Greetings Friends!
Winter in our neck of the woods has been cold and long, and now that the snow banks have finally receded, I’m delighted to finally gaze out at greening pastures and an extensive list of growing season projects.
For those of you who mournfully scanned your inbox all winter long, despairing that a Grassfed Cooking Newsletter did not appear for three months straight (some of you noticed….right???), I offer my apologies. I write bearing excuses:
Long Way on a Little: First, I’ve been knee-deep in recipe writing and testing for my newest cookbook, Long Way on a Little. This latest tome contains all my new-and-improved knowledge about cooking the myriad cuts of grassfed meat, each of which is cross-referenced to recipes in the extensive chapters on leftovers and soups. My hope is that Americans will re-discover all the prudent ways to make use of a local, sustainable food supply, making it more accessible for everyone. I’ve discovered that there is an amazing amount of food going to waste in even the most earnest earth-honoring kitchens, at tremendous cost to our sustainability and our pocketbooks. Thus, hopefully, the book will put us all on a path to more effectively go…well…a long way on a little. I will continue to chip away at the manuscript and recipe testing over the coming months, with hopes of releasing the book sometime between September 2012 and January 2013.
GrassfedCooking.com: The other reason I haven’t been writing is because we’ve been madly working to re-design the grassfedcooking.com website. The archive of articles on the old site was getting extensive, and therefore difficult for folks to peruse, so I hope you’ll check out the new format. You will also notice that we’ve updated our pricing and shipping policies. Believe it or not, most of them have actually gone down. In an effort to streamline the shipping expenses, we’ve created new bulk ordering packages, all of which now include priority shipping and insurance (as always, if you don’t see the right combination of books you need, you are welcome to write and request a custom price quote). We hope the results are a website that is easier to use, and prices and products that better suit your needs. Please be sure to check them out. As a little incentive, we are offering a coupon special. From now until May 15, when you place your order, type the following in the coupon code box: NEWsite! We will give you 10% off your purchase. For those of you who need to stock up on books for the upcoming market season, this is a great time to buy.
MEAT: And finally, I want to call your attention to a very important new book: Meat: A Benign Extravagance, by British activist and former livestock farmer, Simon Fairlie. The book was published last year in the UK, and has recently made it over the pond us, thanks to Chelsea Green Publishing. Fairlie’s book is exhaustively researched, and one of the most intelligent and thorough arguments for sensible, sustainable meat production and consumption that I’ve seen. While Meat is not light reading by any means, I feel it is an essential addition to the library for any of you who are closely following the meat-as-sustainable food debate. Fairlie leaves no stone un-turned in his research, uncovering the politics behind the computation of conversion ratios, government livestock eradication policies, whether or not we should be permitted to recycle food waste through omnivores, the role of livestock in addressing famine, the all-consuming carbon footprint debate, and much more. It is a serious read, particularly important for anyone who must serve as a spokesperson for sustainable, humane, earth-honoring livestock production. I encourage you to explore it further at Chelsea Green’s website.
Okay, that’s all for now. I encourage you to visit the new grassfedcooking.com website, and to look forward to all new articles in the coming months!
Best wishes,
Shannon Hayes
Sap Bush Hollow Farm
Author of The Grassfed Gourmet Cookbook, The Farmer and the Grill, and Radical Homemakers.
