April 2011 Archives

First there was "The Dangerous Book for Boys," then "The Daring Book for Girls." Now there's a "Dangerous, Daring" book for adults: "Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World" -- which is being released today.

Now, we've had a compost bin going for as long as I can remember. We have grown all sorts of little crops around this homestead (volunteer melons, anyone?) and we wish we could have chickens (alas, so does our dog and the roaming cats in the neighborhood). But we're serious amateurs.

Like the Dervaes family out in Pasadena (www.urbanhomestead.org), "Making It" authors Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen are L.A. homesteaders who keep chickens like all the other hipsters-about-town but are also pretty much my first stop should signs of Armageddon become apparent. Why? Because they know how to build a compostable toilet using a milk crate and a toilet seat.

My husband read the details of this and after inquiring about where to get the required sawdust (my urban suggestion: a pizza parlor), started staking out a place in the backyard for one ("Do I cover it with a box like I'm homeless?" he wondered. "How about four stakes and a tarp, live it up," I suggested).

Coyne and Knutzen who also have their own urban homesteading blog, know how to make castile soap and give lengthy instructions that stop just shy of listing a hazmat suit in the ingredient list. They make soup for their dog to supplement his kibble.

There are useful tips on easy meals and basic cooking, making your own shampoo, treating cuts and bruises, how to slaughter a chicken, making a composter using shipping pallets, and how to sew cloth sanitary napkins. The instructions are thorough and very clear (and also mighty clever).

Even if you never try half the stuff in the book, it's great just to see how things are done, and how far we've drifted from living a truly self-sufficient life.

There's so much talk about green living and treading lightly on the Earth these days. "Making It" is about really doing something, even if that something only involves throwing your garden clippings and peels into a nice pile in the backyard that will one day become food for your garden.

Or, um, making a composting toilet.

Note: Coyne and Knutzen's upcoming book tour includes a 7 p.m. Friday, June 17 event at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena. For more bookstore appearances, plus classes in urban homsteading, follow the events page on their website.

The first chapter of Gabrielle Hamilton's book "Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef" begins with a luscious description of a giant barbecue/lamb roast on the property of her parents' rustic, beautiful, out-of-time New Hope, Pennsylvania, home. Her family, the cooking and the beauty of the place where she grew up will hook you right away (read the sample on Amazon and you'll see).

Whenever Hamilton is passionate, as she is about food and cooking, it's easy to get sucked in by her descriptions. Don't expect explanations, however, about negronis and chanterelles and the like; you'll need to do a bit of research at times to figure out just what is being eaten. No matter. Her description of working Sunday brunch at her restaurant in a kitchen that's probably smaller than yours at home will cause you to respect anyone who works behind the burners.

Although Hamilton's prose is adept and insightful, she leaves us without much when it concerns her rather complicated personal life (she's a lesbian who marries an Italian doctor she dates when he needs a green card; they have two sons together and live apart - except when they travel to Italy every year). Hamilton's relationship with her mother is difficult, and when Hamilton brings her up, the subject seems too painful to fully explore. Her beloved father simply disappears from the story.

Nonetheless, Hamilton's story is admirable and brave without her declaring it so, and a very interesting read as long as you don't mind having as many questions as answers about her life when you finish.