Modern Country Cooking

Go back to the basics in the kitchen and rediscover the joy of cooking with simple tools and fresh local and seasonal ingredients. A complete guide to the essentials of home cooking from the popular cooking school at Maine's Salt Water Farm.

Good cooking has nothing to do with fancy equipment, complicated recipes, or trendy, hard-to-find ingredients. The fundamentals are really quite simple: it's about instinct, technique, and freshness. Annemarie Ahearn, dubbed by Food & Wine Magazine as someone "changing the way America eats," believes that developing these essential skills can lead to a greater sense of confidence and fulfillment in the kitchen. Her credo: 1) Grow at least some of your own food to establish a deeper connection with the earth that provides your nutrition, 2) Be familiar with a range of cooking techniques so you can develop flexibility and intuition in the kitchen, and 3) Master the age-old cooking skills that will serve you your whole lifetime--cooking in cast iron, sharpening knives, and using a mortar and pestle. With these classic skills under your belt, and with 75 tried-and-true seasonal recipes, you'll be on your way to putting consistently delicious, satisfying meals on the table every day while you learn to fall in love with the process.

ANNEMARIE AHEARN founded Salt Water Farm in 2009, a cooking school for home cooks on Maine's Penobscot Bay. She is a graduate of Colorado College and the Institute of Culinary Education and has worked at Saveur Magazine, Slow Food, Maine Magazine, and Downeast Magazine. As a chef in New York City, she trained under Dan Barber at Blue Hill Restaurant and was a personal assistant to Tom Colicchio of Craft Restaurants. She has worked in cooking schools and kitchens in Barcelona and Paris. In 2011, she was named one of Food & Wine magazine's "Top 40 Under 40, Changing the Way Americans Eat." In 2013, she opened Salt Water Farm Cafe & Market in Rockport Harbor, Maine and garnered acclaim in Bon Appétit, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Her first book, Full Moon Suppers at Salt Water Farm: Recipes from Land and Sea, was published by Roost Books in 2017.