With a Ph.D. in conservation biology, Michelle Nelson started "homesteading" in a one-bedroom East Vancouver apartment. Five years later she wrote The Urban Homesteading Cookbook: Forage, Farm, Ferment and Feast for a Better World (D&M, $26.95). It was inspired and informed by her experiences on Bowen Island where she and her "partner in crazy awesomeness," shark biologist Christopher Mull," have a tiny cottage and land they share with chickens, quail, turkeys, geese, rabbits and goats. With photos by Alison Page, Nelson's cookbook has seventy recipes that include sesame panko-crusted invasive bullfrog legs, seaweed kimchi, rabbit pate with wild chanterelles, roasted Japanese knotweed panna cotta and dark and stormy chocolate cupcakes with cricket flour. It's more than a cookbook, however, because Nelson writes about foraging wild urban edibles, eating invasive species, keeping micro-livestock, bees and crickets, growing vegetables in pots, small-space aquaponics, preserving meats and produce, making cheese and slow-fermenting sourdough, beer, kombucha, kefir and pickles.

Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
The Urban Homesteading Cookbook: Forage, Farm, Ferment and Feast for a Better World

BOOKS:

The Urban Homesteading Cookbook: Forage, Farm, Ferment and Feast for a Better World (D&M 2015) $26.95 978-1-77162-081-9

[BCBW 2015]