Farmer John's Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables [Paperback]

John Peterson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 19, 2006

Join the real food revolution with a true pioneer in the Community Supported Agriculture movement-Farmer John Peterson and his farm, Angelic Organics. Angelic Organics is a leader in community supported gardening and biodynamics, helping to connect people with their food, their farmers, and healthful living.
With exciting recipes grouped by season and by vegetable, The Real Dirt Cookbook provides cooking tips, serving suggestions, and evocative descriptions of each dish, and teaches readers new ways to use a surplus of basil, cabbage, tomatoes, or whatever veggie is plentiful. Find new ways to use a huge variety of fruits, vegetables and herbs.
Also included in the book is an Illustrated Vegetable Identification Guide and tips on long-term vegetable and herb storage and preservation methods (such as freezing, drying, canning, and lactic acid fermentation). Whether you grow your own veggies, spend lingering mornings at the farmer's market, or pluck your produce from shelves at the local supermarket, The Real Dirt Cookbook is an invaluable resource on growing, cooking, and storing real food.
Watch for the DVD release of The Real Dirt on Farmer John, the award-winning feature documentary film by Taggart Siegel, about the dramatic failure of Farmer John's conventional farming operation and its resurrection into a thriving, organic CSA farm! Coming Spring 2006. Visit www.AngelicOrganics.com for more information.
"[Farmer John is] part of a movement that connects to the same movement that Alice Waters has helped lead and facilitate, coming from another part of the system."
-Al Gore, in his introduction of The Real Dirt on Farmer John, San Francisco's Castro Theatre, June 2005
Lifelong farmer John Peterson runs Angelic Organics, one of the largest Community Supported Agriculture farms in the United States. John brings the discipline of farming in the Midwest to his winters of writing in Mexico. John's essays have been featured in books and articles, including in The Sun, Growing for Market, Biodynamic Magazine, Lilipoh, and Community Farm News. John makes public presentations about farming to groups and conferences worldwide. He lives in Illinois.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Community-supported agriculture is an increasingly popular farm-marketing system where subscribers buy a portion of the harvest before the growing season begins and receive weekly boxes of diverse vegetables that vary throughout the season. Angelic Organics is one of the largest farms of this kind in the country, serving 1,200 shareholders in the Chicago area, and Peterson's cookbook is an outgrowth of the chatty, idiosyncratic newsletters he's been sending to his members every week since 1993. The book is arranged seasonally by crop, offering recipes and information on storing and preserving the exotic or misunderstood vegetables like sunchokes, rutabagas and kohlrabi. Familiar staples like corn, tomatoes and spinach are also represented, but jazzed up with an eclectic international pantry of condiments and spices. Interspersed with the cooking discussions are philosophical essays on biodynamic agriculture by and about the movement's founder, Rudolf Steiner. While the relevance of some sidebars is questionable"cooking tips from the farm cook, and excerpts from farm newsletters on weather, harvest records and equipment heartaches"they do help readers vicariously experience life on this unique farm in this farm kitchen bible presented with missionary zeal. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

...there is much more than recipes in the cookbook's 360 pages, including comments from the cooks, letters from CSA members, excerpts from Farmer John's weekly newsletter, essays by nutrition experts and even a few poems. These tidbits spice up the basic fare and offer readers the flavor of an unusual and admirable farm. -- Lynn Byczynski, Mother Earth News

A charming companion cookbook to a popular documentary. Goes straight to the heart of Peterson's indomitable spirit: fresh, home-grown, organic produce...Just as with the farm, this isn't Peterson's project alone--shareholders contribute recipes, tips and testimonials throughout the text, giving it a communal feel. A warm, earthy celebration of agriculture and the journey from field to your table. -- Kirkus Reviews

As a chef, I know that without superb, seasonal, pristine product, I really cannot get too far. I have used the extraordinary produce from Angelic Organics, and I can attest it has made a substantial difference at Charlie Trotter's. The stories and recipes in this glorious book thoroughly connect the farmer to the kitchen. Congratulations, John, you've delivered a real winner. -- Chef Charlie Trotter

Farmer John, with boa and pitchfork, is provocative and passionate about cultivating not only delicious vegetables but also a vibrant community of farmers and consumers dedicated to the values of sustainability. -- Alice Waters, Chez Panisse

His life generated a movie, and the movie spawned a cookbook without peer--not only a big, brightly illustrated bag of recipes that will send you flying to your local farmers market, but also a physical and spiritual examination of the secret life of veggies and a re-chronicling of the struggles and triumphs of Farmer John. Every recipe sounds savory and lip-smacking, or sweet and tender. Farmer John's Cookbook is, like the man, unconventional, spiced with delectable sidebars such as...this overheard remark: "If I ever get married, I want a nice frying pan." Farmer John's Cookbook will quickly find a place on your kitchen shelf, your reading list, and your veggie-loving heart." -- CurledUp.com

