The One-Block Feast: An Adventure in Food from Yard to Table

by Margo True

Based on the James Beard Award–winning blog The One-Block Diet, this all-in-one home gardening, do-it-yourself guide and cookbook shows you how to transform a backyard or garden into a self-sufficient locavore’s paradise. When Margo True and her fellow staffers at Northern California–based Sunset magazine walked around the grounds of their Menlo Park office, they saw more than just a lawn and some gardens. Instead, they saw a fresh, bountiful food source, the makings for intrepid edible projects, and a series of seasonal feasts—all just waiting to happen. The One-Block Feast is the story of how True and her team took an inspired idea and transformed it into an ambitious to create four feasts over the course of a year, using only what could be grown or raised in their backyard-sized plot. She candidly shares the group’s many successes and often humorous setbacks as they try their hands at chicken farming, cheese making, olive pressing, home brewing, bee keeping, winemaking, and more. Grouped into gardening, project, and recipe guides for each season, The One-Block Feast is a complete resource for planning an eco-friendly kitchen garden; making your own pantry staples for year-round cooking and gifts; raising bees, chickens, and even a cow; and creating made-from-scratch meals from ingredients you’ve grown yourself. Chapters are organized by season, each featuring a planting plan and crop-by-crop instructions, an account of how that season’s projects played out for the Sunset team, and a multicourse dinner menu composed of imaginative, appealing, and ultra-resourceful vegetarian recipes, such  Butternut Squash Gnocchi with Chard and Sage Brown Butter    Egg and Gouda Crepes    Whole Wheat Pizzas with Roasted Vegetables and Homemade Cheeses    Fresh Corn Soup with Zucchini Blossoms    Braised Winter Greens with Preserved Lemons and Red Chile    Summer Lemongrass Custards    Honey Ice Cream Generously illustrated and easy to follow, this ultimate resource for today’s urban homesteader will inspire you to take “eating local” to a whole new level.From the Hardcover edition.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking, Nonfiction, Gardening, Food, Reference

272 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a somewhat alienating read.  There is certainly a market for a book like this, but I'm not it.  That isn't to say that this book is useless--there are certainly some very useful parts of the book.  The suggestions for plants to grow in seasonal garden rotations are occasionally even inspired, and some of the recipes look quite tasty even if most of them are more than a bit hipster in nature.  The approach of the book as a whole, though, comes from the sort of privileged and leftist locovores who want to eat what they want while not purchasing products from stores or contributing to global and industrial logistics supply chains.  In looking at this book and the experience of the writer and the team of gardeners, this is the approach to feeding oneself that can only come from someone who already has a fair amount of money to work with and a fair amount of time on one's hands and presumably quite a few people working together (since a large team worked on this farm to take care of all of the various aspects of the adventure).  And if you're a single person who finds the author's approach more than a bit too precious, this is not the sort of book that hits the right chords.

This book is a complex one of more than 250 pages and it is really four parts that each have three different elements to them.  The book begins with an introduction that discusses the book's planting plan and timeline for both warm-season and cool-season as well as some gardening guidelines.  After that the author discusses the four seasons:  Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring.  Each of the sections includes a discussion of the seasonal feast that offers a humorous tale of the experiences of the team in dealing with various concerns.  There is then a look at the garden plan in each season, projects that match the season, as well as recipes and preserves.  The projects include raising honeybees, making cheese and beer, raising chickens, making wine, vinegar, and olive oil, growing mushrooms, taking care of dairy cattle, and so on.  The author expressed a difficulty that one has in growing tea on the West coast, which is a problem that deserves to be solved.  The recipes included skillet-roasted endamame, plenty of zucchini dishes (one suspects that the author found herself burdened with a lot of zucchini to get rid of, a common fate of gardeners), herb vegetable broth, and many others.  Preserves include dried herbs, strawberry oven jam.  After the four seasons are discussed the author provides an epilogue, gives acknowledgements, introduces the team of people who worked on the garden throughout the year, as well as providing a regional planting and harvesting timeline for one's own gardens as well as an index.

This book is the sort of adventure you have when you can ensure that you make a book out of it.  It is hard for me to imagine a group of people who would do something like this, and those who would would probably do it differently.  It is worthwhile, I suppose to see how the other 3% lives, to ponder how it is that those who have the means to support their ideals about wanting to return to a simpler life but with the means to support considerably more privilege in distinguishing themselves from peasants by virtue of more elitist choices of plants and care than one would find in subsistence agriculture.  Yet there are certainly a great many people who have enough property to do something like what these authors suggest, if they have a lot of people to help them out with taking care of the chickens or milking the cows or pressing the olives into oil or growing the wheat or rotating the crops after harvesting or taking care of the bees.  A lot of man-hours went into this one block, and the author makes it clear that if one wants to be a locovore it takes if not a village at least a few households working together.  That's not such a bad model, if you can do it.

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book seems like a Portlandia spoof. Clearly, I'm not the target audience (although I read Sunset magazine). I can only empathize with the poor publishing workers who were coerced into working on this project (you KNOW not everyone was in love with the idea of beekeeping, feeding chickens, and weeding while at work). The worst in holier-than-thou local foods rhetoric. Ugh.

[Kendra · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great recipes but very West Coast specific

[jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

I followed the blog. I waited anxiously for the book. I read it. Now, I feel two ways about this project/book.

