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Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver: book review

  


 

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Our Year of Seasonal Eating (2017) is part memoir and part food experience set in America.

 

The author begins with her family’s move from city-living Tucson, Arizona, to a rural farm in southern Appalachia: ‘We wanted to live in a place that could feed us: where rain falls, crops grow, and drinking water bubbles up right out of the ground.’ In other words, the Kingsolver family wanted to return to their agricultural roots and to eat food grown locally. 

 

For food, she begins with asparagus: it’s history, it’s growth, the harvest, and the eating. Then it’s leafy greens, zucchini, pumpkins, and potatoes. 

 

She writes of farmers’ markets, trading fairs, organic farming, seeds and diseases, flowering plants, bolting, molly mooching, birds and the bees, poultry farming, whether bigger is really better, finances, and gratitude. She talks of weeds: pigweed, pokeweed, quackgrass, crabgrass, and purslane.

 

She writes about slow food cooking, cheesemaking, canning, and cooking for celebrations. And she writes about being prepared: meal planning, planting planning, and seasonal planning.  

 

There are lots of easy recipes too: asparagus and morel bread pudding; eggs in a nest; spinach lasagna; chicken recuerdos de Tucson; Asian vegetable rolls; strawberry rhubarb crisp; 30-minute mozzarella; summertime salad; eggplant papoutzakia; Friday night pizza; basil-blackberry crumble; melon salsa; cucumber yogurt soup; grilled vegetable panini; cherry sorbet; disappearing zucchini orzo; zucchini chocolate chip cookies; frijole-mole; family secret tomato sauce; relish; chutney; veggie frittata; spicy turkey sausage; four seasons of potato salad; pumpkin soup; holiday corn pudding a nine-year-old can make; Frida Kahlo’span de muerto; antipasto tomatoes; dried tomato pesto; braised winter squash; butternut bean soup; vegetarian chili; and sweet potato quesadillas. 

 

This is a great book to read while cooking, and to be entertained while eating. It is simple, easy-to-read, educational, and fascinating. Although the author’s farm life is in a local setting, many of the principles can be extracted to fit other locations and situations, including just the pleasure of eating good, sustainable food. 

 

 


 



MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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