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

Based on Sunset magazine's award-winning One-Block Diet blog, this ultimate guide to eating local explains how to raise and produce everything you need for completely made-from-scratch meals, all from your own backyard. Includes seasonal garden plans, menus, 100 recipes, and 15 projects such as installing bee hives, pressing olives for oil, brewing beer, making your own cheese, and raising chickens.

Inspired by the locavore movement and Sunset's dedication to covering trends in cooking and gardening, food editor Margo True led a year-long staff effort to create seasonal feasts using only what could be grown or raised in a backyard-size plot at Sunset's office. Over the course of the ambitious project, the group shared their triumphs and often humorous setbacks on their James Beard Award-winning blog. Sunset's One-Block Feast chronicles the project's first year, and includes a bounty of new information, insights, cautionary tales, and fresh recipes to create a unique blend of backyard farming guide and engaging cookbook. Chapters are organized by season, each featuring detailed coast-to-coast planting and harvesting plans, 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 recipes made from home-grown ingredients, such as Butternut Squash Gnocchi with Chard and Sage Brown Butter, and Whole Wheat Pizzas with Roasted Vegetables and Homemade Cheeses. This generously illustrated, easy-to-follow modern homesteading manual will delight readers nationwide who want to get closer to their food.

MARGO TRUE is the food editor at Sunset magazine. Before Sunset, she served as the executive editor at Saveur and senior editor and writer at Gourmet. She has received three James Beard journalism awards for her food writing, in addition to her James Beard Award for The One-Block Diet blog. Additional contributors include Erika Ehmsen, Sunset’s copy chief and a member of the One-Block project’s Team Wine; Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher; Sunset Test Garden’s Johanna Silver; and production coordinator Margaret Sloan, who leads Team Bee.