More on River Cottage

Lance and Marge sent me the River Cottage Cookbook from England and it's been a total revelation. It's exactly the kind of book I've been looking for.

It's actually kind of misnomer to call it a cookbook. It definitely has recipes but they are a small part of the book compared to the narrative portions. The premise of the book it how to cook food from ingredients that you yourself grew or raised or hunted. So there is a whole section on how to grow vegetables, how to grow herbs, how to raise and slaughter pigs and such, how to fish, how to hunt.

I guess Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (the author) is most famous for his advocacy of nose-to-tail eating. But the book is as much about how many different animals you can eat as how many parts of a given animal you can eat. And the book is a total inspiration to me. Suddenly I find myself wanting to fish for eels and hunt rabbits.

The book has a companion TV series that I have started watching on Amazon. In the first episode he shoots and then cooks pigeon and actually succeeds in making it look delicious. I'm not quite ready to buy my first .22 but I wouldn't mind going out with someone else and playing at hunting. I wish Lance was here for that. I'm fairly sure I could talk him in to some rabbit hunting.

As Nikki mentioned in the previous post, she made a mutton and apricot recipe (with goat substitute) from the book that was delicious. Next up I am hoping to find some rabbit and try a rabbit skewer in peanut satay sauce recipe. The price I pay for rabbit that someone else has raised and sold might just inspire me to take up rabbit hunting.

I am also going to be doing some porch gardening this year. I am planning on a full compliment of herbs in window boxes. And this weekend I picked up a giant plastic pot at Costco and am going to try to grow hops in it. I am waiting to see what varieties Freshops will have available but I am thinking Willamette will do me nicely. Finally, I think I am going to buy another of these giant pots and grow some kind of fruit or vegetable. I am trying to figure out what will grow well here. At first I wanted to try plums but I don't want to wait till the end of fall to harvest. So maybe peppers or something like that.

For now I think most of what we cook from the book will come from the farmer's market or the grocery store. But look forward to stories of us trying to find new ways to get our hands on some free food.