Savoring the garden’s bounty

Chef Jonathan Bardzik has been creating fresh recipes at Washington D.C.’s historic Eastern Market with seasonal produce since July 2011, and his experience there was the inspiration for “Seasons to Taste.” With hundreds of options to choose from, we wanted to know how he narrowed it down. Check out an edited excerpt from our conversation below, and listen to the full podcast on the Retailer Radio Network here: bit.ly/1l0pcF4

Q: Why did you decide to organize your book by the seasons and why was it important to you?

Jonathan Bardzik: The idea originally grew out of four years now of cooking demonstrations at Washington D.C.’s historic Eastern Market. Every week I show up with brand new recipes that I developed out of fresh ingredients available that weekend at the market. It just seemed natural, because these recipes were all developed out of seasonal ingredients, to organize them that way. But in the process of writing it, I really reconnected with how important the seasons are to the way we live our lives. And I’ve thought a lot about growing up in horticulture … I think that the seasons really help us appreciate the passing of the days of our lives in a much more significant way that slows things down a little bit.

Q: You have collected, cooked and demonstrated so many recipes. How did you narrow down your choices when you were trying to determine what to include? What was your criteria for selecting the recipes that you did?

JB: The book is 127 recipes. We create a new recipe every single week for these live cooking demonstrations … I first started with wanting to really focus on seasonal ingredients … A lot of it was making sure there wasn’t too much duplication ... Pretty much anything between two tortillas and cheese and lots of seasonal veggies makes a great quick, healthy weeknight dinner. You only want so many of those in any given book. There were some groupings around key seasonal ingredients or techniques so there’s a full section in the winter on soups and homemade stock ... Summer talks a lot about salads. It was challenging to narrow it down and I can tell you there are definitely a few more books [in the works].

Q: How do you combat new gardeners’ and cooks’ fear of failure?

JB: I think TV exposure and magazines have done such a great job of showing people the real joy of success, whether it’s with cooking or gardening or anything else. But there’s this expectation that things can and should be done perfectly every single time ... I think we’ve lost a little bit of this idea that you can just go out and garden or put a meal on the table because it’s fun. And because you get to share time with the people in your life who make your life matter while you’re doing this, and that’s good enough. And it’s OK to hit the garden center on a Saturday morning and bring some plants home and plant some containers and put things into the garden. And you’ve won already.

Michelle is editor for Garden Center magazine, a GIE Media publication.