Food from Close to Home

I'm reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and of all her books, find this one valuable. Not a fictional account, she writes about spending a year in this very area, where her husband inherited some farmland, and deciding to live raising their own food as much as possible, and buying from local farmers, basically living seasonally.

Not a vegetarian or vegan, she and her family raise animals for food, struggling with the need to dispatch them as kindly and humanely as possible.

They have many reasons for these decisions. She cannot justify the economics of shipping fruit across the US or from other parts of the world, just so the family can enjoy varieties. They can their own vegetables and local fruits. One hilarious story concerns her attempt to hollow out a huge pumpkin, filling it with milk and other ingredients, then slowly baking it, the purpose being to create a pumpkin pudding by scraping down the insides of the pumpkin as it is baking. She pictures herself proudly bearing the huge pumpkin pudding to the center of their dining table. Unfortunately, the pumpkin gives way before it gets to the table!

Kingsolver delights in the many varieties of vegetables she plants; she particularly rhapsodizes about the rainbow chard that I dearly love. Growing this chard is like growing a beautiful plant that I've learned to selectively cut away (rather than cut the whole plant or pull it from the ground) so it produces the entire summer and into the fall. In fact, if grown in a large pot, I can move it into my sunroom and have fresh rainbow chard year round. New little leaves make their way into my salads.

Our book club was to have finished her book by last Wednesday, but I didn't get my library copy in quite enough time. Now I'm thinking I may have to purchase a copy in order to have the recipes she includes. But not the huge pumpkin pudding...