Our Food Philosophy.

To make a meal from the produce you’ve grown is one of life’s simplest luxuries and greatest pleasures. We’ve never been more excited and curious about or connected to the taste of what we’re eating than when we’ve sampled the delicacies we’ve grown ourselves.

There’s something about the expectation, the surprise and the delight of harvesting, preparing and enjoying your own fresh produce. Every mouthful brings with it a story of triumph and contentment. I’ll never forget the time my brothers and I helped Mum harvest our first corncobs – we roasted them in the oven, lathered them in butter and then crunched our little teeth into the bursting yellow morsels. The sheer delight of watching these juicy cobs grow from seed to the point where we were able to enjoy them with the family was something pretty special.

If you allow it, the garden can be your greatest teacher. It teaches you patience, perseverance and presence, and it rewards you for your hard work, mindful observation and loving care. The garden will teach you lessons for life and lessons for the kitchen. It will encourage you to experiment, get creative and learn to make things from scratch that, previously, you would have thrown in your supermarket trolley without a second thought as to its ingredients or origins.

THE IMPORTANCE OF SEASONALITY

In a fast-spinning world that is constantly fighting to find new ways to feed its 7 billion mouths, we’ve lost touch with what real produce looks like and what is seasonally available to us. Whether we like it or not, both our successes and failures in the garden teach us lessons about the importance of seasonality and Mother Nature’s way.

Growing our own food means that eating seasonally is not just an aspirational ideal – it’s a daily way of life. We eat simply, healthily and mindfully, not because it’s the trendy thing to do, but because it’s so convenient when delicious and insanely fresh produce is located only a few steps away from our kitchen. Why would we bother eating anything else?

At our house, our weekly menu is a compilation of the best produce of the season. Our pantry is an assembly of the previous season’s preserved goods. Our shelves resemble those of our predecessors, who really had no other choice but to eat seasonally. Back then, the only produce available at the market was what was in season. For example, you could only buy peaches in summer and broccoli in winter. Now, produce is available year-round. Ripe and juicy peaches, for example, start to appear on our supermarket shelves in winter – and we should be asking why. Collectively, we have lost touch with seasonal growing and eating. Fewer and fewer people understand the patterns of the year and what this means for their plates, so this knowledge is not being passed on to the next generation. We now see a huge lack in awareness of not just seasonal eating, but also where our food comes from entirely!

With this comes an even greater problem for the modern world – food wastage. Growing our own food has made us far more aware of wastage and has meant that we’ve become both more resourceful and more mindful in the kitchen.

FEEL-GOOD FOOD

We’ve been lucky enough to have a prolific patch while living in our city home. This backyard bounty has included an abundance of fruits, herbs, vegies, eggs and honey. It’s been a labour of love, with a sharp learning curve when it comes to succession planting. We’ve had to quickly adapt to harvesting, cooking and storing some rather large batches of produce. With a penchant for cooking and a disdain for wastage, we’ve developed many methods of ‘using up’ what we’ve had on hand. The recipes in this book are a result of this way of life and thinking. We created these recipes to help us utilise all the produce we’ve managed to grow successfully.

We cook because we love to enjoy, share and trade food, and we have been lucky enough to live in wonderful communities of people who raise their hands to swap a bunch of fresh rhubarb for a jar of jam any day of the week. Having our own garden and taking care of others’ gardens has proved to us that, no matter how small or how urban, a backyard patch brings people together to grow, eat, share and learn, keeping us connected to the earth, the seasons and our community.

Returning to a way of cooking, eating and sharing food which is similar to that of the people and cultures before our time has taught us that food grown with pride and cooked with love doesn’t just fuel you – it sustains you long after the pesto has been licked from the bowl. We hope these recipes inspire you to make more things in your kitchen and encourage you to think about your food, where it comes from and, just as importantly, how it tastes.

So, here’s to your future edible garden, full and happy bellies and blissful days. Happy harvesting!