Amandine Geers, our culinary columnist, died

One foot in the garden, with his mother. The other in cooking, to spy on his father’s gestures. It is thus, rooted in the Solognot terroir, that Amandine Geers grew up. This setting, she started by playing it before observing it and embarking on her first harvests, later accommodated on the grill. But it was further west, in Niort (Deux-Sèvres), and a few years later that his family heritage borne all of its fruits. He drew his professional career.

Author and a culinary photographer, host of cooking workshops and a curious planter, she published in just twenty years more than fifty books, at the mostly living editions. From now on, she cultivated three patch plots. One of 250 m2 coiled between two arms of the Sèvre, rented for almost two years to the Horticulture Society of Deux-Sèvres; the other, more modest, within solidarity and plural gardens west; The last at the foot of his companion’s house.

In these lands amended by floods, enriched by the sharing of good gestures and worked in tandem, Amandine Geers did not refrain anything. And groped with joy: planting of perpetual vegetables, “lasagna” cultivation, square reserved for syntropy (agronomic approach aimed at creating productive ecosystems by imitating natural processes).

The taste of wild plants

At 52, she was on all fronts. From the furnace garden, there is only one step. His patiently gathered nutrition know -how by the balance of his dishes. Salt more than sweet, this mother of a young student reached her intuition, her past experiences and the products at his disposal to enchant the taste buds.

Her plates combine notes elsewhere, notably from Southeast Asia, aromatic herbs and seeds, but also wild plants and flowers that she learned to recognize, harvest and associate. With her watchword in favor of a cuisine combining “pleasure, health and ecological common sense”, Amandine Geers had to feast on you, dear readers.