[alert variation=”alert-info”]Publisher: Norton
Formats: Hardcover, Paperback, Mass Market Paperback, eBook, Kindle, Audiobook, Audible
Purchase: Powell’s | Amazon | IndieBound | Barnes & Noble | iBooks[/alert]

For those who love the currently popular concept of buying organic foods locally and seasonally, Growing a Feast will be wonderful reading. Luckily, author Kurt Timmermeister is an excellent writer having not only good writing skills but describing his stories well and with enthusiasm. The book is very readable, and the concept is fascinating. He lives and grows his food on a thirteen-acre farm on a Washington state island, including dairy and beef cows, chickens and pigs.

“This is the story of that glorious fall feast.”

The story of this book is a farmhouse meal for twenty guests (at $100 each) that starts two years earlier with the birth of a calf, enabling Timmermeister access to rich milk and cream, thus butter and cheese. The next phase is eighteen months before the meal, the beginning of the aging of cheese. Growing the vegetables (three kinds of onion), tomatoes (ten varieties) and many other garden items is over the space of a year before the feast. The meal is a true multi-course, very substantial feast, including the last item: fresh home-roasted coffee beans. The book is entirely text and illustrations would’ve helped (e.g. describing the rolling of pasta), yet his descriptions are very good, very vivid.

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