As you would expect from someone calling himself the Green Man, Randy Shore’s garden in Roberts Creek is terrific. It’s a simple layout, suitable for growing a huge variety of year round vegetables and herbs. In this autumn weather, tomato leaves may be turning to brown, but the winter buckwheat is blossoming, replenishing the soil. Leafy chard still towers over pots of rosemary and currently empty beds will soon sprout garlic. This produce will find its way onto Shore’s dining table faster than you can blanch a green bean.
That connection between garden and table is what his new book is all about. Grow What You Eat, Eat What You Grow: The Green Man’s Guide to Living and Eating Sustainably All Year Round is the lengthy title for a simple concept that Shore has espoused most of his life.
“I’ve got lots of cookbooks and lots of gardening books,” Shore said, “but nothing that makes the connection between kitchen and garden.” It includes 140 recipes of down home, farmhouse cooking, using what you can grow and what you can find at flourishing farmers’ markets. He’s convinced, as are many others, that there is a major loss of flavour when a vegetable is transported from Mexico to Canada. At a local farmers’ market you can talk to the grower to find out where your food comes from.
“A garden is your trip to the gym, your free-food grocery store and a potent source of vitamins, fibre and antioxidants all rolled into one,” he writes in the book’s introduction.
The book has been divided into the four seasons and offers advice for many aspects of gardening, including composting and dealing with slugs. Sustainability is important, not only for keeping the soil fertile, but to enrich it using the by-products of other industries such as bone meal and canola seed meal.
Shore is best known these days for his column in Vancouver Sun on food issues and urban gardening. He offers a blog (www.vancouversun.com/greenman) that he started when he moved from Vancouver to Roberts Creek six years ago and was immediately seduced by the land that surrounds his home.
He comes from a farm family where cooking was important — his father taught boys how to cook at one time (see Frank Shore’s Dumplings, a recipe in the new book). Randy Shore’s wife, Darcy, also contributed some of her grandparents’ recipes for this hearty, rustic food.
Fans of Shore’s blog might recognize a few of the dishes, he said, but in the time it took to compile the book, all of them have been tweaked and retested. The recipes are lip smacking: cabbage rolls, lamb kebabs — this is no fancy gourmet book using exotic ingredients.
Shore will be attending a book signing in Gibsons at the Seasoned Kitchen in Park Plaza (IGA mall) on Saturday, Oct. 4, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Grow What You Eat is published by Arsenal Pulp Press for $22.95. Shore invites you to chat with him, buy a book and sample some of the dishes that will be on hand to taste.
