Book review: Gaining Ground by Forrest Pritchard

efore I begin my review of Gaining Ground, allow to me to make a quick disclaimer: I am not an objective reader. In fact, I have worked for Forrest at farm markets every weekend for over a year now, in rain, snow, wind, thunder and tourist season. Before Smith Meadows came into my life I was largely vegetarian in order to avoid sponsoring the horror stories I read about the papers and books like Omnivore's Dilemma and Deep Economy. Then, through a boyfriend's friend's sister's best friend I found Smith Meadows, the perfect local farm with all the practices and principles an idealist could hope for.

Forrest Pritchard is Smith Meadows' farmer, its steward and practically a part of the soil he has worked so hard to nourish from the sad state it was in after years of overuse. As it turns out, lush pasture is easily achieved through a combination of patience and well planned herd rotation, switching between cattle, pigs, chickens and sheep, letting each fertilize and refresh the soil in turn. "Easily," of course, is a relative term when one is reading about it all from a comfy chair with a nice cup of tea.

In truth, it took not only years of hard work but decades of failure for the Pritchard family farm to turn around and produce a profit (as well as valuable land, animals and a sterling example of good farming practices). Gaining Ground recounts the journey Forrest took his entire family on when he realized that farming might be more of a calling for him than teaching (though writing is clearly still in his repertoire). As a bit of a book connoisseur, I did note that the book itself has a good looking, glossy cover, the text is printed clearly on nice feeling paper and the photos are incredibly helpful in placing the reader right there on the farm.

Gaining Ground has a good flow that kept me impatient to turn the page for the next adventure or roadblock, even though I knew exactly how it turned out. Forrest's anecdotes are sometimes touching, often hilarious, and range from rampant hogs to very confused market customers to a couple of completely baffling exchanges with a butcher. Pedro the goat, for instance, accompanied by Travis the humming farmhand, has a highly amusing adventure with some marigolds, in true goat-style.

As somewhat of an insider, I also know that there is a lot left out of this 317 page book. There were more adventures with goats, some ducks, more about Nancy's pasta business, a food truck and many more humorous stories from market and the farm. One hopes there will be a second book in the works... I, for one, would have enjoyed the inclusion of Forrest's other writing, perhaps the poetry he mentions sending off to literary magazines early on. The book stands at the right length and breadth to be a reasonable and fun read (One of Publishers Weekly's top 10 summer reads in nonfiction), though the prose could have dug a little deeper into the emotional underpinnings here and there.

The other members of the family receive occasional mentions, but the elder Mr. Pritchard has a fair share of the spotlight as he does his best to support his harebrained son through the snafus and disappointments of starting his free-range, grass-fed meat business. Mr. Pritchard's declining health provides a backdrop that Forrest puts to use in framing the problems with the commercial food industry and how we think about food in terms of cost, taste and enjoyment. On the whole, Gaining Ground is a good story, not an essay on farming practices, and it is this difference that will help readers to understand on a personal level what it means to buy local and why they too should work to save the family farm.

I did have one customer at market ask if Gaining Ground was a collection of recipes from Smith Meadows Kitchen, and when I passed this along to Forrest he said, "Sure, it's a recipe book. There's a real important recipe in there, they'll just have to read all the way to the end."

Gaining Ground is available on Amazon.com, in hardcopy and Kindle editions, and on IndieBound, as well as at your friendly local DC farm markets listed here. If you bring your copy to Smith Meadows farm day on June 1, Forrest will be happy to sign it for you. He may even sign copies brought to the Arlington and Takoma Park markets where he usually can be found on weekends. I will be putting my signed review copy in the Little Free Library for which I am co-steward. Pass it on!

Books read in Chincoteague (6 of 7): The Shipping News

arlier in this week of reading I very quickly judged a book to be not-my-type. The same could have happened with The Shipping News, but for the fact that Annie Proulx's writing style (unique, fragmented thought-blows of sentences) drew me in, the hope that things would improve for Quoyle, our protagonist, and the knowledge that the book did pick up in mood after the first few chapters. It was well worth it, and that very same point winds up being the heart of the book.

