Books! Books!

I am so very thankful for our library. Reading has been a favorite past time of mine for as long as I can remember and our library makes a lot of great reading material available for us! There are a couple of books I have read lately that I really enjoyed. They are both non-fiction but both of them were very interesting to read, I didn't want to put them down.



The first one I read was "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a year of food life" by Barbara Kingsolver with her husband Steven Hopp and daughter Camille Kingsolver.

This book is about a family of four that decided to try and eat locally (pretty strictly ~ thought they did make a couple of exceptions) for a whole year. It goes through the trials and triumphs of gardening, raising animals for meat, foraging for wild food and buying from other family farms.

I had heard this book was really neat but to be honest, even though it is on a subject I relate too, I doubted that it would be all that interesting. However B. K. is a great writer. It was a very inspiring book, informative and also made me laugh until I cried. It was very fun to read.

It also has quite a few recipes in it which can also be found at their Website. One of the recipes that I tried was for Mozzarella Cheese. I have already made ricotta cheese many times I thought it would be great fun to try something new.

Here I am squeezing the cheese to get all the whey out. You need to wear rubber gloves as you work with it when it is very hot. It was still hot with the gloves on. I didn't follow the recipe quite perfectly as I thought I had all the right ingredients and then as I was reading farther found out I didn't quite. I decided to go ahead with it anyway and the cheese was a little different but still quite edible and we enjoyed it. I hope to try to make it again soon with all the right ingredients. If you want to make Mozzarella cheese (which I recommend, it is quite fun) then go to Ricki's site. She is the person that Barbara learned to make cheese from. She has the recipe for 30 minute Mozzarella cheese and she provides lots of pictures to guide you along.

This next picture is of our little balls of cheese ( we got 3 of them from a gallon of milk!) as well as all the whey in the jar. The whey worked very well in place of milk in baking. I couldn't tell the difference in my pancakes, waffles and cake.

The only thing that I can think of right now that I didn't care for in the book was that although she was striving to do a good job of caring for God's creation and seemed nearly in awe of it, she never gave credit to God. When she spoke about Thanksgiving holiday (one of her favorites) she said several times "Praise the Harvest" without giving credit to the One who made Springtime and Harvest.




The other book that I found very interesting lately was "Unraveling the mystery of Autism and Pervasive Developmental Disorder, A mother's story of Research and Recovery" by Karyn Seroussi. This book had been recommended to me by my friend Jenny. We had been talking about health matters and she said this book had been very interesting. When I finally got it checked out, I found our she was very right!

Even though I don't have any kids with Autism I was very thankful to have read this. It is an amazing story of a family with a son that became autistic at around 15 months. She explains how horrible that was, it felt like they had lost their son. She however didn't not except it but rather studied it out and found out with their son it involved a casein (milk protein) and gluten (protein from grains) intolerance as well as other things. When he is on a gluten and casein free diet he is a normal child again now. I can't explain it all very well, you will just have to read it yourself.

One of the things that she said that really hit home with me is that "there is no symptom without a cause". God designed our body to work and when it doesn't there is a reason that it is not working. The method of just treating symptoms and not finding the root problem is not a good one. We need to figure out the source of the problem.

Anyway those are a couple of neat books that I have read lately. What have you been reading?I love to hear about good books to read!