ROYALSTON – Columnist and author Tamar Haspel will be at the Royalston Library this Sunday, Nov. 2, to discuss her book “To Boldly Grow: Finding Joy, Adventure, and Dinner in Your Own Backyard,” in which she and her husband take a more active approach to their diet.
Haspel said she and her husband Kevin, who live in Barnstable on Cape Cod, also own a cabin in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, just north of Royalston.
“That is how I know Kathy Morris at the Royalston Library, because you basically have to go through Royalston to get to where we are,” she said.
The couple lived in Manhattan before relocating to Barnstable during the 2008-2009 financial crisis.
“Because when I lived in New York, I wrote about food,” she explained. “I started looking around for things I could do with food that I couldn’t do in New York, and the answer was all kinds of stuff. We built a chicken coop and then it was sort of a downward slide – or maybe an upward slide – into all the different ways we could procure food. I wrote a blog about it at the time and then that became the book, which is the basis of the event in Royalston.”
Part of the book looks at how Tamar and Kevin raised chickens, grew tomatoes, foraged for mushrooms and hunted.
“If you can glean it from the landscape around you, chances are I have gleaned it from the landscape around me. The thing about cooking is it’s not rocket science,” she said. “So much of cooking is figuring out how to make things that are kind of substandard become delicious.”
Much of the fish and game Haspel prepares, she acquires herself. The couples’ cabin in Fitzwilliam sits on 36 acres and the author both hunts and fishes.
“The deer we cook with are generally a deer that either I or my husband have shot ourselves. I don’t do a whole lot of other hunting,” she said. “The reason I hunt deer….it’s because, as a meat-eater, a wild, overpopulated ruminant is the most responsible meat I can eat.”
Haspel said she writes a great deal about the impact of a person’s diet on the planet.
During Sunday’s event, according to the release, “Tamar invites attendees to share in the discussion: relate your own stories of gardening, hunting, foraging, and share the mistakes most of us have made.”
The event, sponsored and funded by the Friends of the Phinehas S. Newton Library, takes place at 2 p.m. at Royalston Town Hall, 13 On the Common. It is free and open to the public. Homemade refreshments will also be served.
Greg Vine can be reached at gvineadn@gmail.com.