Reading “The Omnivore’s Guide to Home Cooking for Preppers, Homesteaders, Permaculture People and Everyone Else” by Judson Carroll feels like cooking with your grandma. It’s filled with insights into techniques, ingredients, and flavor combinations that only come from a lifetime spent in the kitchen cooking delicious foods from scratch.
For example, did you know that turtle tastes like 5 different meats? That you can use a basic technique to turn almost any vegetable or meat into either a cream soup or a casserole base? Or that the flavor of cloves goes well with chicken, and you can add it to your chicken stock by slicing two or three times into a whole onion, inserting a bay leaf into each slice, and securing each bay leaf in place by “nailing” it into the onion with a clove?
This book is brimming with cooking wisdom just like that and, while it isn’t a recipe book per se, it does include plenty of recipes throughout that the author encourages you to change up according to your tastes.
Adventurous eating of local, seasonal ingredients is encouraged: You’ll find an entire section on foraged plants, and several pages devoted to less common meats like frog legs, alligator, snake, and turtle—along with tips on finding and cooking them.
A firm believer that “the best kitchens are those that waste the least amount of food,” Mr. Carroll also offers tips on using up leftover ingredients throughout the book.
Overall, the author encourages you to learn and execute proper techniques, to use superior ingredients, and to “keep cooking simple and enjoyable”—just like grandma used to do.
Click here to order your copy of “The Omnivore’s Guide to Home Cooking for Preppers, Homesteaders, Permaculture People and Everyone Else.”
The Grow Network is a global network of people who produce their own food and medicine. We’re the coolest bunch of backyard researchers on Earth! We’re constantly sharing, discovering, and working together to test new paths for sustainable living—while reconnecting with the “old ways” that are slipping away in our modern world. We value soil, water, sunlight, simplicity, sustainability, usefulness, and freedom. We strive to produce, prepare, and preserve our own food and medicine, and we hope you do, too!
