The Kitchen Ecosystem (paper original)

If you are retired with plenty of time to work in the kitchen, Kitchen Ecosystem may work for you. For the average home cook, it won’t. Eugenia Bone’s concept is good: use as much as possible from local and seasonal ingredients. The bulk of the cookbook is recipes arranged in forty sections, alphabetically by ingredients from apple to zucchini. Each section has seven or eight recipes featuring that ingredient. She emphasizes no waste and preserving just about everything: peels, shells, bones which are used in stocks and other applications. Everything she can make use of is homemade: raisins from grapes, even saved dried corn husks for tamales, and so on. She presents a large number of stocks, such as asparagus, cabbage and corn stocks. Her recipes are based on these, including home canned meat and chicken. She gives no substitute, thus without those the recipes are useless. The recipes are well written but occasional listed ingredients are not used in the instructions, and some ingredients in the instructions are not in the ingredient list. Sometimes the cooking steps are not logical. Layout is poor as the text is continuous, thus you must leaf back and forth to follow some recipes.