The Encyclopedia of Country Living Review

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(More customer reviews)The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery, A Review, by Sher June
This book is phenomenal! Besides offering general information on
gardening and variations on the usual ways to prepare and preserve
produce, Carla Emery includes thousands of other exotic and old
fashioned recipes. That alone would be remarkable, but she doesn't stop
there. She covers information on every aspect of farming and
homesteading from buying a farm to delivering your own baby---yes, if you
are all alone when you go into labor!
Here is a general idea of what she includes, as well as some of the
weirder specifics:
How to get water - dowsing, getting it to your farm, using it, pollution
concerns
Living primitively - shelter, backwoods refrigeration, campfire kitchens
Alternative energy - information and resources, using a solar cooker (We
have one, and they really do work.)
Washing clothes by hand
Quilting
Candle making - paraffin and beeswax
Foraging - also poisonous plants and mushrooms
Wood - harvesting, heating, wood cook stoves
Fertilizing your soil
Raising earthworms for gardening, bait, or money making
Using draft horses and oxen
Grain (all kinds!) - planting; mowing by hand; binding sheaves and making
shocks to cure them;
threshing by hand, with animals, or machinery; winnowing; drying;
storing; grinding; and protecting from pests
Preserving food - canning, freezing, drying, salting, larding, fermenting,
jams and juices, making vinegar
Saving seeds for next year plants
Herbs - culinary, not medicinal
Pressing oil from seeds
Acorns - making meal and flour
Bamboo - growing, recipes, and various other uses
Wild Rice - foraging and growing your own
Flax - growing and making linen
Maple sugaring - collecting sap and making syrup
Dandelion root or chicory coffee
Beekeeping - keeping bees, harvesting and using wax and honey
Animals
Raising, feeding, and caring for all types of livestock
Building barns, fences, chicken coops, rabbit hutches, etc.
Pastures, forage, hay, feeds
Predator control
Diseases and veterinary care
Reproduction from breeding to births
Dehorning, castrating, hoof trimming
Sheep shearing and using wool
Pigs - housing, fencing, and how to catch a pig!
Rabbit raising
Poultry - chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese, guineas; hatching chicks;
preserving eggs and testing them for safety; using feathers
Dairying - milking and milk handling; all types of dairy products; cream
separators and butter churns
Butchering - preserving meat; making sausage, soap, and lard; tanning
hides; making pickled pig feet!
Home funerals and burying your dead
In March 1974 Carla Emery self-published the first edition of what she then called "The Old Fashioned Recipe Book." It made the "Guinness Book of World Records" as the largest book ever printed on a mimeograph machine. It was well over 900 pages, hand bound, and some of the early ones were held together with plastic coated copper wire through a 3-hole punch. We were lucky to get one of the early mimeographed editions before she sold it in 1977 to Bantam Books, who continued to publish until 1988. Sasquatch Books began republishing it in 1992 under the current title, "The Encyclopedia of Country Living," and continues to publish it today.
Carla's recipes and homesteading information came largely from her personal experience farming, which she did while raising 6 children and running the School for Country Living for a while in Kendrick, Idaho with her husband Mike. She also
gleaned much information for the book from elderly farming friends and neighbors who still possessed these basic skills and favorite old recipes. Once Carla started publishing her mimeographed editions, she quickly became famous enough to be interviewed on major national TV talk shows, etc., and folks started sending her even more homesteading tips and recipes. So her book kept expanding until it weighed several pounds and looks today like a big city phone directory!
I have been referring to Carla's book for over 30 years on many topics for our own farm, and found it very helpful. I particularly used her recipes on preparing and preserving food. My own 30 year area of expertise is in keeping dairy goats. I found her goat information quite useful and accurate, although I did disagree with her on a couple of points, which isn't unusual with any
book on animal raising. For instance, she says any doe who has trouble giving birth twice should be butchered. Goat birthing problems are almost always tangled or backwards kids, which you can usually help deliver, and are just bad luck. Also she recommended a wormer that is outdated, because worms do become immune to these products after a number of years in general use.
There are useful resources throughout the book for further reference or purchasing products. These include books, periodicals, government agencies, and organizations.
This book is surely unique. I have never seen anything remotely as useful, thorough, and inclusive as this homesteading reference. It was a labor of love.
- from [...]

