Kathy Slack on how to make a virtue out of gluttony

I can only grow gluts. In my veg patch things either fail completely or we are gorging ourselves on a mountain of crops that arrive all at once. I always plant too much. I am hopeless at staggering sowings.

Three years ago, stuck in traffic during a long drive home to West Oxfordshire from a holiday in Skye, I came up with an idea for making a virtue of my glut-growing habit. I would start a blog. A blog about the gluts; how I grow them and what I do with them in the kitchen.

So one week I’d talk about my beetroot glut and suggest a few recipes for how to use them up. I started as soon as I got home and called the blog Gluts & Gluttony – the gluts from the allotment and the ensuing gluttony in the kitchen. I’d just rather rashly left a career in advertising in London and was enjoying country life but in need of a job. I hoped that maybe G&G would be the start of something.

At first it was all about the blog – taking pictures, testing recipes and so on. My patch is on a friend’s farm in the heart of rural Oxfordshire so it lends beautifully to a lifestyle blog. Then I started cooking for local people in their homes for dinner parties and small celebrations. I’d write bespoke menus based on what was in season, what local Oxfordshire producers could offer and what I had in the veg patch. Then I was asked to give cookery classes in client’s home. Soon, Gluts & Gluttony became a thriving small business offering private chef services, cookery classes and supper clubs. I took on a business partner, Mandy Bisson, in 2014 and we’ve never looked back.

This year, the G&G blog has become a book. I’m a cookbook junky and I’ve got a fair few gardening books too, but I’d never seen a book that talked about the growing of the produce and the cooking of it. Books are either mainly growing with a mention of what to cook or visa versa. I wanted to create a book that put both on an equal footing. The G&G Cookbook and Growing Guide is the result – a book about growing your own food and what to cook with it.

The book is divided into four seasons with each season have three gluts and each glut having three recipes. So for example, having read how to grow your own winter squash you can make Squash and Sage Cake with Thyme and Feta Frosting, squash risotto or squash and feta salad.

Every recipe makes a hero of the fruit or vegetable in question. These are recipes for celebrating the glut, and for using it up of course, so the glutting vegetable is the main flavour of the dishes. They aren’t intentionally vegetarian, but many recipes happen to be so and I suppose that’s inevitable when you’re celebrating a particular crop.

The recipes are simple too, but beautiful. At G&G we can’t abide tuilles and foams and frippery. It smothers the ingredients. And when you’ve grown your own ingredients you want to give them space to sing and put them centre stage.

The ingredients are intentionally easy to grow too. I’m lucky to have a decent-sized growing space, but I don’t believe you need a veg patch to grow your own. So in the book I focus on fruit and veg that are simple to grow at home, often in pots and without much, if any, experience. I’d love people to grow more of their own food, so I wanted to make both the growing and the cooking accessible.

* G&G cookboook at glutsandgluttony.com