The Joyful Home Cook. Rosie Birkett
pasta and slow-fermentation doughs for breads and pizza, that can form the basis of so many fantastic meals, as well as homemade condiments, crispy breadcrumbs and flavoured butters and fresh cheeses that can be adapted throughout the year.
I’ve shared ideas for maximising seasonal produce, from making Wild Garlic Pesto (see here), to preparing quick jams and poached fruit to spruce up your desserts, and preserves like sweet Pickled Peaches (see here), My ‘Kind Of’ Kimchi (see here) and other tangy fermented vegetables and fruit-infused spirits (see here). These flavour-packed foods will help keep your kitchen well stocked throughout the year and add extra ‘wow’ to your dishes. They also make fantastic edible gifts for friends.
And so that these gifts keep on giving, I’ve included plenty of ideas for how to use everything up so nothing is wasted, as well nifty ways of utilising any by-products. Many of the recipes feed into one another, so when you’ve had a go at making the Labneh (see here), you’ll wind up with tangy whey, which you can use to brine the juicy lamb chops (see here). And once you’ve tasted how next-level the parsnips glazed in leftover rhubarb poaching liquor are (see here), you’ll never find yourself pouring it away again. Surplus sourdough starter goes into my squishy, sour crumpets and bright pink beetroot blinis (see here and here). And when you end up with a batch of sourdough crumpets sitting patiently in your freezer, waiting to be defrosted, toasted and slathered with butter, Future You will thank Present You for your efforts.
THE WAY I COOK
As you cook from the book, you will get used to my straightforward, ingredient-led approach; the way I combine, contrast and layer flavours and textures to get the most out of ingredients. You will find repeated flourishes and tricks that I hope will start to run through your cooking: a tang of sharp pickled onion or funk of homemade ferment here, the sweet, juiciness of a thinly sliced sugarsnap pea or crunch of Savoury Granola (see here) there.
I’ve always plumped for the underdog. There’s something for me in rooting for the unloved and underrepresented, which is why in the pages of this book you’re not going to find yet another recipe for roast forerib of beef or chocolate mousse. Instead, I want to introduce or reacquaint you with ingredients you might not have used before, or don’t use that often, but that are readily and easily available, and that can bring so much to your kitchen. Things like buttermilk – once a staple in English cookery – whey, pickled walnuts, fregola and buckwheat: all versatile ingredients worth getting in if you don’t have them already.
I grew up in rural Kent with parents who bordered on obsessive when it came to food and drink: my mother an astonishing home cook, my late father a passionate grower of veg, keen forager and even more voracious eater. My mum’s simple, delicious home-cooked meals were the heartbeat of family life. Eating vegetables that my dad grew himself, and gathering field mushrooms with him on autumn mornings, gave me a precious early insight into the connection between food and the land, and how much flavour is in an ingredient when it’s at its prime. My style of cooking reflects this, often putting seasonal veg at the centre of the plate.
Now I live in a big city, but I never cease to be excited by the arrival of the first green tips of asparagus (to be drenched in spiced butter and tiny brown shrimps as (see here)) in spring, or a late summer glut of ripe tomatoes (to be baked into the galette (see here)), and I’ve given ideas and recipes to encourage this appreciation of seasonality, wherever you live. Connecting to our landscape through our cooking and eating gives a sense of enormous wellbeing, and the food I make is always led by which ingredients are at their freshest and most flavourful, plentiful and affordable. You’ll notice that quite a few ingredients crop up more than once, and will find many ways with seasonal favourites like celeriac, runner and broad beans, beetroot and fennel.
I’m a total allotment novice, and have started growing my own vegetables and herbs with enthusiasm and varying degrees of success, often sharing most of it with the allotment’s rather persistent wildlife. I’m not anywhere near the point where I’m growing enough to live off, but having a go at growing and harvesting my own plants made me value ingredients in a new way. When you harvest even a half-nibbled leaf of vividly earthy chard straight from the ground and notice how much more flavourful it tastes, you realise what goes into producing food and feel more inclined to savour the ingredient. There are a couple of recipes where I’ve name-checked allotment produce (the pasties (see here) and Allotment Greens and Anchovy Orecchiette (see here)), because I thought it might be helpful for you to know what a newbie like me has found easiest to grow and cook with.
If you don’t already, have a go at growing some of your own food, even if you have no outdoor space. Herbs and salad leaves are so easy to grow in a window box or container outside the front or back door, and can bring so much vibrancy to your cooking. From seed, I‘ve successfully grown lovage (if you’re not familiar with it, it has a wonderful spicy, curry leaf-meets-celery flavour and comes back year after year), chervil, tarragon, borage (tastes like cucumber and has gorgeous blue and pink flowers), sage and thyme. Investing in a rosemary plant and bay tree is also helpful. Our bay tree is meagre and dog-eared, often battered by the bin men and attacked by slugs, but it’s still consistently provides enough fresh bay leaves for all my cooking.
Foraging isn’t just for men in waxed hats who can identify any mushroom at twenty paces. When I walk the dog down the canal, inhaling the heady scent of elderflower in May and June, it’s impossible to resist grabbing fragrant fistfuls for the strawberry tarts on the cover of this book, or to infuse vinegar. On the coast, I’ll look for flowering stems of wild fennel – their golden pollen is like an extra seasoning of intense anise for seafood or juicy, ripe stone fruit. There’s something incredibly exciting about picking wild ingredients, and they bring intense, hyper-local and unique flavours to your cooking. It goes without saying that you should never eat an ingredient if you’re not 100 per cent sure about it.
While fresh seasonal produce forms the backbone of my cooking style, as part of my job I’ve been lucky enough to travel and report on different cuisines, meeting many chefs and food producers around the world. So naturally, a number of enlivening international ingredients have found their way into my cooking and are now firm kitchen staples: things like harissa, tahini, tamarind sauce, pomegranate molasses, fish sauce and grains and pulses such as freekeh and lentils. If some of these ingredients are more unfamiliar or a little harder to source, I promise they will delight and inspire your cooking from here on in, and not just gather dust in the cupboard.
CHERISH THE CRAFT OF COOKING
There is an increasing appetite to understand the craft and processes behind much of the food we love, and I want to demystify techniques like simple sourdough bakery, fermenting, smoking, curing and brining, and making simple homemade fresh cheeses. They are all age-old techniques that have been recently re-embraced by restaurant chefs, but they mostly originated from domestic kitchens, and we are now reconnecting with them as home cooks.
In particular, I’m excited about the fermented recipes. What I love most about the process is that anyone can do it in any home kitchen: