes 
• 50 delicious recipes that’ll make the most of your at-home harvest 

With 140 beautiful color photographs throughout, Grow Cook Eat is the ultimate guide to refining your gardening skills and cultivating gourmet quality food—from your very own backyard.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632175359
Publisher:	Sasquatch Books
Publication date:	01/07/2025
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	7.25(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

WILLI GALLOWAY is an award-winning radio commentator and writer. Willi began her career at Organic Gardening magazine, where she worked her way up from editorial intern to West Coast Editor. While living in Seattle she became an active participant in the urban agriculture movement, earning her Master Gardener certification and serving for six years on the board of directors of Seattle Tilth (now called Tilth Alliance)—a nationally recognized nonprofit that teaches people to cultivate a healthy urban environment and community by growing organic food. This work introduced her to hundreds of other urban gardeners, and like many of them, she has grown food in untraditional places, including on the roof of an apartment building, at the Interbay P-Patch (an acclaimed community garden right in the middle of Seattle), and in the sunny front yard of her home.

Willi writes about kitchen gardening and seasonal cooking and has taught joint gardening and cooking classes around the Pacific Northwest, including teaching stints with James Beard Award–winning chef Matthew Dillon at the Corson Building in Seattle. She has also hosted an online garden-to-table cooking show, GROW. COOK. EAT., with her husband, Jonathan, and she served as the vegetable gardening expert on Seattle’s NPR station, KUOW, for eight years. Her garden has been featured in Sunset magazine and she has written for Vegetarian Times and Apartment Therapy. Willi currently lives and gardens in Portland, Oregon.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction
 
“Without a kitchen garden—that plot of land on which one grows herbs, vegetables, and some fruit—it is not possible to produce decent and savory food for the dinner table.”
—ANGELO PELLEGRINI
 
This book came about because of a radish.
 
I discovered that radishes made seedpods—and that I could eat them—entirely by accident. I simply forgot to harvest a few rows of the spicy little roots. They grew large and woody, their foliage stretching up toward the sky. I thought all was lost, but the radishes had a surprise in store. They rewarded my inattention with delicate pink flowers followed by pods that looked like fat raindrops perched atop slender stems.
 
The appearance of something so pretty and unexpected gave me pause. On impulse, I snapped off a pod and popped it into my mouth. Crunchy, spicy, nutty, and decidedly radishy, that pod changed my perspective on kitchen gardening. I looked around, suddenly aware of all sorts of roots, leaves, blossoms, and seeds I’d never before considered as food, and asked myself a simple question: What else can I eat?
 
Fava greens, fennel pollen, kale flower buds, green coriander seed, carrot tops, squash flowers, and the tender tips of pea vines are now staples in my kitchen. I’ve also given myself license to harvest vegetables during all their myriad stages of growth. I pull garlic shoots in early spring, when they are slight and tender as scallions, and grill them. I rinse baby turnip roots off with the hose and eat them raw right out in the garden. I wait anxiously for my mustard greens to form flower buds because I love the sweet-spicy flavor they add to a stir-fry. Sometimes these delicious extras, as I’ve come to think of them, are available at farmers’ markets. But if you really want to experience the full range of food that edible plants offer, you need to garden. To grow food is to really know food. Not just in the sense of knowing where the vegetables on your plate come from, but how their appearance, flavor, and texture change as they grow.
 
The vegetables found in grocery stores are invariably sold at the stage that requires the least labor to harvest and the most convenience for packing, shipping, and display. The delicious tops of beets, turnips, and carrots are severed and discarded; strawberries are picked early and then artificially ripened; and tomatoes, though red, are too perfectly round and almost always hard.
 
Gardening gives you the chance to reacquaint yourself with food you thought you knew—like radishes. I plant their roly-poly seeds in a thick row and don’t worry about the spacing, because I know I can thin out and eat their delicious sprouts in a grilled cheese sandwich later. I harvest the roots when they are not much bigger than a marble and again later when they reach the familiar grocery store size. I cook their greens just like spinach, use the flowers as a garnish, and eat the pods as a snack. The whole radish plant is eminently edible and delicious—something I never would have discovered if I hadn’t grown my own.
 
I garden because I love food. Or, perhaps I love gardening because I grow food. Either way, I think there is almost nothing more satisfying than cooking with food that you nurtured from a tiny seed or seedling, and then serving it to others. It creates a tangible connection between the environment, the food that nourishes you, and the people sitting around your table. This book is an invitation to explore the amazing diversity of food that becomes available to you when you plant a plot of land with vegetables, herbs, and fruit, and to gain the confidence to experiment in the kitchen with the delicious raw goods your garden will provide.
 
