Broccoli and Other Love Stories: Notes and Recipes from an Always Curious, Often Hungry Kitchen Gardener

Broccoli and Other Love Stories is a study and celebration of 55 food plants, arranged by plant family and chosen because the author grows, cooks, and eats them regularly, with accessibility front of mind (many being suitable for container gardens for urban cooks, and most being available at grocers in temperate regions around the world) but also including a few curiosities because that is what makes life interesting.

Paulette Whitney runs a plant farm with her husband in munwinina country, in the foothills of kunanyi/Mount Wellington, half an hour south Hobart. After she began propagating plants they needed for themselves, her chef husband’s cookbook library led her to culinary curiosity. Why would you grow broccoli when you could grow purple sprouting broccoli that produced spears for months? And what on earth was a tomatillo and how would you cook it? The couple found themselves with a surfeit of plants and an addiction to collecting and propagating them. They took a stall at the Hobart Farmers’ Market, where they learned that edible plants and local produce were in high demand. At the market, they began relationships with local chefs and their curiosity took them on a shared journey to learn about all manner of plants, every conceivable part of them you could eat, and multitudes of ways to prepare them. Today Provenance Growers is a full-time operation for the two of them, but in the spare time she carves out, Paulette loves to write about, draw, and photograph her bounty. She wrote engagingly about farm life and produce in a popular, regular column in Gourmet Traveller and has built a loyal following of other likeminded cooks, gardeners and chefs around the country.