Brett L. Markham

A fairly straightforward book about dehydrating fruits, vegetables, meat and even bread and cakes.I've done a bit of dehydrating with a small commercial unit and it seemed to take an inordinate amount of power to dehydrate even small quantities of fruit. (oh......the other issue is that what starts off as a case of mangoes reduces to a very small plastic bag of the dried fruit. It's a very practical book with some good recommendations....like just use wide mouthed sealable storage jars for the dried products. They are cheaper than vacuum bags and will last well enough for all practical purposes. I also leant red that I should be pre-treating my fruits and vegetables by blanching and treating with ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) or other products such as Potassium metabisulfite. This givers a better coloured product and reduces bacteria etc that may spoil the product. Markham is pretty clear on the fact tht his dried vegetables and dried meats are probably best when used in soups and similar dishes. He has also helpfully included a lot of recipes which I will probably never try and he's includes instructions for making your own large dehydrator. (I don't think I'll be bothering). One of his throw away tips is that he will frequently take vegetables that are not going to get used from the refrigerator and run them through the dehydrator. This way he saves the fruit or vegetables and builds up a great store of dehydrated products over time. I was surprised at the length of time that he claims dehydrated product can be used (10-15 years for products vacuum packed and stored below 10 degrees C.). Though, as he says, you have to think about the cost of running a refrigerator of 10 years if you plan on doing this.
An interesting book. Does what it sets out to do. Would have been enhanced by better quality (and more) colour photos). I give it three stars.… (plus d'informations)

This was a bizarre book. It seemed as if it was thrown together on some desktop publishing program and never edited. The wine chapter was hilarious. It was profusely illustrated with pictures of broccoli, raw, cooked, or growing in the field, with captions like "an example of blueberry wine" or "a typical carboy setup". Some of the pictures throughout the book are only partial, as you might see on a webpage which has not fully loaded. And the wine chapter was not the only one affected with mismatched photos and titles, just the funniest. If the fact-checking was no better than the rest of editing (and why should it be?) I don't feel I can trust any information in the book.

Most of the book was fairly general, even superficial, with some very peculiar exceptions. One chapter that was startlingly specific and actually did have appropriate titles to its many photographs was the chapter entirely devoted to the construction of the Chicken Plucking Machine. It's a truly bizarre contraption. There are no instructions for using it, no descriptions of what it is supposed to do (other than "Plucking Chickens") and no pictures of it in use, so I can only imagine that it beats the (hopefully dead) chicken with flailing rubber hoses until feathers fly off.

I borrowed this from my library. I won't be renewing it.… (plus d'informations)

I found this book much less satisfying than others of its type (Backyard Homestead and The New Self-Sufficient Gardener are better). The chapters were basically an outline of what should be covered, but the coverage of various topics, from compost to accounting, often left a lot to be desired. The thing which sets this book apart from others is its focus on the economics of mini-farming. The back cover says that this book: "will show you how to produce 85 percent of an average family's food on just one-quarter acre -- and earn $10,000 in cash annually." It failed to deliver on that promise. The author leaves a lot out when calculating the average family's food consumption, and the section on making money boiled down to, "Yes, you can do it! Look at these numbers." I don't get the sense that the author has done this himself, or that he has much business sense.

This book has a lot of big pictures which mostly take up space, to make the book seem longer. There are also some interesting and useful charts, and I did find the author's economic calculations interesting and fun to read, but I don't think they're particularly useful.… (plus d'informations)