But a garden should reflect its gardener. So think of the guides and advice in these pages as a recipe you can make your own—add a cup more here, a pinch less there—and have as much fun as possible. The most important thing I’ve learned is that in the garden and in the kitchen, mistakes can be the greatest gifts. You just have to have the courage to taste them.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Here’s a book for our times. It schools us to become better cooks by extending our reach beyond the kitchen. Grow the right kind of Swiss chard, not just pick it out at the market. Cook the perfect potato you’ve stored for winter, instead of boiling one that’s stored for you. Eat these recipes and you’ll find them delicious, but the real flavor here comes from the story, and the satisfaction of eating what you grow.” —DAN BARBER, executive chef and co-owner, Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns

Editorial Reviews

For those fortunate enough to have a plot of arable land, what can be more rewarding and satisfying than creating a vegetable garden? ... Gardener Galloway encourages even urban dwellers to consider raising their own fruits and vegetables. In this guide, she offers instructions on basic preparation of growing beds, including composting, an essential step for her preferred method of organic agriculture.  ... Color photographs accentuate the most appealing qualities of both produce and finished dishes.
Booklist

Master gardener and radio commentator Galloway (former West Coast editor, Organic Gardening ) concentrates here on herbs, greens, legumes, squash, cabbage, roots, tubers and bulbs, warm-season vegetables, and fruits, giving hints on planning a garden, using good soil, planting, watering, fertilizing, weeding, and dealing with insects and diseases. VERDICT This book is recommended for all readers interested in eating what they grow.
Library Journal

What makes this book stand out from the hundreds of other new vegetable-gardening books? It's Galloway's recommendations for varieties that thrive here, from blueberries to basil.
Valerie Easton, The Seattle Times

Like to eat as much as you like to garden? Willi Galloway's Grow Cook Eat...gives a recipe for each crop.
Sunset

The pretty garden and food photography will draw any novice in, and the conversational tone makes the book feel like the gentle guidance of a best friend. Even old hands will make use of the introductory chapters, a useful guide to basic gardening know how.
Organic Gardening

For a comprehensive guide to growing and using vegetbles in your kitchen, don't miss this book by Willi Galloway. Grow Cook Eat is packed full of growing tips, harvesting ideas and 50 recipes.
Birds & Blooms

All cookbooks and gardening guides should aspire to be like Grow Cook Eat, a marvelous hybrid by Master Gardener Willi Galloway... Feast on this book and you’ll never garden or cook the same way. You’ll certainly never eat the same way again.
Greenwoman Magazine

If there was a book that I could imagine that would teach me everything I needed to know to grow the edibles I had my heart set on from edamame and melons to garlic, tomatillos and tatsoi, this would be it.
Spade & Spatula

A recipe that will reward you for the bounty you’ve brought into the kitchen but won’t exhaust you with an additional grocery list or hours in the kitchen.
Bay Area Bites, KQED

The photos are dreamy, the recipes tantalizing (Lemony Broccoli Rabe, Strawberry Basil Ice Cream...), with plenty of tips on harvesting, storing, and how to successfully grow what you eat.
The Seattle Times

...I can't recommend it enough. Not only is it lovely to behold, it's imminently practical to use and apply. This is the gardening book you absolutely want to have on hand this coming growing season.
Ashley English, Small Measure

From the Publisher

Sustainable gardening and eating locally are popular now, and this is one of a number of new books for kitchen gardeners. Master gardener and radio commentator Galloway (former West Coast editor, Organic Gardening) concentrates here on herbs, greens, legumes, squash, cabbage, roots, tubers and bulbs, warm-season vegetables, and fruits, giving hints on planning a garden, using good soil, planting, watering, fertilizing, weeding, and dealing with insects and diseases. Chapters describe individual crops and suggest the best way to plant, grow, harvest, store, and cook them. Galloway recommends particular varieties and notes botanical and family names, edible parts, and problems in growing. For each kind of produce, she also provides a recipe that is simple and easy to prepare. Some are unusual, such as Tartines with Gruyère and Radish Greens, Roasted Beets with Winter Citrus Vinaigrette, and Cucumber Wedges with Chile and Lime. Full-page color photographs accompany many of the recipes and produce descriptions. VERDICT This book is recommended for all readers interested in eating what they grow.—Christine Bulson, formerly with SUNY Oneonta Libs.

Library Journal