To Boldly Grow
Finding Joy, Adventure, and Dinner in Your Own Backyard
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A love-letter to the unexpected delights (and occasional despair) of so-called “first-hand food”—meals we grow, forage, fish, or even hunt from the world around us. To Boldly Grow is “part memoir, part how-to guide and wholly delightful” (Washington Post).
Journalist and self-proclaimed “crappy gardener” Tamar Haspel is on a mission: to show us that raising or gathering our own food is not as hard as it’s often made out to be. When she and her husband move from Manhattan to two acres on Cape Cod, they decide to adopt a more active approach to their diet: raising chickens, growing tomatoes, even foraging for mushrooms and hunting their own meat. They have more ambition than practical know-how, but that’s not about to stop them from trying…even if sometimes their reach exceeds their (often muddy) grasp.
With “first-hand food” as her guiding principle, Haspel embarks on a grand experiment to stop relying on experts to teach her the ropes (after all, they can make anything grow), and start using her own ingenuity and creativity. Some of her experiments are a rousing success (refining her own sea salt). Others are a spectacular failure (the turkey plucker engineered from an old washing machine). Filled with practical tips and hard-won wisdom, To Boldly Grow allows us to journey alongside Haspel as she goes from cluelessness to competence, learning to scrounge dinner from the landscape around her and discovering that a direct connection to what we eat can utterly change the way we think about our food--and ourselves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Haspel (The Dreaded Broccoli Cookbook), writer of the Washington Post column "Unearthed," marches briskly down the well-trodden path of doing something for one year in this amusing work. When, in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, Haspel and her former commodity trader husband left Manhattan to live in a 900-square-foot "shack" on Cape Cod, they decided to go a step further and commit to eating one food a day that they had gathered "first-hand." In a colloquial, curious tone reminiscent of the work of Mary Roach, Haspel recounts how this escalated from clamming to catching and smoking bluefish, to raising chickens ("gateway livestock"), to making their own salt by evaporating seawater. Haspel even got acquainted with guns to shoot deer for venison. Set pieces, such as a description of rigging a washing machine to serve as a chicken plucker, double as helpful hints (including tips for crafting logs to grow shiitakes) and self-deprecating anecdotes. There's a refreshing lack of sugarcoating: Haspel notes that the idea that growing your own food saves money can be a delusion, and mourns the death-by-hawk of Phyllis, a white Araucana chicken named for her resemblance to Phyllis Diller. Despite the familiar setup, the bright prose and clever insight make this a pleasure to dig into.
