Weekend Cooking : Food for All Seasons by Oliver Rowe

In Food for All Seasons, British chef and restaurateur Oliver Rowe celebrates seasonal cooking in his home country. His memoir / cookbook is arranged by the calendar and features the six or eight star ingredients for each month of the year: rhubarb in March, gooseberries in June, and oysters in September, for example.

Rowe, of course, provides recipes for the seasonal foods he cooks and loves, but the heart of Food for All Seasons is really the stories about the interconnections among kitchen inspiration, the natural environment, and the season.

I particularly like the chatty sections in which Rowe talks about all kinds of things, from going on July picnics and fishing with his mother to how to cook crab, his developing relationship with garlic, and the different types and uses of elder.

Many of the recipes look quite inviting (boozy cherries, slow-cooked lamb, green tomato chutney, chocolate-almond cake), though a handful use ingredients I doubt I could find in my small town (quail eggs, for example). I know I'll give some of Rowe's dishes a go; in fact, I have my eye on Lemon-Dressed Kale with Pumpkin Seeds for a holiday side dish and think homemade eggnog would be a wonderful Christmas treat.

The real appeal of Food for All Seasons for me, though, are Oliver Rowe's stories about both his personal relationship with food and cooking and his love of using fresh, seasonal ingredients.

Here are a few quotes that stuck with me:

• Food trends come and go, but eating goes beyond the mere need to sustain life: it's imbedded in culture and therefore becomes entwined in the mores, values and aspirations of the time.
• Stocks are peculiar things and chefs will go on about them for as long as you keep your eyes open.
• June is thoroughly spoiled.
• There's a lot of luxury at the height of summer, what with the strawberries, raspberries, peaches and all. Everything starts to change when the autumn comes around. It's not that autumn produce isn't delicious and seductive, but it tends to ask more of us than some of the floozies you get in the summer months.

For more on Oliver Rowe, visit his website. For some recipes, visit The Guardian or BBC Food. You'll get a glimpse of his incredibly blue eyes and learn how to make a simple summer salad in the following short video:

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