There's something in the air around here. I've been on an Asian kick for the past week. Sushi, stir fries, sweet-and-sour - I just can't get enough of it! Two of my Asian favorites are sweet-and-sour eggplant, and peanut sauce with stir-fried peppers and water chestnuts.

Sweet-and-Sour Eggplant

Here in Montana, I had to leave most of my eggplant in the garden as long as I could. It just doesn't get hot enough here to grow bumper crops of eggplant, but I'm pleased to say that the season closed with the harvest of a few beauties. My college friend Ambrose gave me this eggplant recipe years ago, and it's fantastic.

• 3-4 eggplants, small dice


• 1/2 cup peanut oil


• 1/2 cup ginger root (about 1 medium/small piece), small dice


• 1/4 cup garlic (about 1 medium/small bulb), small dice


• 1/8 cup sesame oil


• 1/2 cup soy sauce


• 1/2 cup sugar


• 1/4 cup red wine vinegar

Directions: Saute eggplant in peanut oil until brown (can't really overcook). Set aside to cool. Saute garlic and ginger in sesame oil until slightly caramelized. Add the rest of the ingredients and cook over low heat for 3 min. Mix with eggplant and let sit for at least an hour. Serve hot or cold.

This stuff is delicious over rice or noodles, but my favorite is with pita bread triangles toasted in the oven. That's the best kitchen tip I've got: Dress up any dip or dish with toasted pita triangles. They're easy prep and much prettier than your standard dipping chip.

Peanut Sauce with Stir-Fried Peppers and Water Chestnuts

I learned of this peanut sauce recipe while hiking in the Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness a few years ago. Someone on the trip brought a plastic jar of this stuff on the trail, and after a day of hard hiking, I thought this was the best sauce I'd ever eaten. I don't know if you're familiar with the phenomenon where food tastes better when you're tired, in the middle of the woods, and without a variety of resource, but this sauce has nothing to do with that. It was just as good when I tried it at home, and I got to eat twice as much because I didn't have to share.

• 1/2 cup peanut butter


• 1/2 cup warm water


• 2 Tbsp tamari


• 2 Tbsp sugar


• 1 tsp rice vinegar (or other white vinegar)


• 3 cloves garlic, chopped


• 1 inch slice of ginger root, grated or chopped


• cilantro, cayenne, and salt, to taste

The original directions suggest that you mix the peanut butter with warm water first, but I like to mix the warm water with all of the other ingredients, mix in the peanut butter, and then add extra water to taste. If you have time, letting the sauce sit before serving allows all the flavors to mix nicely.

Stir-fry whatever you can find in your garden. It's been cold around here, and my pickings are pretty slim. I was able to round up a few peppers for this, but there wasn't much else that hasn't been canned or frozen (some by me, and some by the frost!). The peanut sauce really takes front and center with this dish, so you can slip in whatever veggies you like.

If you're like me, you think of yourself as just a little more self-sufficient than most people. My friends oohed and aahed, for instance, after finding out that I make my own butter from raw cream I buy from an Amish farmer. I shrugged it off; I pick up the food from a drop point about 10 minutes from my house, I told them, and "churning" butter is as easy as shaking a sealed jar for 20 minutes or so while checking my e-mail with the other hand.

But secretly, I enjoyed that praise. I enjoyed thinking of myself as the kind of person who doesn't use paper towels or own a television. I flattered myself that I could "rough it" as well as my great-grandmother, Amish herself. Then my brother dealt me a cruel hand: he embarked on a solo road trip from Baltimore to Montana, where he spent the summer wrangling horses in the wilderness, camping outside and growing his hair into one giant dreadlock. And before he left, he gave me this book.

Don't get me wrong - Country Wisdom & Know-How is about as good a manual for living as you'll find anywhere. It's exhaustive and exhausting all at once. There is almost no domestic or agricultural task that is not represented here; the printing is tiny and the pages are large, no-nonsense newsprint with hundreds of carefully labeled line drawings. But if you thought you were pretty countercultural, it will school you within an inch of your life.

The book is a compilation of information from Storey Publishing's Country Wisdom Bulletins, small booklets which were published in the 1970's during the "back to the land era." They were simply and directly written, with easy-to-follow diagrams, and millions of copies were sold to eager do-it-yourselfers. The Bulletins have been divided into six basic categories, all of which are tied in some way to agriculture and gardening, in keeping with the belief that natural is better.

Animals: Here is where you can easily get lost for hours learning how to identify, attract, feed, bathe, house and care for all kinds of wild birds (including a formula to be fed to abandoned babies, every fifteen minutes for twelve hours a day, until you can get more professional help: dog food, egg yolk and baby cereal!) Or you could learn what to look for in buying a horse, how to build a beehive, or the ten most useful herbs to improve feline health. And if you ever need to butcher anything, you can consult the diagrams here to ensure you do it correctly.

