Turnips' Edible Almanac: The Week-by-week Guide to Cooking with Seasonal Ingredients

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Foster’s accounts of supplying some of the UK’s most exacting chefs are also worth a read - there’s a particularly good one about what went into Nico Ladenis’ famed peach Melba. We usually turn down cookbooks written by suppliers but have made an exception for fruit and vegetable specialist Turnips because its effort is a genuinely useful tool for chefs (it’s not vanity publishing either, the book is published by DK). The collection of over 100 recipes is mostly written by the Turnips Restaurant’s very own head chef, Tomas Lidakevicius, as well as Fred’s family members and friends within the industry, including some celebrity chefs such as Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver and the Galvin brothers. As a greengrocer, Turnips has built strong ties with independent farmers across the UK and Europe and has been supplying restaurants with the finest ingredients for more than 30 years.

The author of the book is Fred Foster, a fourth-generation costermonger and co-director of Turnips, which operates a stall in Borough Market and supplies some of London’s best restaurants (it also runs its own restaurant, which is also in Borough Market). Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Fred encourages readers to embrace the anticipation, the excitement of counting down to the arrival of a long-awaited fruit or vegetable. The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network. Fred Foster is the co-founder of Turnips, a fruit and vegetable wholesale and retail company with an emphasis on quality and seasonality in the heart of London.

The bulk of the recipes have been penned by Turnips Restaurant chef patron Tomas Lidakevicius, who Foster describes as Lithuania’s answer to Eminem (presumably on account of them having a similar haircut, but who knows).

While ambitious chefs might not be too interested in Oliver’s recipe for banoffee pie, they will be interested in Foster’s insights into the fruit and vegetable business. The time for fresh, seasonal, delicious food is now – Turnips’ Edible Almanac is the definitive guide to eating the very best produce throughout the year, written by Borough Market greengrocer Fred Foster. These lists are created from decades of Fred’s experience working with and selling world-class fresh fruit and vegetables to restaurants, chefs and home cooks. Recipes during the autumn weeks include Chestnut gnocchi; Squash salad with pickled walnuts and blue cheese; Pickled grapes with creamy mussels; Kohlrabi gratin with smoked bacon and garlic crumb; Sweet ‘n’ sour cauliflower; and desserts such as Lemon pie and Roasted plums in rum with Chantilly cream.If you are interested in the history of our local area why not sign up to our regular newsletter which contains lots of fascinating historical info. Each chapter is focused on a single ingredient and comprises an impressively detailed mini essay and a recipe or two. Turnips’ Edible Almanac is a fruit-and-vegetable reference book for home cooks, chefs or the culinary-interested, with 52 chapters: one for every week of the year.