Photo: Girl Interrupted Eating/Flickr

Like many people, most of my cooking takes place before dinner, in the span of an hour or so. And almost all of the food that I make is consumed immediately after. Cooking, for me, has never been about the long term.

But cooking solely on impulse, on the desire to make food for tonight alone, limits my ambition. I’ve always bought ketchup and mustard from the store, never seen the point of homemade yogurt, and had no desire whatsoever to brew my own beer. I’ve read enough food websites to know that there are large and passionate groups of people who freeze pounds of pesto, make 10 jars of jam in one day, hoard food for winter like they’re hibernating squirrels – but I’ve never made the effort.

Why? I suppose because I’ve never been convinced that the upfront costs (weird, hard-to-find ingredients! pounds of fresh berries, or mustard seeds, or vinegar!) and the usually lengthy time required were worth it. Often, these projects create food that, ultimately, only serves as an accessory to a meal. How fast is that mustard going to go bad? How many hot dogs do I have to eat to use up that single jar of relish?

So maybe I wasn’t the intended audience for Karen Solomon’s new cookbook, Can It, Bottle It, Smoke It and Other Kitchen Projects. Still, I enjoyed it. A sequel to Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It – her previous guide to kitchen crafts – it’s a very fun and even funny book, designed to avoid provoking intimidation.

On that ground, it fails somewhat – the time required for these recipes is often measured in days, not hours, even if most of that time is inactive. And you may occasionally be left scrambling for ingredients like brewer’s malt and candied fennel seeds. Still, the recipes aren’t really hard, and the final product usually is quite special.

These aren’t the sort of recipes you make on a whim, but these are the sorts of recipes you brag about for days afterward. Imagine the respect you’ll get – or eyerolling, if your friends are like mine – telling people you’ve made your own tofu, carbonated your own soda, or baked your own corn flakes. A facebook status update of mine, from this past week: “Making homemade bagels. NBD.” That’s a feeling of smugness that can’t be bought, my friends.

There are a lot of people in the food world who get described as “punk rock” nowadays. Most of them are butchers or Anthony Bourdain, but Solomon – a sweet-looking lady with no visible tattoos in her press photo – deserves the label more than most of them (after all, isn’t making your own ketchup a pretty righteous act of anti-consumerism?). Her approach is generous and democratic – I cannot recall a single recipe that involved a fancy bit of equipment. And this includes roasting coffee beans without a coffee roaster, making ice cream without an ice cream maker, and forming tortillas without a press. This is, perhaps, the most admirable part of the book.

Well, that, and those bagels – every bit worth the three hours they took to make.