Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ www.teachinggarden.org
Written by Alan Hickman

Every couple of weeks for the past eight years I’ve sat in my familiar book lined study to write a garden column. This morning all that remains is a small desk with the computer while around me the room is stripped down to the bare walls for renovation. The accumulation of almost forty years has been packed away - the books alone filled four dozen Banker’s Boxes - and I wonder if I’ll ever find anything again. It took decades to get the piles of paper, the jars and boxes and files, ‘organized’ the first time!
Although most of the thousand or so titles of books, booklets and monographs in the collection were garden related, maybe a couple of metres of shelf space were occupied by cookbooks. Perhaps the oldest, a ‘Mrs Beeton’s Cookery Book’, still carries a sticker from St. Columba School in London attesting that the book was awarded, in 1924, to my mother for "General Improvement"!
Despite the encouragement of the venerable Mrs B and subsequent luminaries like James Beard and Julia Child and even Jamie Oliver, for me the epicurean arts have remained more alchemy than repeatable science. Out of sheer frustration, I recently signed up for cooking classes and that was quite the role reversal. I and most of the other ten students had cooked for years and the main job of the teacher was to get rid of all our accumulated bad kitchen habits, our misconceptions and our mal-practices.
It turns out that teaching an adult to cook is remarkably similar to teaching an adult to garden. In one case it starts with the correct way to hold a knife and how to produce a standard julienne potato; in the other case it’s the difference between a spade and a shovel and the correct way to use both. Who’d have thought that a kitchenful of people wouldn’t know how a chef’s knife was designed to be held?
One person who manages to combine gardening and cooking with more than usual success is Renee Shepherd. It’s no longer un-common for boutique chefs to feature fresh herbs and produce grown in their restaurant’s own gardens but Renee has gone a step further.
As founder and owner of Renee’s Garden Seeds, Renee tours extensively to find sources of seed suitable for the professional chef and the home gardener - heritage varieties as well as crosses newly hybridized. Back home, the seeds are grown and assessed for a couple of years before the best are added to the company’s catalogue.
Starting in spring, Renee and collaborator Fran Rabinoff spend a couple of days a week constructing recipes using fresh garden produce as it becomes available. The resulting cookbooks reflect this seasonal origin. Arranged alphabetically by main ingredient, it’s easy to find something to do with a trickle or a glut of tomatoes or zucchinis or pumpkins.
Although I’d never turn down a piece of pumpkin pie, this recipe for pumpkin cobbler, taken from Recipes From A Kitchen Garden, has become my favourite indulgence. With no pie-crust to wrestle with, it’s easy to make; the crust mixture rises to the top during baking to form a rich topping.
PUMPKIN COBBLER
FILLING:
2 eggs, beaten
1 cup evaporated milk
3 cups cooked mashed pumpkin or butternut squash
1 cup white sugar
½ cup dark brown sugar
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ginger
1/4 teaspoon cloves
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
½ teaspoon salt
CRUST:
½ cup butter
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup white sugar
4 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
TOPPING:
1 tablespoon butter
2 tablespoons white sugar
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
In a large bowl, combine eggs, milk and pumpkin; add the rest of the filling ingredients, mix well and set aside. Then prepare the crust: melt the butter in a 9 x 11-inch baking pan. In another bowl, mix the remaining crust ingredients until just combined and pour into baking pan on top of the melted butter. Spoon or slowly pour the filling evenly over the crust batter in the pan. Do not stir. Dot the top with the remaining 1 tablespoon of butter and sprinkle with the 2 tablespoons of sugar. Bake 1 hour. Serves 8 to 10.
Initially I tried to make this using a fancy Italian ceramic dish and had no success at all. Using a cheap metal baking tin the recipe is a winner every time so be advised. As evaporated milk comes in 385 mL cans, use the 135mL left over from the filling as part of the milk for the crust. The filling is also very yummy if a 300mL can of sweetened condensed milk is substituted for the cup of evaporated milk
Go to http://www.reneesgarden.com/ for cookbook details. For the 2007 series of free gardening classes check out http://www.teachinggarden.org/index.shtml. I’ll even show you how to use a chef’s knife!