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Product Details

• Paperback: 360 pages
• Publisher: Gibbs Smith Publishers; 1 edition (April 19, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1423600142
• ISBN-13: 978-1423600145
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 10.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #49,463 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #68 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Vegetables & Vegetarian > Vegetables

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A cookbook that brings the farm into your kitchen (and into your life), July 23, 2006

By 

R. M. Bower (Illinois) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Farmer John's Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables (Paperback)

This book skillfully weaves a tapestry of farm and food. It offers depth and also keeps us from taking ourselves too seriously. Relating the seasons to your cooking with pictures, stories, excellent recipes and more, it effectively captures ones experience of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). Most cookbooks focus on the kitchen but this one takes you back to the farm, to where your vegetable ingredients are grown and the burgeoning CSA movement from which this deeper relationship springs. What an exciting new way to look at the food we eat.

A previous reviewer seems to have missed the tie-in this book might have to Omnivores Dilemma--not only is the book not vegetarian per se (although it certainly does focus on vegetables, meat is even included in some of the recipes), but how could this book be construed for an infomercial for a farm which is part of a CSA/local movement where the previous reviewer living in California (thousands of miles away from Angelic Organics' Illinois location) is unable to even participate or purchase even one vegetable. If it is an infomercial, it must be for the vegetables themselves and the local community supported agriculture movement (www.localharvest.org helps you find your own local csa farm amongst many other local products) for which this book so effectively captures the spirit.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The CSA's Primer/Cookbook, October 4, 2006

By 

Christopher F. Orman - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Farmer John's Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables (Paperback)

With the current spinach scare, modern industrial society has begun to reflect on exactly where their food originates. A DVD like Koons-Garcia's "The Future of Food" explores both the problems with our current genetically engineered food, while develing into the socio-economic issues conflicting farmers faced with the GE future; where seeds are patented or refuse to grow unless sprayed with Round-up.

Interestingly, when we enter a supermarket, rarely do we reflect on the fact that 70 percent of the produce we can purchase is, well, out of season. The distances produce travels to sate our society, to eat tomatoes in the dead of winter, provides carbon emission concerns, while again triggering the "now what kind of conditions were these vegetables produced under?" or more directly, "Are they safe to eat?"

Which is why a CSA, or community supported agriculture, has become viewed as a viable, intelligent option to our current predicament. Farmer's participate as a group, receiving a call every week to fill a specific number of orders. The farmer sees what they will have available, and only one day before being delivered, pick the said product. The farms net their produce together, fill a box with their various pickings(like figs, tomatoes, beets, squash, arugala, carrots, green onions, etc.) and then deliver them to a drop point where customers pick the boxes up. So week to week, the food the customer receives changes depending on availabilty and time of year.

Besides giving customers better produce, a CSA cuts carbon emissions because food travels on average 50 miles to 1500 miles, and obviates concerns of chemically laden, GE foods.

So the Farmer John's Cookbook's attitude, or arguably its underlying theme, becomes tied to this notion of seasonality, slow food, and CSAs; hence why the author mentions his own CSA and farm Angelic Organics(to dispel, again, an earlier review here). The recipes are quite good. They are family-style and feature enough twists to be worthwhile. More importantly, each recipe focuses on each chosen produce's strengths. Similar in many ways to Alice Waters' "Chez Pannise Vegetables."

But the true greatness of the book is in, again, its theme. It argues for seasonality, and shows the eater how much can be appreciated in the produce each season brings. The snippets of information, an amalgamation of the Farmer's Almanac and some esoteric dated Brillat-Savarin philosophizing, only further carries this notion of appreciation.
As a CSA primer, the text succeeds, becoming more of a handbook than a cookbook; place it firmly next to "One Straw Revolution."

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Way More Than Your Average Cookbook, August 29, 2006

By 

Judith M. Jindrich (Wilsonville, OR USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Farmer John's Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables (Paperback)

This is a food book to savor. Not your average, get-down-to-business, step 1,2,3 sort of cookbook, this is more of a food-for-the-soul book, with lots of scrumptious recipes thrown in. Originally conceived as a helpful guide for the consumer/members of Angelic Organics, a CSA farm, the book evokes a direct connection between family, food and farm. The sidebars about weather and agricultural theory, the stories and humor give the cook, even if he/she is preparing food in a high-rise in Manhattan, a feel for the origins and importance of the food being prepared. The book is about the seasons, about the work of farming, about the soil and about harvest joy. It celebrates life as viewed through the eyes of the farmer as well as the cook. Highly recommended as a provocative read as well as a cookbook.