From AwayToGarden.com and RobinhoodRadio.com, this is AwayToGarden with Margaret Roach. You're a weekly invitation to dig in and grow. Kevin West begins his newest book called The Cooks Garden like this. This is a book about flavor, he writes. It is a book about how to become a better cook by stepping into the garden. His is not just a cookbook, though. It's also a book about how to grow edible crops from seed to harvest, so a cookbook and a gardening book all in one, highlighting exceptional varieties to cultivate and enjoy. Since this is the start of Sirius Winter Squash season in Kevin and I both delight in them, growing and cooking winter squash is our topic today but first these messages. Underwriting support for a way to garden provided by Colorblends wholesale flower bulbs, a third-generation bulb company offering top-sized flower bulbs directly to landscape professionals and ambitious residential gardeners on the web, Colorblends.com. And by High Moeng Seeds, Wolcott Vermont, Professional Quality Vegetable, Flower, and Erbil Seeds that are 100% organic and non-GMO project verified. On the web, HighMoengSeeds.com. And by White Flower Farm, offering a wide range of lineage, and today lives and gardens organically in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. He's the author of Saving the Season, A Cook's Guide to Home Canning, Pickling

and Preserving, and now of The Cook's Garden. And I'm so glad for a chance to talk to him again

on the show today. Hi, Kevin. How are you? Hi, Margaret. Very well. It's great to be back with you. I looked back in my records and like 10 years ago or something we talked about how to make Apple butter on what was in a radio program that I did.

That was a long time ago and back then I was living in Los Angeles and shopping at the Santa

Monica Farmers Market every was in a radio program that I did. That was a long time ago. And back then, I was living in Los Angeles and shopping at the Santa Monica Farmers Market every Wednesday. Exactly. Now we're not so far apart. We're just across a little bit across I-90-ish, the Massachusetts turnpike from each other, I think. We call it country neighbors, right? Yes, exactly. So, yes. And so we'll do, I should say, before we get started, we'll I'll do a book giveaway with the transcript of the show over on away to garden.com. So people can enter to win and I've been enjoying the book. It's a big book. It's got lots going on as I said in the introduction. It's gardening and cooking. So two areas to learn about. And it right in the book, another quote that I loved right early in the book, you say gardening is now a facet of what it means to me to eat well. You say that. And so tell us a little bit about your sort of motivation for writing this and how you would describe this sort of hybrid gardening cooking volume. Mark, I love that you started with the line that this is a book about flavor. This is a book about eating well, about living well, about having a connection to our food and to the seasonal calendar and to seasonal vegetables in particular. It's not fundamentally about self-sufficiency, home-setting or living off the grid or anything kind of hyper, you know, kind of hippie independent back to the land in spirit. As much as I admire that kind of ambition, what I really want to do is to park and back to the way that I grew up around seasonal food, which is to say, as you mentioned, I come from a farming family on my dad's side, and my mother, who comes from Tennessee Hillbilly's, really. My dad and mom both grew up around gardens, and they were both gardeners all of their lives. And so my experience of being around a garden is that you would grow some things. You would look forward to the tomatoes, and my mother grew all kinds of herbs that she cooked with every meal. You might have a favorite squash that you grew. My father always grows okra. So there's always something in the garden, but you're not depending on it because you're also shopping at farmers market or you're also swapping vegetables with some of your neighbors or you have an uncle or an aunt who is growing something. So it's this idea of just being close to the seasons and being close to the garden. We called it cooking from a garden. But again, the idea is that you layered in some homegrown food into your everyday cooking. And that's really the starting point for the cooks garden. It's this idea of taking your everyday cooking life and making it richer and more flavorful and more creative by using seasonal vegetables and some homegrown herbs and vegetables. Right. And so now your garden where you are now, how we where your edible the part that your edible so grown is it raised beds or is it in the ground or how big is it just describe it briefly for us?

Yeah, my garden is about 60 by 75 feet approximately. It's in the ground. The garden is divided into quadrants, which makes it easier to rotate, to schedule my rotations, and also just makes management easier generally. It's principally a vegetable garden, although I also have some ornamentals in there, such as

irises and some lilies and some peonies. You know, it's my cutting garden as well. And then I have herbs scattered here and there. And there are little strips of grass and little strips, little places where I left the weeds come up to benefit the pollinators. And it's It's surrounded by a dear fence and my neighbor, Del Martin, on whose land I actually

garden.

