Gardening Pacific Northwest: Slugs and Salal

Exquisite book for food gardeners

Organic & Wholefoods: Naturally delicious cuisine, Andre Domine, ed. (Whitecap, 460 pages, hardcover, $60 Cdn.).

This is one of the best of the new gardening books for food gardeners. The book's editor, Andre Domine, is an author and journalist specializing in food and drink. His interest in alternative cultivation methods and love of "good wholefood" have their origins in his first sampling of prize-winning organic wines and in his wife's spoiling him with organically grown vegetables.

As well as fruit, vegetables, herbs and grains, more foods such as drinks, sweeteners, dairy products, fish, meat and poultry are explored in delectable detail.

Photographer Ruprecht Stempell, son of a chef, is based in Cologne where the book was produced. His photographs of robust foods together with the recipes for using them inspire an enhanced appreciation for vitally nutritious foods grown organically in our home gardens.

Organic and wholefoods

The editor's preface affirms the changing awareness in the eating habits of many people. "It has increasingly been recognized that fresh fruit and vegetables -- if they are grown on living soil, fertilized with compost, protected from pests by natural means, and harvested when fully ripe -- contain a wealth of vital substances which are of central importance for our well-being."

There are further benefits from eating wholefoods: "If you eat organic food you are not only promoting your own health but also that of plants and animals, and the environment generally. The fact that a whole world of flavors and pleasures can be (re)discovered at the same time will also totally satisfy the gourmet."

The photographs

The photographs are earthy and exquisite, the people in them real. From a flat of onions being handed to a young woman with clearly visible smears of dried soil on her shirt to a fashion-challenged trio knocking plums from trees in southwest France and an elderly couple slicing cabbage for making sauerkraut -- all convey a most appealing, down-to-earth authenticity.

But, there's much more than just pretty scenes. This book contains a multitude of practical pictures showing plants and produce in various stages and forms, and painstaking detail in recipe instruction photos. Simply stunning.

A Typical Section

In praise of vegetables, the introduction to a section devoted to them notes that "there is no other foodstuff so rich in nutrients ... They have a wealth of vitamins, minerals, and fiber together with enzymes and hormones -- all essential for health, immunity to disease and well-being, yet they contain comparatively few calories."

Color photos covering four pages and 48 vegetables follow, each item captioned with a description and the vegetable's most common uses. Included are a few unusual foods such as stinging nettle, sorrel, and scorzonera.

Tantalizing photographs of finished dishes and various stages of their preparation fill the entire book. The vegetable chapter begins with a vegetable soup that is easily adapted to each season in the garden, and a series of Mediterranean vegetable recipes such as eggplant rolls with mozzarella filling.

In the Roots and Tubers section there's a Beet, Apple and Nut salad with onions and hazelnuts, and Caramelized Root Vegetables using carrot and parsnip cut in long strips and cooked in oil, honey, and turmeric.

A Glossary of Lettuce spreads 18 colorful salad ingredients over two pages. Two frilly little leaf lettuce favorites, Lollo Biondo and Lollo Rosso, are there along with arugula, radicchio, purslane, lamb's lettuce (corn salad), and nutritious dandelion.

Herbs in the Kitchen features herbal teas and a two-page photo feature of 11 dips -- herb dip, carrot and ginger, yoghurt and mint, and more.

Or perhaps you'd rather have dessert

Health Food Par Excellence is the phrase chosen to introduce a section on Pomaceous Fruit -- apples, pears, quinces -- containing recipes like Cinammon-Flavored Pears with Chocolate Mousse. In a section on strawberries there's sliced fresh strawberries with lemon juice and honey, served topped with port wine zabaglione.

Webmaster's note: Helen and Lois will probably thump me for telling you this, but they were positively drooling over this huge, gorgeous book. They have each been to Italy recently, and they assured me that this book is the Real Thing. Check it out.

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