Root, Stem, Leaf, Flower is a cookbook about plants – it's about making the most of the land's bounty in your everyday cooking.

Making small changes to the way we cook and eat can both lessen the impact we have on the environment and dramatically improve our health and wellbeing: good for us and for future generations to come. Making plants and vegetables the focus of your meals can improve your cooking exponentially - they provide a feast of flavours, colours and textures.

Root, Stem, Leaf, Flower is a true celebration of seasonal vegetables and fruit, packed with simple and surprisingly quick vegetarian recipes. With roots, we think of the crunch of carrots, celeriac, beetroot. From springtime stems like our beloved asparagus and rhubarb, through leaves of every hue (kale, radicchio, chard), when the blossoms become the fruits of autumn – apples, pears, plums – the food year is marked by growth, ripening and harvest.

With 120 original recipes, every dish captured by acclaimed photographer Andrew Montgomery, and Gill's ideas for using the very best fresh ingredients, Root, Stem, Leaf, Flower is a thoughtful, inspiring collection of recipes that you'll want to come back to again and again. 

About the Author:

Gill Meller is a chef, food writer, food stylist and cookery teacher. Gill has been part of the River Cottage team for over 15 years, working closely with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. He regularly writes for The Guardian and The Observer and has a monthly recipe column in Delicious magazine. Gill has written several award-winning and critically acclaimed cookbooks, his latest, Root, Stem, Leaf, Flower — How to Cook with Vegetables and Other Plants (Quadrille Publishing) is available now.

Time is the highly anticipated follow-up to the award-winning Gather. In it, Gill Meller distills the essence of his approach to food and cooking time spent in the kitchen, with good ingredients, makes for the best possible way of life.

Morning, daytime and night these are the touchstones of our days, and days are the markers of our years. Gill's unique dishes fit within this framework, moving through the seasons, from freshness and light to comfort and warmth.

Gill's dishes follow the course of the day: simple breakfasts (wild mushroom & sausage chachouka, buckwheat pancakes), glorious seasonal lunches (steamed vegetables with tamari, honey & sunflower seeds, chicken with chamomile, tomato & anchovy tart, date, olive oil & fennel cake), evening gatherings in the soft glow of summer or chill of winter (lentil dhal with crispy kale, roast pheasant with parsnips & chorizo, ceviche with rhubarb, lemon & chilli, treacle tart with thyme & orange, quince & vanilla crème brûlée).

This is the best of modern British cooking, from the most exciting new voice in food writing.

Praise for Gill's previous book, Gather:

Gather does for contemporary British food what Ottolenghi has done for contemporary Middle Eastern cooking... Beautiful writing, beautiful food, this is an exquisite book that I cannot stop reading. Nigella Lawson

My book of the autumn and possibly of the year... Gather is a perfect expression of something food writers have been trying to define for the past three decades: modern British cooking. Diana Henry

"Gill Meller's latest cookbook, Time, is poetic and romantic - a string of beautiful recipes guide you through the seasons.” - Yotam Ottolenghi, Guardian

"I love Gill Meller's food: it is completely his own, and ranges from the (unpretentiously) rarified to the smile-inducingly cosy; indeed, he often seems to fuse the two. An intensely personal book, this brings you into his life and his kitchen. And as with his first book Gather, his recipes make me want to run headlong into the kitchen." - Nigella Lawson

"Producing a second book as good as your first ... is not easy, but this is every bit as good and, in fact, more approachable for the home cook. The recipes follow the curve of the day, from breakfast to dinner - hence the title - and you want to make them all... Meller constantly delivers the unexpected, though not just for the sake of novelty, and the recipes are never complicated." - Diana Henry, Sunday Telegraph