Strangely. benefit the pollinators. And it's surrounded by a deer fence and my neighbor, Del Martin, on whose land I actually garden, strangely, my garden is not on my place. It's on a neighbor's place. Because the property, the garden has a slight southern tilt, south facing tilt. And so that slope, that gentle slope, improves drainage. And as you know, we've got a lot of heavy New England play here in the Berkshires. So that gentle slope improves drainage. And as you know, we've got a lot of heavy New England play here in the virtues. So that gentle slope improves drainage. And it also, because it's tilted towards the sun in the springtime, it helps the garden wake up a bit quicker. And it's just such a good garden spot that I can't give it up. Okay. And co-op, we have a cooperative neighbor, so that's good. So I promised we would

extoll the virtues of winter squash, which is probably my favorite vegetable of all. And a funny story for this year, 2025, I kind of gave up my vegetable plantings because we were having heat domes and drought and whatever, and I just thought, no, I'm going to's market. I give up. But my compost heap didn't give up. Out popped a tangle of winter squash vines and I didn't know what it would be and it was obviously something I had, you know, had scooped out and eating a winter squash however long ago and put the seeds in there as my composting them, so to speak. And so these vines were crazy, wild all over the place, and I just left them. And don't you know, you know, I harvested seven very good sized, their Delacotta-type squash. And they are just absolutely delicious. So you never know what did you grow this year accidentally or on purpose, which wins your squash. Wow. That's amazing. It reminds me of something that my mother used to say. She would say, I seed wants to grow. And she would say, look around your compost bin and look into beds from last year. And you'll see a million volunteers coming up, particularly squash and volunteer tomatoes. And that was her way to reassure me that the garden would be fine. I see it wants to grow. We're just helping out the process. That was a wonderful saying I always carry with me because it's reassurance that even if you're a little nervous about having the garden, it's reassurance that things are going to work out. Margaret, to answer your question about what I grew this year, I have a dire confession to make before you and your listeners, which is that I didn't grow new winter squash this year because of commitments I had around my book launch and things like that. I grew summer squash, but I didn't get out any winter squash. However, having said that, I typically grow a couple of different varieties that I choose for flavor because I love them so much. One of them is Honey Patch, which is the newest iteration of Honey Nut, which is a squash that I'm sure you know, developed by Michael Maserick, a plant breeder who came out of Cornell and who is one of the co-founders of Ro7CED seeds with Sheth Dan Barber. And Honey Patch is imagine a Honey Nut, I mean a butternut, excuse me, imagine a butternut and then shrink it down to about one-third the original size. But all of the flavor of the original butternut is concentrated in that little package. And the honey patch or the honey nut is absolutely delicious in flavor. And the size is just right for two cervix. So they grow prolifically, they produce very generously and they're just wonderful to cook. So that's the winter squash that I go to every year, except this year. And there are many other varieties that we could talk about, but that's my number one recommendation for anyone. I know in the book you also mentioned another variety I think also from row seven seeds. And I don't even know how to pronounce it. Robyn's Koginat, KOGINUT.

That's what I say is Robyn's Poginat. I'm not sure I've heard anyone pronounce it, who knows what they're talking about. So you and I can decide it's Koginat. And you and that one, the rest of you in the book, I believe you stuff it. You have it as a stuffed squash, which is kind of, I've never, you know, I'm vegetarian And I cook for one.

And so I'm kind of boring sometimes. So a lot of times I just take the simplest route and just, you know, roast a squash or whatever, but it looked so beautiful. Oh gosh. That's it. It's a beautiful squash. I made that, I developed that recipe for Thanksgiving because I wanted to come up with a an vegetarian alternative to the Thanksgiving turkey. And I was looking for something that would be beautiful, right, and would be dramatic, and would be delicious, and would be able to hold the table in the way that a whole roasted bird holds the table. And so I had grown a coconut thatinut that year, this is, I don't know,

three or four years ago, four or five years ago. And the Koginut had done very well. It's not a huge, it has a pumpkin-like shape. But it's relatively modest. Each one weighs maybe, oh, I don't know, two to three pounds, let's say. And it's just the right size to cut off the top and scoop out the seeds and stuff it and roast it whole.

And the flavor again is delicious. say. And it's just the right size to cut off the top and scoop out the seeds and stuff it and

