Foto do autor
11 Works 191 Membros 4 Reviews

About the Author

Lolo Houbein lives and gardens in the Adelaide Hills of Australia. Cofounder of Trees for Life, and an environmental activist for many years, she has written a dozen books on love, life, travel, and food.

Obras de Lolo Houbein

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Data de nascimento
1934
Sexo
female

Membros

Resenhas

I really like the plot designs in this book, and the fact that the author lives in the same city as me is really nice too. It took me another read-through to appreciate how well laid-out many of the plots are, and I look forward to using them in my garden this year.
 
Marcado
TinkerBot | outras 2 resenhas | Feb 8, 2022 |
I've never thought about it before, but my cookbook shelves are a glimpse into the way I've lived my life. The oldest ones are recipe books for a beginner cook wanting to do it well: they include the CWA cookbook and Mastering the Art of French Cooking, plus Margaret Fulton and the Women's Weekly Cookbooks. Recipe books from the 80s reflect my 'earth mother' phase, when I made everything from scratch. They also represent a long period of time when I was a vegetarian, mainly because I was (still am) opposed to factory farming. This phase led me to branch out into recipes from all over the world with recipes for Italian, Chinese and Asian cooking, and when The Spouse came into my life and we began to travel overseas, things became more adventurous so that now there are books of Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese and Middle Eastern cuisine. The recipes became more complex too, influenced in part by MasterChef, but also by the restaurant scene here in Melbourne. You can see this in some of the foodie books I've reviewed here on my blog, with pride of place going to my efforts to reproduce a recipe by Heston Blumenthal.

At first glance, Magic Little Meals belongs back in my '1980s earth mother' phase. It's not a glossy 'food-porn' book. It's only 200m square, and although it's profusely illustrated, the stylist has concentrated on the food and the ingredients rather than the décor. But it's actually a profoundly contemporary book because it addresses a concern that so many of us have...

We have had a terrible year in the kitchen garden. We harvested barely enough tomatoes to fill a pudding bowl, our beetroot failed altogether, and as I write there are two – just two – eggplants finally emerging from plants that had many flowers but otherwise had failed to fruit at all. Our only success has been the pumpkin vine. The reason for this debacle is that the weather has been profoundly affected by climate change, and we hadn't changed our practice to accommodate it. And not one of our numerous gardening books has any advice, and the ABCTV's Gardening Australia has been no help at all. If there is anything on their website about how to handle extreme weather situations, I can't find it.

But Magic Little Meals is all about growing your own food for the table, and it is written with a keen sensitivity to the way the world is now. It's the only book I've ever come across that has practical tips for protecting the vegies during those extreme heat waves.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/04/18/magic-little-meals-making-the-most-of-homegr...
… (mais)
 
Marcado
anzlitlovers | Apr 18, 2019 |
Ok but for the serious gardener - I found it a bit to labour intensive for me, but it will give a good idea on "how to' tips.
 
Marcado
Brumby18 | outras 2 resenhas | Mar 11, 2009 |
I love compost. I dislike spending money and fossil fuel. This book's instructions for starting a bed are to pick up:
- a bag of mushroom or other compost
- a bag of organic potting soil
- a bale or pack of straw
- a bag of animal manure
- a small bag of gypsum for clay soil
- a tiny bag of lime for acidic soil
- organic fertilizer pellets or liquid seaweed fertilizer.
Maybe I'm just not the right audience for this book? But who is? Who likes spending money and fossil fuel they don't have to, in order to grow their own food organically?

The chapter on composting is just a ragbag assembly of possible methods. There is no information about when or why you might want to use on of them instead of another. And several are just bad: the old circle of chicken wire trick is in here, with no advice on how to handle chicken wire without stabbing yourself. Houbein suggests making compost in "two plastic laundry baskets lined with wet newspaper and covered with doormats held down by a brick". You'd be picking bits of laundry basket and doormat out of your compost forever. I think the worst advice in this section is "Using a Riding Lawnmower to Make Compost." Don't do this. Don't burn fuel and clog your mower driving over piles "prunings from the ornamental garden; weeds, except bad ones likely to regrow from pieces; leaves; very thin bark; a bag of animal manure; a small bag of lime (you only need handfuls); other organic material, like spoiled hay; fallen branches no thicker than your finger." Disassembling and mixing those materials is what composting does.

There is a three-page chapter called "Easy-Care Fruit Trees" which contains no information on how to care for fruit trees easily. Houbein describes a Shaker method, which requires immense amounts of material and physical labor before you begin. Then there's a page on espaliering. Then a page on netting. That's it! That's the whole chapter! That's where I gave up.

… (mais)
 
Marcado
susanramirez | outras 2 resenhas | Sep 17, 2018 |

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Estatísticas

Obras
11
Membros
191
Popularidade
#114,255
Avaliação
3.8
Resenhas
4
ISBNs
21
Idiomas
1

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