Making It: Radical Home Ec For A Post-Consumer World DIY Cookbook

You shop at the farmers' market. There's always a growler of local craft beer in your fridge. You've dabbled in making pickles and have been known to cook grass-fed goat on occasion. You fancy yourself a DIY type.

In actuality, though, you're an amateur.

But with the new book Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World ($20) by L.A. urban homesteaders Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen, you could move to the postgraduate level of DIY-ism: growing vegetables, drinking homebrew, and pickling Japanese-style with the help of a living bed of fermented rice bran called nukazuke.

Organized by the level of time commitment involved, Making It can factor into every facet of your life, or just provide inspiration for a few weekend projects here and there. "Day to Day" culinary projects include herbal and fruit infusions, while the "Season to Season" section gets into the specifics of humanely slaughtering a chicken.

Still, to flip through the pages might be a bit intimidating to those ensconced in modern comforts. So here's a gateway project, kimchi-making (click here to download the recipe), that yields delicious rewards after minimal prep and a bit of patience.