A Year in My Kitchen: A Collection of Recipes Inspired by the Seasons and Based on a Culinary Toolbox of Inventive Flavorings

Captivating chef and local foods advocate Skye Gyngell inspired the Food Network, and "The New York Times Magazine" to tell her story. Her beautiful cookbook, A Year in My Kitchen, is as inspiring as its author. Interweaving personal narrative and 100 seasonal recipes, the book reveals how to make food sing. As the head chef at Petersham Nurseries' award-winning restaurant, Gyngell cooks with produce from her own garden; in this cookbook she inspires locavores, gardeners and cooks to craft meals from their vegetable gardens or source ingredients from local farmers' markets, greengrocers, fish markets and butchers. "There is a wonderful sense of anticipation, as well as a comforting familiarity, if you cook with the seasons," she writes in the book, which won the Guild of Food Writers Award for Best Cookery Book in the UK.
The book opens with Gyngell's toolbox, a trove of flavor-harmonizing ingredients like lemon zest, infused oils, agra-dolce and roasted red onions. Gyngell's spring dishes, such as warm asparagus with herb mayonnaise, rely on early greens. Once the glorious produce of summer bursts onto the landscape, Gyngell suggests peppers Piedmontese and other colorful recipes. She recommends rediscovering the stirring beauty of autumn with griddled scallops with sweet potato puree with tamari, maple syrup and chilli before taking comfort from winter foods, like slow-cooked pork belly with cinnamon, cloves, ginger and star anise.
Photographer Jason Lowe's luminous food imagery pays tribute to the sacredness of the seasons, nature, and the earth, as well as the sensual cooking experience.