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No home, whether in the country, the city, or somewhere in between, should be without this one-of-a-kind encyclopedia — the most complete source of information available about growing, processing, cooking, and preserving homegrown foods from the garden, orchard, field, or barnyard. For more than 30 years, people have relied on its practical, step-by-step advice on basic self-sufficiency skills such as how to cultivate a garden, buy land, bake bread, raise farm animals, make sausage, milk a goat, grow herbs, churn butter, build a chicken coop, cook on a wood stove, and much, much more. First written at the height of the 1960s back-to-the-land movement, the book has been continually revised, updated, and expanded, and has grown from a self-published, mimeographed document to an exhaustive reference of more than one million words, 2,000+ recipes, and over 1,500 mail order sources. Emery's personal advice, reflections, and anecdotes ensure that this incredibly detailed, diverse reference is as enjoyable as it is useful.

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Slow Cooker: The Best Cookbook Ever with More Than 400 Easy-to-Make Recipes Review

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(More customer reviews)"Slow Cooker: The Best Cookbook Ever" has many excellent recipes and meal ideas, is well laid out, clear, and nicely photographed. Whether it will prove to be the "best cookbook ever" for you probably depends on how you use your slow cooker. I usually turn to mine on busy days when I have little time to cook and will be gone most of the day. I want to quickly combine a few ingredients with minimal fuss, clap the lid on, walk away, and come home eight or ten hours later to a ready-to-eat meal. Unfortunately, many of the recipes in this book require extensive preparation, cook for only three or four hours, and involve the slow cooker almost incidentally.
For example, the Asian Honey Wings, although they sound delicious, are all but finished before the slow cooker even makes an appearance. The wings are cooked in the oven while the sauce is prepared in a bowl, and the sauce and wings are then combined in the slow cooker and heated through. The book suggests serving them from the slow cooker to keep them warm. Heating and serving an already cooked dish from a slow cooker hardly qualifies as a slow-cooker recipe, and I don't really need a book to know that serving from a slow cooker is a good way to keep food warm.
Another typical example is a casserole for which the cook must first make 2 cups of cooked rice; chop several vegetables; have 3 cups of cooked, diced chicken at hand; and grate 2-1/2 cups of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. While the rice simmers on the stovetop, the cook sautés the vegetables in separate steps, then removes them to a bowl and adds several more ingredients to the pan to create a sauce. The rice and some of the vegetables are then combined with half the sauce in one bowl, and the chicken and other vegetables are combined with the rest of the sauce in another bowl. Finally, the rice, chicken, vegetables, and cheese are layered in the slow cooker and heated through. Frankly, if I have time for this level of involvement and kitchen mess, I'm just going to go ahead and cook a meal. Once again, the slow cooker seems to be involved only so this can be called a slow-cooker recipe.
A recipe for enchiladas calls for 17 different ingredients and 10 cooking steps before it is ready for the slow cooker - and then cooks only 3 hours. The cook can neither save time by using the slow cooker nor leave it unattended for the day.
There are some interesting suggestions, such as making snack mix or spiced nuts in the slow cooker in a way that is much simpler than the usual oven recipes. There are good dip recipes; again, no surprise that a slow cooker works well for warm dips, but new ideas for dips are always welcome.
I find myself using this cookbook as more of an idea book than a slow cooker reference. Leafing through, I find a recipe for something I like - cabbage rolls, say - see that it's just as much work as making them in the oven, and decide to make them soon - in the oven. One more thing: All of the recipes are sized for 6 to 10 servings; if you need to adjust the recipe to make fewer, that will add one more step.

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This is the only slow cooker book for busy people. With over 400 recipes, The Best Slow Cooker Cookbook Ever saves time and money week after week with easy meals that keep one eating well at home every day. From Old-Fashioned Chicken Pot Pie to Mexican Hot Chocolate Lava Cake, this cookbook contains recipes for everything from soups and roasts to cobblers and puddings, inspiring night after night of great meals. Prep a few ingredients, toss them in the pot, and let the cooker work its magic while you're gone for the day. Return to a slow-cooked, deeply flavored, great-smelling dinner for you and your familyevery night!

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