Using the Plot: Tales of an Allotment Chef | 
 enlarge | Author: Paul Merrett
Publisher: Collins
Category: Book
List Price: £16.99
Buy New: £8.48
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Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 4270
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 320
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.2
ISBN: 0007252617
Dewey Decimal Number: 635
EAN: 9780007252619
ASIN: 0007252617
Publication Date: June 2, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Hmmmmm..... August 26, 2008
emma who reads a lot (ealing)
I wanted to like this book. It's extremely beautiful, printed on lovely paper with lovely photos. Paul Merrett seems like a cheerful enough guy and he has quotes on the cover from Gary Rhodes and Novelli. And he is from Ealing, supports Brentford, so for me it's a local local food book!
But something stopped me. I just found the book to be a bit all over the place. Merrett constantly tells us he's only going to eat home-grown food, then ends up in Tescos; he talks about wanting to be green then admits to having a patio heater, he gets an allotment and only manages to grow one thing by the first spring, he wants to persuade his children to eat more veg but behaves like a typically anal chef, not letting anyone eat bananas (which don't have too bad a carbon footprint as I understand), only just about tolerating his kids' playing and pulling up a whole row of baby spinach Because It Wasn't Straight Enough....
I think the brief of the book should have been clearer - is he doing it to eat fresher tastier food, or to be more sustainable, or to get his kids to eat more veg, or to save the world? It's confusing that sometimes it seems to be about all of the above, though Merrett doesn't totally seem to understand how any of it might be achieved.And he keeps referring to his editors and what they want from him, which is a bit too meta for me, in a cookbook.
The second half of the book is entirely recipes, but not many of them seem expressly designed to use stuff from the allotment - for example, fish pie? Or roast lamb?
And there is a sea bass recipe. Sorry, but that's just so oooooo unenvironmentally friendly! Despite the little section at the beginning of "fish" where he talks about line-fishing etc. And Merrett doesn't even bother with the really crucial allotmenteer question: what to do with all that marrow? He just says real chefs don't cook marrow.
I wouldn't have minded at all if this book had just been a chef's allotment book - why not just take the saving the world out of it, and have a caring, unhypocritical book about trying to grow more local ingredients?
However, you will get good, good recipes for:
Lamb stew with allotment vegetables.
courgette pickle
tomato and chilli jam
red onion jam
mint sauce
roasted plums
and many others.
it is a beautiful book, and perhaps I should applaud Merrett's honesty about his sense of confusion! It certainly didn't make me like him less, as I found the whole book charming and I would definitely check out future publications by him. I just think: don't try and please everybody next time...
 Ripping Yarn August 14, 2008
John Bradley
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The book recreates the bemusement, hard work and ultimately triumphant feeling of those starting out on an allotment career. It shows how even when it's wet, cold and you'd rather be down the pub there is an attraction to allotmenting which can only be appreciated when you sit down to eat your results of your own efforts.
The characters are only slightly exaggerated and all that he records did happen (I know I'm the one with the long socks - read the book to understand). In short a bloody good laugh: the recipes are pretty good as well. Maybe this will do for New Zealand Spinach what Deliah did for cranberries!
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