What I'm Reading...

I guess I should title this blog entry "What I Just Finished Reading". *grin* I checked this book out of the library yesterday afternoon and finished it last night. Yeah, I inhale books - especially when I find the subject interesting. While I don't know that I'd be willing to forgo electricity and only use things that were available by the year 1900 for an entire year (even if I did get a book deal out of the experience), the idea of eating what you grow and being more self-sufficient is highly appealing.

This book isn't a "how-to" manual, but rather a memoir of one man's year-long experiment living the life of a 1900's dirt farmer in the Shenandoah Valley with his wife and young son. That said, I still would've liked more details of how they did things, instead of merely reading: "We surpassed our goal by preserving more than 350 jars of food, including corn, squash, okra, pickled cucumbers, dill-seasoned pickled green beans, and more than 100 quarts each of tomatoes and green beans. We made three dozen jar of blackberry jelly, put up fourteen gallons of apple cider, dumped a bushel-and-a-half of potatoes in the bins, stored pumpkins and winter squash and onions...". I specifically would've loved to read more from the wife's point of view. I'm curious about things like if she found it difficult to learn to cook using a wood-burning stove and how did she make the marvelous sounding goat cheese mentioned over and over in the book.

All in all, a nice little book!

Oh yeah, and Dean? I want a root cellar. :-)