New cookbook celebrates Rosie Daykin’s garden

The content of the article

Coco, Olive and Regina George – yes, the latter has a Mean Girls streak – gave me the wink as I entered their space. Not surprising: I’d protect my coop if I were a chicken pecking around Rosie Daykin’s ridiculously elegant backyard on Vancouver’s west side.

Alongside giant firs, arrays of flower beds, basalt walls and winding bluestone paths punctuated by an expansive greenhouse, are the three “daughters”, star actors in Daykin’s new cookbook. That’s because the multi-syllable Daykin – known for its well-honed interior design talents and the neighboring Butter Baked Goods, which it sold three years ago – can now add “gardening” to its repertoire.

The content of the article

The content of the article

His fourth cookbook, The Side Gardener, is named not only for the once languishing, now tidy planters that flank his home, but also for the way Daykin gardens “on the side” with his other businesses. The pages slide nicely with helpful tips on how to grow your own—whether it’s a two-acre plot or an herb garden—and recipes resulting from her plants, edible flowers and, of course, eggs. (Daykin’s Cuckoo Maran, Olive Egger and Ameraucana repay their luxury and loving attention by putting a lot).

Based on the food she likes to eat, The Side Gardener was “a fun exercise” to create “veggie-forward” recipes that spring from the garden. He rattles off how zucchinis inspired a chocolate cake, how his red peppers transformed a bisque with crab and how his beets perfected a ravioli.

“After a long time, I have a gut feeling for what works pretty quickly – find the base, then riff on it,” he opines over homemade peanut butter biscuits and Yorkshire tea. (His best vegetable is the radish. “You sprinkle,” he adds, “then a sneeze later, they stayed. Very rewarding.”)

The content of the article

The content of the article

Beyond the products, just dipping his hands into the soil also feeds him. “Walking in nature is wonderful,” she continues, “but, not to be too woo-woo, there is something more when you work in it – dig, plant… Being connected in this way to the earth is a way to lose. It brings me peace of mind.”

It’s all part of the courageous thread that runs through her modus operandi in life: teaching herself. “Put your feet first,” she exclaims. “Maybe it’s my own stupidity or ignorance, but I’m not afraid of failure.”

He did, in fact, have a few false starts in gardening: an “epiphany” that, by mistake, he had a rooster in his first chicken patch – an absolute no-no in the city with its chorus of dawn – and not having the correct irrigation in the early days. years that led to poor performance.

But she is clearly driven by curiosity and creativity. “Things can hold people back — a lot of shame, and they wonder what people would say, but they have things to say whether you’re doing good or bad, so I can’t control that,” Daykin says. “My real joy comes when I build something. I prefer to do something that I find exciting or fulfilling like the act of gardening, and figure out how to do it.”

The content of the article

From sparkling English country garden roses and dahlias to chocolate and violet cosmos, the new garden also allows her to have fun growing all the flowers she loves. (Her edibles make their way to her flower puff coins—a nod to L.A. culinary artist Loria Stern.)

“I’ve had another order from Chiltern Seeds – just a slippery slope,” he adds, referring to an English supplier. It is one of the many snippets that he “siphons” from his extensive travels in Europe and makes “achievable” back in Vancouver. Take the rustic watering can he packed in a suitcase to bring back from the UK or the giant wicker baskets and stone pots (the latter from his friend Thomas Hobbs) that wouldn’t look out of place in an English country pile .

The West Coast may be home, but these trips are essential. “When my ‘lights’ start flashing it means I need to go,” she laughs. “The trip is to replenish me visually. Then I come back, and I am so revived.”
A clear energy radiates throughout the side garden.

The Side Gardener, published by Appetite from Random House, is out on April 9.

Photographs by Andrew Montgomery excerpted from The Side Gardener by Rosie Daykin. Copyright © 2024 Rosie Daykin. Published by Appetite an imprint of Random House®, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduction by agreement with the publisher. All rights reserved.

The content of the article