Rosie Dakin is an award-winning cookbook author and, by trade, an incredible gardener. She transformed a patch of barren land beside her Vancouver home into an enchanting English garden that’s just as beautiful as the produce she harvests and cooks. In her latest cookbook, The Side Gardener: Recipes and Notes from My GardenShe shares easy recipes and care tips for the vegetables she grows in her beautiful garden, so anyone can learn to nourish their body and the land that nourishes it – no gardening skills required.
Excerpted from The Side Gardener by Rosie Dakin. Copyright © 2024 Rosie Dakin. Photography by Andrew Montgomery. Published by Appetite, an imprint of Random House®, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced under agreement with the publisher. All rights reserved.
Living in the West and embracing the longer gardening season, Rosie celebrates the long, warm weather that allows her to plant early her must-have favorites, including leafy greens, English peas, radishes, tomatoes, and herbs. Though she admits to a penchant for impulse buying in seed catalogs, she is a stylist at heart, always experimenting with new vegetable varieties that will pop out boldly on the plate. Rosie’s current plant palette consists of beauties in reddish hues, including the highly fragrant Chinese pink celery, the beautiful vine-like Japanese cherry tomato called “pinky,” and the sweet-tasting pea “shiraz” (mangetu) with its deep wine-red shell. Her approach to gardening is to keep an open mind and not be afraid to do a little trial and error. She encourages her readers not to give up or be intimidated. She explains, “After you’ve plucked your first ripe tomato off the vine or pulled your first handful of radishes out of the ground, it all starts to make sense.”
Excerpted from The Side Gardener by Rosie Dakin. Copyright © 2024 Rosie Dakin. Photography by Andrew Montgomery. Published by Appetite, an imprint of Random House®, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced under agreement with the publisher. All rights reserved.
Rosie’s passion is creating recipes using ingredients straight from her garden. Side GardenerHer enthusiasm for fresh produce (whether from your own garden or the local farmers market) shines through in this lovely testimonial. Rosie wants this book to prove that even small spaces can produce bountiful harvests, and to show that even simply growing herbs in a balcony or windowsill patio planter can bring great satisfaction and peace of mind. Here she shares some recipes from the book that will not only let you enjoy the taste of your summer garden, but also all the joy you get from tending it.
Veggie-based meals you can try at home
Get the book
Excerpted from The Side Gardener by Rosie Dakin. Copyright © 2024 Rosie Dakin. Photography by Andrew Montgomery. Published by Appetite, an imprint of Random House®, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced under agreement with the publisher. All rights reserved.
Want more recipes from Rosie Dakin? The Side Gardener: Recipes and Notes from My Garden.
