Turnips' Edible Almanac: The Week-by-week Guide to Cooking with Seasonal Ingredients

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Fred encourages readers to embrace the anticipation, the excitement of counting down to the arrival of a long-awaited fruit or vegetable.

Turnips’ Edible Almanac is a fruit-and-vegetable reference book for home cooks, chefs or the culinary-interested, with 52 chapters: one for every week of the year. Foster’s accounts of supplying some of the UK’s most exacting chefs are also worth a read - there’s a particularly good one about what went into Nico Ladenis’ famed peach Melba. Recipes during the autumn weeks include Chestnut gnocchi; Squash salad with pickled walnuts and blue cheese; Pickled grapes with creamy mussels; Kohlrabi gratin with smoked bacon and garlic crumb; Sweet ‘n’ sour cauliflower; and desserts such as Lemon pie and Roasted plums in rum with Chantilly cream.The time for fresh, seasonal, delicious food is now – Turnips’ Edible Almanac is the definitive guide to eating the very best produce throughout the year, written by Borough Market greengrocer Fred Foster.

Each week champions a seasonal ingredient for that time of year alongside delicious recipes, including a mix of fresh dishes to enjoy that week as well as preserves to use later in the year. If you are interested in the history of our local area why not sign up to our regular newsletter which contains lots of fascinating historical info. The author of the book is Fred Foster, a fourth-generation costermonger and co-director of Turnips, which operates a stall in Borough Market and supplies some of London’s best restaurants (it also runs its own restaurant, which is also in Borough Market).The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network. Each chapter is focused on a single ingredient and comprises an impressively detailed mini essay and a recipe or two. While ambitious chefs might not be too interested in Oliver’s recipe for banoffee pie, they will be interested in Foster’s insights into the fruit and vegetable business. Fred Foster is the co-founder of Turnips, a fruit and vegetable wholesale and retail company with an emphasis on quality and seasonality in the heart of London. By challenging yourself to try different ingredients each month, and seeking out the freshest and most sustainably produced options, you’ll revolutionise the way you cook, eat, and even think about food.

He's particularly good at appreciating and articulating the difference between produce that's simply 'fine' and the really good stuff: "If you've never eaten a lychee from grown in Réunion (an island in the Indian Ocean) prepare to be blown away, especially if you think you don't like them". With decades of experience sourcing the highest quality produce from a network of independent farms, Fred Foster of fruit and veg supplier Turnips – equally beloved by Borough Market locals and Michelin-starred chefs – is perfectly placed to guide you through a year of seasonal eating. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. This is a man that knows his stuff, having supplied top-end produce to restaurants for over 30 years. The collection of over 100 recipes is mostly written by the Turnips Restaurant’s very own head chef, Tomas Lidakevicius, as well as Fred’s family members and friends within the industry, including some celebrity chefs such as Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver and the Galvin brothers.The bulk of the recipes have been penned by Turnips Restaurant chef patron Tomas Lidakevicius, who Foster describes as Lithuania’s answer to Eminem (presumably on account of them having a similar haircut, but who knows). These lists are created from decades of Fred’s experience working with and selling world-class fresh fruit and vegetables to restaurants, chefs and home cooks. We usually turn down cookbooks written by suppliers but have made an exception for fruit and vegetable specialist Turnips because its effort is a genuinely useful tool for chefs (it’s not vanity publishing either, the book is published by DK).