The nature of food

"If you want to truly celebrate the incredible tastes every season has to offer, this book is a no-brainer. It's a perfect companion for all gardeners and passionate home cooks" - Huw Richards gardener, writer and permaculturalist

“Having known Sam for a couple of years, food and cooking has always been something that we’ve found common ground on… both caring massively where and how our food is produced/grown and cared for. It’s a brilliant read, with a great philosophy behind the recipes."
- Nathan Davies Michelin-starred chef at SY23

Introduction

The Nature of Food  follows the four seasons in the garden, showing tasty and creative ways you can enjoy and share your harvests.

Each season has 20 key plant-based and vegetarian recipes for all meals of the day, along with a drink of the season and other prep recipes to capture delicious flavours for use later in the year.

The inspirational photography and beautiful presentation of these meals celebrate the garden’s bounty, while the recipes are surprisingly easy and low-cost to make, yet deliver restaurant-quality flavours. With Sam's simple, clear instructions and well-sourced produce, you can make these stunning dishes for yourself and others. 

The chapters are based on the seasons, and within each chapter are at least 20 recipes. These include some prep ideas to help you capture the flavours of the seasonal produce (how to cure, ferment, and preserve ingredients, for example), a breakfast recipe per season, two desserts per season, and plenty of delicious savoury recipes that can be adapted for sides, lunches, mains and sharing platters. 

There are also ideas for how to source the best ingredients and how to adapt recipes to work with the ingredients available to you at the time. Sam lists his storecupboard essentials and offers cheat-sheets on cooking ingredients and grains, to make it as easy as possible for you to adapt the recipes in this book and swap in ingredients to suit you. He also outlines his philosophy of co-sufficiency and sustainability, and suggests further reading (all his favourite books, basically).

With global and personal health issues on the increase, I genuinely believe how and what we eat makes a huge difference. My hope is that this cookbook helps you make the best of your ingredients and take a step towards creativity in the kitchen. Honestly, it’s the book I wish I’d had when I first got into food. - Sam

Sam’s focus is on exploring flavour in the most sustainable way possible. Limiting waste, sharing food, and getting creative with seasonal produce are practices he’s been developing and sharing for as long as he can remember. It is his goal to demonstrate that seasonal does not mean limited, and that in fact it is our view of food practice at large that limits what we value.

Reconnect

Much more than just a collection of recipes, Sam wanted to write a cookbook that would be a go-to resource for seasonal, sustainable eating, packed full of very simple tips and techniques from his time in professional kitchens. Lightly addressing the key role food plays socially (in our relationships with one another) and environmentally (its impact on the world around us), he hopes that this book will help you connect with food wherever you live, whatever you eat. From the importance of sourcing ingredients to recipe flexibility and seasonal eating, The Nature of Food carries an empowering and hopeful message: to help you make the most of your food and learn what it is to cook instinctively in a beautiful and approachable way.

About the author

As a chef, writer and gardener, I’ve been fortunate enough to work alongside some truly inspiring, knowledgeable and creative people from all over the world. I develop recipes and write for the blog Farmer and Chef, produce online courses, and consult for local restaurants. 

I fell into being a chef at a young age, after an incredible Brazilian chef took me under her wing from my first job pot-washing, to helping her make desserts. I didn’t fully realise my passion for food until after I graduated from my postgraduate studies in fine art. Art taught me to use my senses as a lens to actively explore the world around me, and stepping back into the kitchen turned my focus from the visual arts onto flavour and aroma. Much like art, cooking has rules. From colour theory to flavour pairing, art gave me a unique opportunity to explore the world of food from a different angle – one that continues to yield new and exciting discoveries.

Since then, I’ve worked for challenging and creative restaurants, dedicated to sustainability, excellence and flavour. I’ve also built up a small library’s worth of books on the subject of food – from cookbooks by the world’s best restaurants to academic studies on food production, soil biology, fermentation and flavour science.

It is my love for both food and books that first inspired me to write my own cookbook, along with the encouragement of my good friend Huw (yes, that Huw Richards).

A couple of years ago, Huw and I started to work together; growing, cooking, preserving, foraging and fermenting everything we could. Our areas of expertise are two sides of the same coin, and our enthusiasm for sharing that passion sparked a number of projects – this cookbook being one of them.

How you can help

Supporting this project and buying this book will not only give you all the great recipes within it, but will also support Regenerative Press. Huw, Sam, and the team at Regenerative Press are keen to publish other authors with great information to share, so your purchase will help fund our future.

“Having spent the last year designing recipes, growing ingredients, making bowls and plates, cooking food and photographing the whole process, I’m so excited to finally share this project with you.” - Sam

Originally crowd funded, we’re pleased to announce our goal of £10,000 towards printing costs was met and the book is currently in the process of being turned into reality. Thank you so much for the support from so many people. Not only will this help cover the cost of the first print run but it will also help Regenerative Press take the next steps towards supporting new authors with expertise crucial to a more sustainable future.

Order your copy here

If you’d like to order a copy of Sam’s book, please click here.