Review: My Darling Lemon Thyme: Every Day

My Darling Lemon Thyme Every Day delivers, as promised in its sub-title, recipes that are vegetarian, gluten-free and flavour-packed. Those flavours are spot-on for 2021 – heavily influenced by Indian and South-East Asian cookery, with a smattering of Hispanic and Middle Eastern.

Emma Galloway (Te Ātihaunui-a-Pāpārangi, Ngāti Raukawa ki te Tonga) is a former professional chef who has been vegetarian all her life. She became gluten intolerant during her first pregnancy and has two children who are intolerant to gluten and dairy. In 2010, she started a blog, which led to two books written when she lived in Perth. Now back in her native Raglan, she notably is a regular contributor to Cuisine magazine and in this, her third book, she says she aims to provide recipes and tricks to make everyday cooking easier and better.

Her key to easier everyday cooking is what she calls “anything” recipes: base recipes for pesto, cobbler, crumble, muffins, pizza, frittata, quiche, soup, fermented vegetables (kraut), nut butters and nut milks, made with whatever ingredients are on hand or seasonal.

The book has a generous introductory section that includes several pages on her philosophy of no-waste cooking, information about ingredients and instructions for sprouting legumes and grains.

There are even two pages about how to cook an egg, which shows she really wants this to be a book useful to beginners. The information here is clear and sensible, and many readers might be inspired to take their egg buying to the next level: learning about the egg farmer and caring about how long ago eggs were laid – because this actually matters if you want to cook the perfect egg.

Every recipe and every chapter has a generous introduction in which you learn more about Galloway’s philosophy and personality. (She’s a Virgo, she likes growing plants to turn into herbal teas, she suffers the same cooking anxieties as the rest of us…). Each recipe has a note marking if it’s gluten-free, grain-free, dairy-free or vegan. There are just a few that are, mysteriously without explanation, not marked gluten-free.

Vegetarian cooking with world flavours is not new. When I consulted my copy of The Enchanted Broccoli Forest by Mollie Katzen, published in 1982, many dishes looked surprisingly similar to My Darling Lemon Thyme Every Day. But our lifestyles and expectations have changed since Galloway’s hippy parents were her first culinary influence. This book is written with New Zealand and Australia in mind, and it’s the style of home cooking we want today: meals in a bowl slathered in sauce, uncomplicated curries, colourful one-pot meals, fried noodles, burgers and tacos.

Google will provide you 164 million results for “vegan taco recipe.” Does the world need another one? Yes. To put it simply, Galloway’s carrot tacos taste good. My committed meat-and-bread-eating household love the fresh, satisfyingly aromatic flavour of the carrots and beans baked in Mexican-inspired herbs and spices. And when I shopped for ingredients, carrots were only $2.99 per kilo.

Buckwheat and dark chocolate make a surprisingly good combination in the buckwheat chocolate chunk cookies – sweet with a moreish touch of savoury and bitter. And the cookies have a beautifully soft, tender texture.

The potato-top curried lentil bake has all the comforting texture and richness of its cousin the cottage pie, with the added appeal of a bit of chilli and generous helpings of fresh coriander and curry leaves.

These recipes will definitely be made again for my family of three, comprising one who loves a meal with meat, one who wants to be filled up with large portions and one who doesn’t like coriander. On that note, a caveat: Galloway’s pantry contains ingredients that may be triggers for “fussy eaters.” For example, feta, mushrooms, tempeh or tofu.

If you’re a beginner or less confident cook, some of the instructions aren’t 100 per cent fool proof. Some of the cooking times are a bit underdone; I have never cooked Puy lentils or mashable potatoes in 10 minutes. And I will revise my definition of “bite-size chunks” next time I cook the carrot tacos.

Reviewed by André Taber