A book review - A Taste of the Unexpected
I have been looking forward to reading and reviewing this book for ages. Mark Diacono is the head gardener at River Cottage and runs his own garden at Otter Farm where he grows all sorts of exotic and unusual things: apricots, Japanese wineberries, Szechuan pepper and kai-lan are just a handful. He also writes for The English Garden (pause for small "what about my Welsh garden" rant) and his are always amongst the articles I really read rather than skip over. This is a book both about growing unusual things to eat and also about cooking them. I love growing food, I love cooking it, I love eating it. When the book came in the post it felt like Christmas. I am a speed reader, a skipper and skitterer over things that bore me and an express train reader with things I like. But I have taken my time with this. It is a book so densely packed with ideas and information and written with so much knowledge and even love that it seemed wrong to take it at...