Now the Waters Boiling #2

Now the Waters Boiling #2

24 pages, mini

$2.50 delivered

10 soup and stew recipes, including chili and how to make croutons. The very best in cusine de la baccalauréat.

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https://www.etsy.com/listing/213228952/now-the-waters-boiling-issue-2-soups-and?ref=shop_home_active_21

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The Word Distribution

ATTN: Chops

319 8th St. APT. 4R

Jersey City, NJ 07302 

theworddistro@gmail.com

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review by Jack Cheiky

Ginger Binge

Ginger Binge
36 pages, mini
$4 US

Annie Soga reviews 24 brands of ginger beer and ginger ale, along with a well researched history of these fizzy beverages. Each review comes with a hand drawn image of the item. There are some cocktail recipes, a bibliography, and a short list of medicinal uses.

Tan card stock cover, overal proffesionally produced apearence, nice artwork throughout. Would be appreciated by foodies, or anyone with an interest in ginger and ginger products. Price is reasonable.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/232491374/ginger-binge-zine-by-annie-soga



Review by Jack Cheiky

Feeding the Masses: A Guide to Mass Vegan Catering

By The Anarchist Teapot Mobile Kitchen
www.eco-action.org/teapot

The Anarchist Mobile Teapot are a pretty rad group of people that cook loads of food at protests throughout the UK. If you've ever read Morgenmuffel you're probably at least somewhat familiar with them as Isy is a member.

This zine is a guide on how to start a group that cooks food for lots of people. Not like twenty or thirty lots, but hundreds and hundreds lots. At the protests the Teapot attended they'd feed several hundred people multiple times a day, often while cooking in a field!

The zine breaks down large scale cooking into several sections, covering laws concerning cooking for others in the UK, transport, equipment needed, bulk food ordering, hygiene, and other things. While some of this may seem obvious at first, most of the information given is useful, in-depth, and probably not available in other cooking books.

The style the whole thing is written in is quite casual, and filled with UK slang which can be amusing/confusing at times ("leccy" means electricity). The information is generally well presented and easy to understand, though occasionally there are bits that are like "we didn't do this, but maybe it will work!", which are less useful.

Throughout the zine are anecdotes, stories, and examples about large scale cooking that the Teapot have done. Also included is a several page long account of a protest they cooked at in Scotland. It seemed pretty intense, but these stories are useful in that they show that yes, it is possible to cook for this many people, but you will have to plan for it.

There's also a large section on recipes, which admittedly I didn't look too hard at, as I don't think I'll be planning meals for several hundred any time soon. But if you are, then this is an incredibly useful guide, and you should probably get it.

(Originally written for 365 Zines a Year.)

Shabba's Crappy D Stories Part: 1

By Saban Kazim
www.shabs.net

I have, thankfully, never worked in fast food. However, as I am currently not working anywhere I suppose those working in fast food have one up on me in that they have a paycheck and know where next month's rent is coming from.

The two brief stories in here are good at showing how terrible these sort of jobs are, and how to find humour in them. The horrible customers, the worker/manager relationship (where all the power seems to be with one, but occasionally the other can get the upper hand), the nonsensical rules, the horrible tasks, the trying to do as little as possible. It's kind of impressive that all of that is portrayed in just a few brief pages, but I guess so much of those things are part of popular culture nowadays that it just has to reference them and I understand them far more in depth.

There aren't many backgrounds and Kazim reuses panels and character art, but you don't really notice that on your first read through. I like the character designs of his boss and the customer, both of which remind me of muppets (is it the eyebrows? I think it must be). Kazim's art style isn't the most polished, but it manages to tell the stories that he's set out to tell, and I was a little disappointed that this was so short, as I wouldn't have minded reading some more tales of fastfood life.

(Originally written for 365 Zines a Year.)

Halifax Urban Maple Sugaring Project

(Apologies for the less than stellar cover scan.)

By Mike and Juele

I'm pretty much guaranteed to give this zine a good review because I got to try some of the maple syrup that they made! Mmmmmmmm. Delicious!

The zine is made by some people who are all about bringing food production to people, through guerrilla gardening, urban farming, and similar projects. In this case they decided to tap a number of maple trees, collect the sap, and make maple syrup out of it! I guess I knew that maple syrup was made from tree sap (or maybe I didn't...), but it's kind of strange to think about it.

