Kitchen gardens offer bountiful harvests throughout the growing season. These enable gardeners to enjoy freshly picked fruits, veggies, nuts, herbs, and nuts. Kitchen gardeners will find the following cookbooks to be particularly useful.


“Huckleberry Cookbook”

This delightful cookbook is by Alex and Stephanie Hester. Illustrated with lovely line drawings, it was published by Three Forks, an imprint of the Globe Pequot Press. It belongs in every kitchen gardener’s bookshelf.

Though it’s true that huckleberries are much more common in the West, these also grow wild and are cultivated in the East as well. Kitchen gardeners will be pleased to know that blueberries are a great substitute for huckleberries.

This cookbook has every kind of dish you can imagine. One chapter contains recipes for appetizers, salads, and side dishes. There are also chapters devoted to desserts, and baked goods. As this book shows, huckleberries can be used to accompany any type of entrée from beef and pork to chicken and fish.

With berries being so popular for breakfast, breakfast and brunch dishes were also given their own chapter. Some of these breakfast goodies, such as smoothies, require no cooking.

Kitchen gardeners will especially like the chapter on condiments and preserves. This offers numerous ways to preserve and store surplus huckleberries for later use. The recipes include chutney, jam, vinaigrette, and other flavorings.

For each recipe, there are easy to follow directions. Throughout the book are quick tips about these berries and how to use them.

The engrossing introduction provides a wonderful history and background for this American fruit. It includes quotes from the Lewis and Clark Expedition.



“Rosalind Creasy’s Recipes from the Garden”

With 200 scrumptious recipes, this hardcover is a new release from Tuttle Publishing. This has both vegetarian and meat dishes.

There is a lush full color photo of each dish. For each recipe, there is a list of ingredients and simple directions along with some background notes on its origins.

A chapter is devoted to each type of dish. They include suppers and starters, side dishes, drinks and desserts. An entire chapter is devoted to vegetarian dishes.

The author devotes a lengthy chapter to herbs and edible flowers and how to use them. It has every type of herbal recipe you could want from salad dressings and herbal sweets to different kinds of herb blends and flower-flavored butters.

This book has two indexes. There is a complete recipe list with the dishes arranged by the recipe title and type.

Gardeners will find the second index especially helpful. It lists the recipes for each type of garden produce, including everything from