Today I am super excited to welcome onto the Blog Jo Thomas with her inspiration behind The Honey Farm on the Hill as part of the blog tour!

Have any of you yet read The Honey Farm on the Hill? Or an book by Jo Thomas? If not I highly recommend that you getting cracking because Jo writes some divine books. And are perfect for a holiday read. Or if your not going away for a bit of sunshine.

Below Jo shares some of her inspiration behind the book, particularly why she choose Crete and its famous Honey…

The Inspiration:

Writing a book for me is liking going into my kitchen pantry and seeing what ingredients I’ve got there and what I’m going to make for dinner. I’ll have a vague recipe in mind but no real idea of what to put in it. I start with the country I want to write about and the food of that country. I find that once you discover the food of a country, it takes you by the hand and introduces you to the history, the culture and the people of the place. In Ireland, it was oysters; Southern Italy it was olive oil and in South West France, wine.

I knew I wanted to write about Greece and maybe one of the islands. I decided on Crete. I’d never been there and really wanted to go and taste the place. I had a vague idea of greek salad, with white, soft, tangy feta cheese, shiny black olives, fat flavoursome tomatoes and fresh crunchy cucumber. But the more I started digging the more I discovered that Crete food is very simple, made delicious by the wonderful wild mountain herbs. It is the herbs that gives the Cretan honey is distinctive flavour, wild thyme in particular. And then I came across the magic ingredient I had been looking for, a wild herb called dittany that only grows in the mountains of Crete and is also known as ‘love’. Young lovers have risked their lives to gather this herb that is known to cure ailments and to act as an aphrodisiac. It is a rare and endangered jewel in Crete’s crown and once I’d found it, I knew my story started here.

What do you guys think of the Inspiration behind The Honey Farm on the Hill?

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