BOOKS & CO - THE VILLAGE - Matt and Lentil

In The Village , Matt and Lentil from Grown & Gathered focus on the life-giving value of cooking and eating with your village – whether made up of family or friends.

Wholesome staples, like Kombucha and Sourdough flatbreads. Pickles and preserves, like Pear, lemon and chilli jam and Zucchini pickles. Delicious meals including Honey onion, buckwheat and lentil salad, Nonna’s leek and spinach fritters, and Pan-fried gnocchi, pea and ricotta salad. Desserts like Baked plums, sage and warm cheese, and Raw chocolate and espresso bowls.

A comprehensive chapter with practical advice on setting up a natural garden to feed your village will help you get the basics right: the importance of soil and sun, garden design, planting guides and projects, and natural pest control. The Village is about nurturing and being nurtured, by growing, cooking and eating together – whether it’s dropping a loaf of bread around to a neighbour, or spending an afternoon making a big batch of pickles with your mates.

It is about food, but beyond food. It is for everyone who wants to embrace the fullness of life in all its mess, for everyone who wants to connect. Because we all deserve it.

About Matt and Lentil

We are Matt & Lentil and we believe that health and happiness come from real, traditional food, a warm home and a mastery of life's fundamentals.

We are gardeners, farmers, winemakers, writers, poets and educators and we love sharing our skills with you. We are the authors of two books, Grown & Gathered (2016) and The Village (2018).

We began by selling our produce to some of Melbourne’s top restaurants, encouraging chefs to adopt principles of local, real produce and sustainable farming and packaging. Since then, we have embarked on a number of projects, including The Produce Van, where we pulled our van up each week in the streets of Melbourne to sell our homegrown vegetables and talk to people about sustainability and natural food, The Flower Exchange, where we grew flowers and traded them without exchanging money for a year and Minimum Wines, where we’ve converted a 125-acre vineyard into organic, regenerative management and now sell delicious wines made to nurture both the environment, and the drinker!

We currently live between Italy and Australia, spending our time creating, learning, writing poetry winemaking and experiencing all we can in the world of natural food and life. Lentil loves writing and photography, Matt growing food, winemaking and design.