We first came across Emma Galloway around eight years ago, having discovered her delightful food blog online. Loving the healthy, homely cuisine, and excited to know that it’s created in one of our favourite beach side villages, Raglan, we reached out and invited Emma to send in a few sample recipes for publication in Verve. Now, many years later, we are proud to be able to share a few more of her recipes – this time from her latest book, My Darling Lemon Thyme: Every Day. We also chat to Emma about cooking, blogging and family life.
What did 2020 remind you of when it comes to the importance of good quality home cooking?
It reminded me of how beautiful simplicity can be and that we definitely don’t need expensive or hard-to-find ingredients to make a nourishing and flavour-packed meal.
You’ve been running your award-winning food blog, My Darling Lemon Thyme, for over a decade now; what prompted you to start it?
I discovered US-based food blogs around the time and it blew my food-obsessed mind. I was at home with two young kids and missing being creative in the kitchen, so it seemed like the perfect outlet for me. I had no idea what I was doing, but I taught myself food styling, writing and photography along the way.
Have there been any shifts or changes in your approach to cooking since you started your blog?
My approach to cooking has pretty much stayed the same from day one, focusing on simple, real food, made from scratch that just happens to be vegetarian and gluten-free, as these ethos have always been important to me. But one thing that has changed is society’s views on vegetarian and/or gluten-free cooking! I was one of only a handful of food bloggers around the world when I first started out, who shared vegetarian and gluten-free recipes, so my style of cooking was still looked upon as ‘niche’. I remember when I first shared how to make kombucha at home back in 2010 and people were like ‘um, sounds interesting’. Nowadays my style of cooking is almost mainstream!
What has been the most rewarding part of running your blog?
Seeing the community grow around it. I’m still in touch with many of my blogging friends from around the world, and also many of my first readers too.
You mention on your website that you and your children are gluten and lactose intolerant; have these restrictions forced you to be more creative when it comes to coming up with new food ideas?
Yes, these limitations have definitely forced me to think outside the box on more than one occasion. For me texture and flavour are super important components of what makes a recipe delicious, so I use these as my guide when forced to consider alternative ingredients.
How did you develop the idea for My Darling Lemon Thyme, Every Day?
Over the years I’ve heard from so many people struggling to create affordable, achievable and nourishing food for themselves and their families, so the idea for this book has been brewing for some time. It’s also honestly just how I approach cooking! Simple, waste-free, seasonal, utilising leftovers, using simple everyday ingredients and recipes which are highly adaptable. Dotted throughout my Every Day recipes, you’ll find my base or ‘anything’ recipes, with examples of how you can change things up to suit your tastes or what you might have at hand at different times of the year. This is how chefs have always cooked but, I’ve noticed it’s not something home cooks always know how to do. I want to help change that, to empower the reader to be bold and cook with confidence.
As well as creating really simple recipes, I also purposely paired back my already minimalist styling in a lot of the images. Some recipes I didn’t even bother with garnishes. I wanted to present the recipes in as honest a way as possible, so when people cook my recipes at home, they look the same as what they see in the pages of my book.
There are over 100 recipes in this book; were there more that you had to leave out and if so, do you have a process for deciding which ones make the cut?
All the recipes that I turned in with my manuscript made it into the book! We nearly had to cull a couple to make room for more photos and to get the layout to fit, but in the end it all fitted. There were of course recipes I worked on in the early stages of creating this book that sounded like a great idea in my head but when I actually started testing them, they either simply didn’t work or I really just wasn’t feeling them anymore. So those ones were tossed aside. I don’t have a process for deciding which ones make the cut as such -it’s more of a gut instinct for me- but if it’s not utterly delicious, something I’d want to make again myself, or if the process turned out to be too lengthy or used ingredients that were either expensive or hard to find, it’s fair to say it didn’t make it into this book.
What is your favourite recipe in this book?
I don’t have a favourite, that’s like picking a favourite child! But a few of the many I love are: everyday buckwheat sourdough, speedy nachos with the lot, beetroot curry, shredded carrot salad bowls, anything pizza, any-fruit cobbler.
