Hi everyone, welcome to Le gourmet TV. Today, we’re going to take a look at a cookbook and it’s called the River Cottage Cookbook. And this is a lot more than just a cookbook. This is pretty much a lifestyle guide for all those people and I would include myself in that that live in the city and think you know someday I’d love to move out to the country. I’d love to get myself a piece of land, grow some vegetables, raise some animals and really become you know—if not completely self sufficient, largely self sufficient.
This is a modern day guide book to making that happen. There stuff in here about choosing the right seeds to grow in your vegetable garden. About what to do with your vegetable garden while it’s growing, how to tend to it and what to do with the vegetables after harvest time and putting them down for the winter, pickling them, including all of the recipes that you can cook with the fresh vegetables, you know how to choose the right, cattle to grow in your area. What to do with the cattle as you’re raising them and then of course with the cattle and the sheep and the pigs and the chickens. It talks about taking them to the abattoir and doing the butchering and how to hang them and all of those things that a city dwellers don’t think about when they think of food and especially meat.
This is the book that’s going to give you insight into our food chain. And for a lot of people, you’re going to get a little bit squeamish about it because you really don’t want to think about where your food comes from. You don’t want to think about that stake and acquaint it to a living, breathing animal. This book forces you to do that and I think that it would be great reading for just about anybody even if you don’t want to move to the country. Even if you only ever want to shop at the super market, even if you only want to buy a steak ever on styrofoam wrapped in plastic. I think knowing where your food comes from is a fairly important thing. And this is a great cook book for that.
Now, of course, I live in North America and this all happens in the UK and some of it, it’s transferable but largely it is and I really enjoy this book. I’ve escaped into it and you know fantasize about leaving and moving out to the country and being at one with the earth. Something that I don’t think I can do and I don’t think anyway that I ever would do but I can live it through this book and the recipes are great. The recipes are sometimes a little bit simplistic. The recipes sometimes use cuts of meat that you’re not going to find at the supermarket. You’d have to ask your butcher for them but their absolutely fantastic and I think that this is the kind of book that if your looking for a little bit of a simpler life, maybe give it a read. Check it out. Thanks for stopping by. Hope to see you again soon.
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