Cooking: This is far from an exhaustive primer, but there are very detailed sections on a dozen different ingredients, from winter squash to green tomatoes and basic breadmaking. The dairy section is especially useful; people used to know how to make clabbered cream cheese and use a spoonful of yogurt to start another batch, and once you've done either, you'll be hard-pressed to continue buying an inferior product at an inflated price. The section on preserving food is also a great place to start, if you've never done canning or pickling before; there are lots of recipes for simple jams and relishes, vinegars, and (woo-hoo!) a whole section devoted to homebrewing, from hard cider to beer and wine.

Crafts: Try to imagine the exact opposite of the plaques with misspelled, pithy sayings you've seen at craft fairs! All of these goods are useful as well as beautiful, from candlemaking to quilting and basketweaving. In every case, the instructions are comprehensive and clear, and the projects simple enough for a complete novice to attempt. The best section, "Gifts from Nature," features ideas like wreaths, soap and gingerbread houses (think elevations and fretwork details, not graham crackers and Tootsie Rolls). Having long believed that the best gifts are the ones made by hand with love, I couldn't wait to try some of these.

Gardening: In this section you'll learn to grow the plants you'll use for projects all over the book. It begins with a thorough tutorial on types of soil and seed, garden planning and layout and prevention of weeds and pests. Then there are over a hundred pages (roughly a fifth of the book) devoted to individual types and categories of plants, from flowers to herbs, vegetables, roots and fruits. You can find out how to grow the grapes you'll later make into wine; propagate lavender for use in medicinal salves; or transform an existing field into a meadow of wildflowers. Each section contains detailed information about growing conditions, transplanting, maintenance and harvesting.

Health and Well-being: Not to worry, there is no "miracle cure" being promoted here - just the sensible advice of generations who have relied on plants to keep their bodies in balance. There are recipes for bath salts and aromatherapy oils, primers on the care and use of healing herbs like echinacea and goldenseal, and ideas for herbal teas, soups and medicines thought to be beneficial for a variety of ills.

Home: More proof that this book will appeal to both genders! This section runs the gamut from fairly quick (repairs to leaky faucets or broken windows) to very involved (construction of sheds, fences and root cellars.) But both are treated with equal efficiency, and as always, quality and beauty remain important. Ever wanted to learn how to cane a chair, braid a rug or sew a curtain? All are detailed here.

Overall, the best feature of this book is its unpretentious and direct language. No stone is left unturned, no aspect of a project ignored, but the editors have taken care to retain the down-to-earth quality you'd expect from a book based on passed-down knowledge from largely agrarian societies. If you fancy yourself a lover of nature, you will find this book a joy to read for all the years it will take you to do so!

After making a blackberry pie, I got to wondering what other kinds of pies I could make. Could I use native berries? Recently we spent a vacation in a National Forest Service fire lookout cabin. These are a sweet deal at around $50 a night, but you have to reserve them way in advance. Anyway, I brought along a pie crust. My son G and I gathered several cups of native salal berries while waiting for Emily to come out of the campground shower. For comparison's sake, we also gathered several cups of blueberries and raspberries from a local u-pick farm.

I carefully divided the pie into three sections, each with its own type of berry. The plan was to evaluate each berry on its own merits, without mixing flavors.

The blueberry pie turned out pale and bland. You know how cherries turn somewhat translucent when you cook them? The same happens with big blueberries. The beautiful dusty blue skins of the fresh fruit are simply overwhelmed by their bulging insides. The larger the fruit, the lower the ratio of skin to interior.

The raspberry pie tasted like jam. Rich, but very jammy storebought jam.

But the Salal berry pie: there's something magic going on in there. Perhaps because they've such a high skin to interior ratio, the color and flavor was a hundred times richer than the blueberry pie. In addition to being a smaller berry, the salal berry is actually a fleshy sepal enclosed over a ripened ovary. What that means to a cook is there are multiple layers of berry skin all folded up inside the berry. I often hear that most of a fruit's nutrition and flavor is contained in the skin, so it's no surprise to me that the very sweet salal berry pie was almost too rich to eat. But it wasn't just a more conventional berry flavor magnified. It was a new flavor, fully developed only in the cooked berries. The closest I can describe the taste is that it has something in common with cinnamon. But that's not quite it either.

It's best to soak salal berries first before cooking with them. There's a little worm that likes to hide in there, probably the larvae of some beautiful endangered forest butterfly. Still, I don't want to eat them. When the berries are placed in water, the little caterpillars climb up to the surface, looking for air.

Emily and I both agreed, blackberry pie is still the best, a little tart but wonderful with ice cream. Emily didn't care for the salal berry pie, but I feel drawn to it, challenged by its new flavor, encouraged to try other native berries. Next time, I think I'll try mixing salal berries it with blackberries. The salal will add an extra spiciness and sweetness to the otherwise uniformly tart but delicious blackberry pie.