Homesteading Books #2

Here are more of my homesteading book selections and what I think of them.

The Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer--This is the cooking bible, so to speak.  Not really a homesteading book, but if you are going to cook your own meals, you need to know how to do it right.  If you cooked every recipe in this book and it came out right, I would say that would be the equivalent of going to cooking school...or better.  In the 75th anniversary edition, she even covers some info on canning and cooking wild game!

Cee Dub's Dutch Oven and Other Camp Cookin' by C.W. "Butch" Welch--This is a dutch oven cook book that specifically focuses with dutch oven cooking over a campfire.  Good recipes and good stories, this book taught me how to cook over a fire with my own dutch oven.  It came in really handy when we lost electric for 4 days in September.  

Kill It and Grill It by Ted and Shemane Nugent--Okay, Ted Nugent is just cool.  I don't really dig his music, but anything else with Ted Nugent is cool.  It is almost equal parts prose and recipes.  The recipes are pretty good and cover a wide variety of wild game, but if you aren't a kill it and grill it blood brother, the prose may be annoying for you.  Personally, I dig it.  

Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning by The Gardeners and Farmers of Terre Vivante--This book is exactly as it is titled.  Apparently, they solicited a bunch of French people, who are good at preserving food without freezing or canning it, and got their methods.  Some of the directions are more complete than others and to be honest, I'm scared to try most of them because of the "they are not FDA approved" stigma.  I'll get over it eventually.  I'm actually looking forward to dandelion season so I can try out the dandelion wine recipe.  I tried a recipe last year that required you to remove the green nub that holds the petals on.  I realized I'm allergic to dandelion pollen halfway through removing them.  This recipe just boils them, nubs and all.  Maybe I'm tempting fate too much by trying this again, even with the new recipe.  We'll see.

Mary Bell's Complete Dehydrator Cookbook by Mary Bell--I don't know what else you would want in a book on dehydrating.  This covers it all...how to buy a dehydrator, how to dehydrate just about everything, every method for doing it and a bunch of recipes on how to use what you dehydrate.  I've made a bunch of stuff with my dehydrator and it has all turned out spectacular.  In fact, I went kind of dehydrator crazy for a while.  The fruit roll ups are killer.  I keep meaning to try the pumpkin ones and to try dehydrating tofu to make crackers.  That would make for a good blog post.

Cooking with Sunshine by Lorraine Anderson and Rick Palkovic--I haven't had this book long and this isn't the right time of year for solar cooking in this area, so I haven't been able to test the solar cooking methods out yet.  But I do have plans to build one of their cardboard box solar cookers and trying out a few of their recipes.  The book says that in southern Ohio, we should have about 160 days where the sun is strong enough to cook food well, minus days where the weather is bad.  We'll see how well it works come spring.

Okay...enough for now.  Believe it or not, I still have more books.  I love books.  I would love my own personal library...what am I talking about...I already have one. :)