When You Grow It, You Cook Differently
Growing your own food changes how you cook, not just what you cook. When you grow food at home, you do not get neat little portions — you get gluts. A wall of tomatoes all ripening at once. More basil than you can possibly use. Spring onions regrowing faster than you can eat them. Parsley by the fistful, not the sprig.
That abundance fundamentally changes your relationship with ingredients. When you buy a £1.50 packet of basil from the supermarket, you ration it — a few leaves torn over a pasta. When you have got a metre of basil growing on the shed wall, you throw handfuls of it into everything. You make pesto with a whole plant's worth. You stuff it into sandwiches. You use it in volumes that would be absurd if you were buying it.
And that changes the food. Herbs go from being a garnish to being a main ingredient. Spring onions go from a sad little topping to the centrepiece of a stir-fry. You cook with a generosity that is impossible when every ingredient comes in an expensive small packet — and that generosity produces genuinely different, better food.
The NFT herb wall produces more parsley than you would believe possible from three metres of guttering — which is why the recipes here call for amounts that would bankrupt you at supermarket prices. A handful of herbs is not an indulgence when you have got a wall of them growing five metres from the kitchen.
The recipes on this site come from that abundance. They are not about making do with what is available — they are about having more than you need and cooking with the freedom that gives you. Some are ours, and over time we will share recipes from other growers too — real people cooking real food from their own harvests.
