Tonight, Mark braised them in stock, which hardly dimmed their brilliant color but mellowed out their flavor. One of my favorites is the one in the prologue, where you describe in sensual detail a mid-winter meal that Mark is preparing using ingredients from your farm-plus one exotic fruit, a pomegranate, a friend brought you from New York City: But the unlikely star is the radish. Plus flour and grains.į & T: There are a number of cooking scenes in your book. We’re still bringing in kale, green cabbage, purple cabbage, carrots, potatoes. I spoke to Kimball recently as she took a break from putting together the weekly share for CSA subscribers.įood & Think: I'm curious-what’s in a share at the end of January in the North Country? The book, Kimball says, 'is the story of the two love affairs that interrupted the trajectory of my life: one with farming-that dirty concupiscent art-and the other with a complicated and exasperating farmer I found in State College, Pennsylvania.' The memoir follows their first year on the farm, from those painful early days of getting used to physical labor through their wedding in the midst of the first harvest, and Kimball's continuing doubts about settling into farm life. Seven years later, they have about 150 subscribers who pay $2,900 each for a year-round, all-they-can-eat share of produce, meat, dairy and grains. They fell in love, moved to the Adirondacks and started a horse-powered organic farm on a whole-diet Community Supported Agriculture model. Kimball was a freelance writer living in New York City and beginning to long for the idea of 'home' when she went to interview Mark, a young, charismatic organic farmer in Pennsylvania who turned her life upside down.

The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love, by Kristin Kimball, falls into that category, although the author stumbled into farming in one of the most old-fashioned ways imaginable-she became a farmer's wife.

City person moves to the country, takes up farming, can't believe how much work it is, writes a book: a healthy stack of titles along these lines has come out in the last decade or so, as a new wave of back-to-the-landers and locavores has discovered the joys and perils of small-scale agriculture.

The dirty life by kristin kimball