1 - This is a lovely book with gorgeous photos and delicious-sounding recipes. It's great inspiration for anyone looking to source more food locally, eat within seasons and eat closer to the source. I appreciated that they went (almost) vegetarian because they weren't willing to kill their own animals (except for escargot, and let me tell you, I hate snails enough to consider eating them despite my 18 years of vegetarianism). There is a lot of inspiration for "locavore" projects, including growing your own mushrooms or buying shares in a dairy cow. My wife read this book, too, and said, "I feel like we're very accomplished when I think about how much of this we already do." She's right. In our world, we always feel like we're behind schedule and our to-do list is 100 miles long. It's nice to feel accomplished once in a while. So, this book is inspirational, pleasant and gave me a content, smug feeling.

2 - This book is about creating a feast for each season with ingredients produced within one block. I think the whole staff of the magazine was in on it. Divided into "teams," they contribute something through the year. Teams Beer, Olive, Wine, Mushroom, Bee, Cow, Chicken, Salt, Cheese, Garden, Escargot, Mead, Kitchen, Saffron, Tea and Vinegar step forward with projects, recipes and tips. Just writing this out exhausts me. If this whole team of professional people being paid to do this for a living can barely get through it, what chance does any individual have at doing this on the scale of a single family home? It really takes away from the idea that these are heirloom skills that should be practiced by everyone on a regular basis. It makes everything seem too precious and experimental. It's like a "stuff white people like" joke. It makes me feel yucky.


All things told, though, on the cover of the book there is a photograph of a patty pan squash hollowed out to hold a baked egg. I love that photo. It carries me through gray days. It makes me so happy.

[Eileen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The people at Sunset in California went all out; planting for four seasons, raising chickens, keeping bees, growing their own hops, grapes and more. They made their own tea, beer, wine, honey, cheese and even preserved some things. I enjoyed reading about how they did it and looking at the recipes for their feasts. I especially enjoyed the part about growing, harvesting and preparing tea since I am attempting that in my yard and that information is very valuable to me.
However there were a lot of people involved in their project, with lots of knowledge and access to the best resources. Never mind the time they could devote to it. For many of us something on this scale just won't work. Additionally, most of the activities are not presented in enough depth to make this a go to reference. Keep in mind to, that this took place in California and any gardening ideas would need to be adapted to your growing region. I would describe this book as an overview of their project with planting guides, methods and recipes. I plan to try a couple of new plants, a different planting method maybe and I'll definitely be making tea and for me that made One Block Feast worthwhile.

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fun book to read, although I am a little disappointed that I didn't conclude it energized to carry out any of the one-block projects it details. Many of them are too ambitious for a working adult to take on alone, not to mention expensive! Perusing the list of supplies and the amount of time dozens of staff invested in their projects, I assume Sunset must be a very well-endowed magazine. Anyway, I had already decided that raising my own chickens or bees would be too much, and I'm not compelled to start growing my own tea or buying a share in a dairy cow. Thankfully, I do have a husband who is an excellent homebrewer (with more care to sanitation than the Sunset folks, apparently) and am familiar with basic vegetable gardening, albeit not blessed with a Bay-area climate or a full-sun site. Maybe I'll take on the mushroom log someday.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took a village... or in this case, a staff of magazine writers in California... to create a meal. It's a great adventure story and well-written, but I concur with some other reviewers below who say it's really intimidating, especially for people who have things like, oh, jobs, kids, and non-gardening hobbies. I do precious little enough to feed myself (small garden, hens, dabble at vinegar, wine, cheese for fun)so I can see how reading this might make you want to throw in the towel and reach for the Chef Boyardee.

I will say the quality of writing and the lightheartedness of the adventure these people took made for very enjoyable reading and I'll probably be more inclined to read Sunset if I ever come across a copy now.

[Courtney · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a take off on Sunset magazine's One Block blog. I really loved the stories of how the different teams were willing to try new things and how they were honest when something was a flop. The pictures are great, the recipes are inviting...this book will definitely make you think about what you can create in your own backyard and what we take for granted.

It doesn't have in-depth instructions, but does give a pretty good overview of how to do the different projects they tried. They supply you with lots of resources, which is great.

[Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the multitude of garden plans a bit confusing to tell you the truth as its all site specific and that was a bit pointless, probably photos, a discussion of the soil, and realism of doing it on someone's own acre that didn't have 50 staff would be better. If they were earnest about feeding all those people that contributed to the book they would either be carbon anorexics, or growing a lot more food.
If it inspires someone to take on a more sustainable life, then all power to them :)

[Cy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book screams California. To get unpasteurized milk, they suggest buying a cow and a &10,000 milking machine. Because you can't milk a cow without a $10,000 machine. They also suggest u-picking olives and then bringing them to a commercial olive oil refinery to have them pressed, which they say only costs like $1,000.

[Jennifer Miera · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't read this book cover to cover. It's still pretty mainstream (Sunset Magazine), but had some useful information and good pictures. I may revisit this at another time when I can spend more time with it.

[Laureen · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book was awesome! if you wanted to start bee-keeping, for instance, it had info on how to buy it and how much it costs! and that goes for starting a garden, making wine, having a cow, making cheese- anything that you could do at home and would want and need info for, it has. great book!

[Erin Stuhlsatz · Rating 3 out of 5]

This cookbook/memoir would have been much more interesting a couple years ago, and if it wasn't from such a position of wealth. They went out and bought a cow. They bought...lots of other things, too. I was unimpressed.

[Diana · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fascinating book! The idea of raising, growing, or producing everything needed to make a series of seasonal feasts was fiscinating and inspiring. I especially appreciated the fact that the author was open and honest about the things they did right AND the things they did wrong. Hearing both about the successes and the failures makes me so much less afraid to try things on my own. For perfectionist like me, knowing that you can fail and still end up figuring out how to make something that DOES work is HUGE! I liked this book so much that I think I'm going to actually buy it.