It turns out that making maple syrup is considerably easier than I would have expected. You can get up to four litres of sap from one tree in a single day! Of course, once you've gathered enough you have to build a fire and boil it down for hours on end, and the day these guys choose to do that on was pretty horrible weather wise. I guess if you have to be outside when it's raining, snowing, and windy, being gathered around a fire is probably one of the best places to be.

The zine was generally easy to read and follow, with illustrations showing the various tools and objects that they used at each step. I think it could have been a little better organized, but it's not a particularly long zine, so you can easily read it all before you start making maple syrup yourself.

(Originally written for 365 Zines a Year.)

Things That I Have Eaten / Things That I Have Drank

By Devin Renshaw

These are two cute little zines that show everything that Renshaw ate or drank in a one week period of time. Each page features a number of small drawings of food or drink that he consumed in a given day.

It's a neat idea, and I'm wondering if it's something I should do (if only to keep track of what I actually eat), but I'm kind of disgusted by Renshaw's eating habits. He eats fast food stuff like every day! Who goes to IHOP three times in one week? His drinking habits seem somewhat more reasonable, though he still consumes way more sugar than I would be comfortable doing.

(This review was originally published on 365 Zines a Year.)

Food Magic!

By Erin

This zine marks an incredibly important day for this blog, as this is the final zine I got at the 2009 Portland Zine Symposium. When I started this blog last January I had a stack of around sixty zines, most of them from that event, but (as you can tell from the fact that there are more than sixty reviews on this blog) I kept getting more, and certain zines ended up getting pushed to the back of my review box.

This isn't to say that this zine is bad, in fact I enjoyed the recipe I (finally!) made, and both of my parents complimented it saying that it was very good. The only reason I didn't use it sooner was that whenever I opened it I didn't feel like cooking any of the recipes, and you know how that happens. That recipe for tempeh bourgignon might be really good, but tonight all you want to eat is cookies. Also, I don't currently have access to any tempeh.

I'd also love to someday try the cocktail recipes that are included (the white sangria sounds delicious), but at least for the moment I can say that the peanut stir fry sauce recipe is a good.

(This review was originally published on 365 Zines a Year.)

Fanzine Ynfytyn Thirteen

By Emma Jane Falconer

If you've ever read any of my zines (hey, maybe I should make a page on this blog for those, thoughts?) then you'll realize that I usually have a pretty good theme going on for each zine I make (ie. an account of a specific trip, reviews of stuff) and that I don't really do the traditional perzine thing with anecdotes, flashbacks, and stuff like that.

This isn't to say that I don't like that type of zine or even that I haven't written that type of zine, just that I haven't made copies and given them to anyone else. I guess I just don't see why anyone would want to know about what's going on in my life generally, or perhaps I'm terrified of opening up to other people and letting them know that I have feelings and am not an emotionless robot.

By this long intro you can probably guess that Falconer's zine is about her life. She talks about shows shes gone to recently, how everyone that lives in the UK is a "functional alcoholic", a list of small pleasures in her life, tales of learning ballet and acting in bizarre plays from her childhood, a cake recipe, found art, and more.

It's all well written, and I enjoyed the tales from when Falconer's was younger. The ballet story ends on a pretty great quote ("my mum bought me a cheap supermarket doll, whose legs soon fell off, and who I pretended had been involved in a terrible horseriding accident on a My Little Pony"), while the account of the performance of The Rivals sounds like something I might actually want to see since it sounds so horrible and hilariously inept. That it was probably only 15 minutes long and that I don't actually have to see it are amongst the reasons why I want to though.

Plus there is a picture of a robot. A surefire way to improve any zine!

(This review was originally published on 365 Zines a Year.)

Potato Maze

Written by Matthew Murray and Lux Chell.
Illustrations by Lux Chell.

Hey, hold on a minute. That's my name! I made this zine!

Inspired by my friend's candy review zine Sugar Needle and general insanity I decided to make crisp/chip review zine. I even managed to corral a friend into helping me out by reviewing some flavours and illustrating many of the reviews! Amazing!

This long and skinny zine features reviews of twelve different types of chips/crisps, hand coloured images throughout, and a fully functioning maze! (That logo took me forever to draw.)

Contact either Lux or I if you would like a copy. I'll be at Brighton Zine Fest this weekend if you'd like to get one in real life. You should go to the fest anyway, it's sure to be loads of fun.

(This post was originally published on 365 Zines a Year.)