roast it whole. And the flavor again is delicious and the skin is edible so that when you bring it to the table, you can just cut it into slices, almost like cutting a layer cake, you know how you cut out a triangular slice. And the thing is it roms in color after being roasted in the oven And then the the inside, I use a cornbread stuffing. And with lots of onions and shallots. And I use some chestnuts in there. You could use mushrooms if you wanted to. A non-bashary could throw in some oysters, even if they wanted to, for an oyster stuffing. But anyway, you open it up and there's this just fragrant, aromatic stuffing inside. And it was such a hit that my friends, Dellen Christine Martin, who's land I grow on, their daughter asked for the recipe. She loved it so much. And so in the book, the recipe is dedicated to Claudia because it really was such a great compliment to me as a cook that she liked it so much that she wanted the recipe. Right. So whichever squash we grow, we can talk about some more. One thing that's really important as a gardener, besides picking a good variety to start with and starting it at the right time and caring for it and all the good horticultural, cultural things is picking it at the right time, harvesting at the right time and also curing, I think, with a squash. I got, you know, bought at the co-op not long ago some delicadas and they were flavorless. It was very early in the season and the harvest season and whoever had sold them to them, you know, just hadn't cured them. And I think that's a step that a lot of people don't realize. You don't just take it off the vine and sometimes it works. Sometimes it's had enough sunshine and warmth out there and it's at the right stage of maturity that it's kind of pre-cured, so to speak. But other times it can really use a little extra warmth in TLC before you eat it, yes? Yes, that's right. And I'm so glad you bring that up because one of the things that as home gardeners We have to adjust slightly Is how we get things from the garden to the kitchen, right? If we go to the grocery store then everything is already ready for us Right even at the farmers market Most of the big decisions have been made, but in the in the garden, there's a little bit of learning, which my book goes into around what's the best season to harvest and how to prepare things for the kitchen. And as you say, winter squash, they take quite a long time. The squash find is large and vigorous. The squash itself is a fruit, so it comes late in the growing season, late in the life cycle of the plant, once the plant has reached this mature size, and winter squash are eaten right. So you add all of that together, and it takes, at least here in New England, Southern New England, all of the growing season to get the vine up and growing, and then the fruit set, and then the fruit to ripen. And what I want to do typically is to harvest the squash. Once the stem has started to dry, because once the stem has started to dry, you know the plant is shutting down. And essentially the plant has put all of its energy, all of its carbohydrates, all of its goodness into the squash. And now it's sealing off that stem. And at that point, you can pick it and bring it inside. And as you say, I like to leave them in a front room that fills up with afternoon sun. So it's warm. That's exactly what I do. Yeah, right. So it's like, it's the one room in the house where you don't need a sweater in the fall, because it stays warm and it's very dry and the squash then kind of finish their ripening process. And I think what happens is part of it is that they, you know, the skin firms up, right? They get a kind of almost slightly waxy coating. They close themselves down for the winter and then they're ready for storage. And at that point, they're ready to eat and they have maximum flavor. Right. And the starchy, whatever, I don't know if it's technically starch, she's converted to sugar, but it's something I may be oversimplifying. But that's kind of what happens similar with another thing that I'm, you know, people grow sweet potatoes, which is another, probably my second favorite vegetable.

And then they think you can just eat them right away. And boy, you're, you're missing out on some of the sweetness if you don't care what it does. You're in for, you're in for a disappointment if you're not going to trade from the garden. Exactly. So, you know, looking up the aftercare of these is, is, is worthwhile. Yeah. I mean, that's, you know, because you've gone to the trouble of growing it, picking the

right variety and growing it all the way through. So there's that. Margaret, I also, I love as Repetators as well, having grown up in the South and East Tennessee. I ate a lot of Repetators because we just love them down there. I was not, I haven't had great success with them here in New England and in a way,

my response to not having great success with sweet potatoes is to grow more winter squash, because they occupy a similar place in the kitchen, right? They're orange, wheat, star-cheat, delicious, and so I kind of gave up on sweet potatoes and went all in with winter squash. So, there's another recipe in the book that surprised me, speaking of what works in the kitchen and so forth. There's a stew, a winter squash stew, and we'll have the recipe along with the transcript of the show over on AwayToGarden.com. It has ingredients in it that I've never combined with winter squash and I'm not 12 years old either. It has tomatoes and tomato paste and I don't think I've ever had winter squash with a tomato, do you know what I mean? An sauce with tomatoes. It's just so interesting. I would look at it and I thought, what? What would that taste like? It's funny because I think I feel like I've tried so many flavors and maybe that's very obvious in commonplace, but it wasn't to me. So tell us about that stew because it's lovely. It sounds lovely. That's interesting. I love this stew and I make it every year for a big party. I had it in my house the day after Thanksgiving. I do a chestnut roast here for all the neighbors to come in and change their palette away from Thanksgiving. And the reason, it works well at any scale. You can make it a small pot or you can make a huge pot. And the key to the recipe, I think, is this advice that a friend of mine gave me. I was, it was, it was, it was winter, is the cold winter.

And I was standing in my kitchen and I was looking at these Kogi nut squash that I had just pulled up storage, trying to figure out what to do with them. And my friend Wes, chef from Los Angeles, West, West Whistle, he called and he said, what are you doing? I said, I'm trying to figure out how to cook these,

cooking a squash, and he pronounced these generous words.

He said, warming North African spice.

And I thought, I'm trying to figure out how to cook these, cooking a squash. And he pronounced these generous words. He said, warming North African spice. And I thought, oh, yeah, totally. Okay. And so when I started to think about North African spice, I started to think about sunshine. And, you know, the, the, the winter squash is a kind of congealed or coagulated sunshine, but also tomatoes, Tomatoes carry the flavors and colors of summer into the wintertime. And I just, I don't know, just had the idea to put them together. And, you know, when started throwing spices at it, you know, little coriander, little cumin, little shaving of cinnamon, black pepper, all of those, all of those flavors that kind of evoke North Africa without being too literal about it. Right. Well, it sounds delicious and that's definitely one that I'm going to try. So I was glad to see. Again, it just, I was like, what? And you do know what I mean. It's funny how some things that you have more confidence as a cook, obviously, than I do. But it may have seemed job-iest to you, and it surprised me so much. So I'm excited about that. And then even with your basic roasted squash, you know, like a lot of us will cut a butter nut or something, the equivalent in half the long way, and you know, roasted, you roasted on parchment paper, I believe, in the oven, on a trained parchment.

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