The early descriptions of Quoyle make him out to be a lumbering clod, barely capable of speech, unattractive in every way, making the reader feel the self-loathing of a young man lost in a highly critical world. As he begins to let his voice be heard, more of his own character comes out, slowly and painfully, and the story moves forward as we get to know him and he gets to know himself. While the beginning of the book is one calamity after another, Quoyle sticks with it and keeps plodding along, going where the winds take him until his fortunes right themselves.




Once I was inside this world, I stopped wanting to leave. One of my favourite quirks in the book is Quoyle's habit of creating impromptu newspaper headlines about the world around him ("Man with Hangover Listens to Boat Builder Project Variables"). There was also the warmth of the closeknit community in the Northern reaches, the intriguing history and mystery of each character and the town, even an abandoned village on a desolate island. I made a point of never checking the publication date on Shipping News, because it sits fairly happily in the near-present, comfortably familiar and nonspecific. Come to think of it, this was probably my favourite book of the week.

"There are four women in every man's heart. The Maid in the Meadow, the Demon Lover, the Stouthearted Woman, the Tall and Quiet Woman."

Books read in Chincoteague (4 of 7): Boneshaker

or once, the cover blurb is entirely accurate: "A steampunk-zombie-airship adventure[!]" Really, what more do you need to know? And yet, the characters in Cherie Priest's Boneshaker do go a bit deeper than that. They have emotional needs, frailities, a search for a father and role model, a last hope for lost love, an avoidance of kinship at the same time as a frantic search for the same. Not to mention attempts to understand another culture, come to terms with a violent history and guilt (over the same), and yes, the book contains a map.

In the desolate wastes of an alternate Seattle it's every man for himself, except when he feels the need to assuage his guilty soul by coming to a comrade's aid, but it's also all men against the undead, the darkness, without and within. Things can be simple and full of comaraderie in a society with a common enemy. And yet, men and women turn against each other in order to save themselves, to avoid or fight their inner demons, always always putting the self first, for there is very little true altruism in the world.

The book was pretty good, a fascinating and light frolic through a fledgling universe with some mystery thrown in along the way. The steampunk aspects are not obnoxiously overwhelming, but the "blight" victims (the zombie hordes) seem a little gratuitous (I think this is pretty much always the case with the undead). At four hundred fourteen reasonably dense pages, I could have gone for a lot more detail of the world and development of some of the characters' relationships. I'm told there are further developments to be had in subsequent novels.

Photos of phood (now with vastly improved imaging capabilities)

Apparently Mondays are good for making something different. The last time I did tortellini was at least a year ago, but this week I had nabbed a butternut squash at market and have enough eggs to burn on pasta. The squash wasn't terribly flavorful, so wrapping it in pasta seemed like a good plan. The photo shows some unrolled pasta circles, a bit of filling (squash + whatever herbs were lying around) and a few of the finished tortellinis. Cheese is really fantastic in these, but squash is a heckuva lot cheaper. They come out pretty big because I can only roll the pasta so thin with a rolling pin, and any less filling isn't sufficient.

I wont write out the entire process, but the pasta recipe is basically: for each egg, use a bit less than 100g of flour. I used 5 eggs and maybe 450g flour to start, a bit more for rolling, which makes for a very soft pasta dough, but is so much easier to work with.

The method: make a pile of flour with a well, put eggs in the middle, slowly stir flour in from edges until everything is integrated enough to knead (and not run off the counter). Knead. Let rest, covered. Divide, roll out to 1/4" thick slabs. Rest covered. Roll out as thin as you like, dry on a rack to slightly leathery feel. Cut. Dry some more if just doing noodles or stuff with stuff and let dry a bit. Freeze if not using right away, drop (fresh or frozen) in boiling water for ~5 min (mine, as I said, are very thick). Tada.

And because I had these photos of pretty chocolates from the Sugar Cube in Oldtown lying around, here are some pretty chocolates. They also tasted good, of course, very smooth, nice Autumn flavors.