About this item
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.
About the Author
Annemarie Ahearn was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and spent summers in Maine at her family's blueberry farm with her cousins. Ahearn founded Salt Water Farm in 2009, a cooking school for home cooks located in beautiful Lincolnville, Maine. The teaching kitchen is located in an antique barn that sits on a 17-acre fruit, herb and vegetable farm overlooking the Penobscot Bay. The classes focus on large scale entertaining, building seasonal menus, resourcefulness in the kitchen and cooking instinctively. Ahearn is the primary instructor at the school and teaches both weeklong workshops that focus on fundamental kitchen and gardening skills, as well as specialized cooking classes such as bread baking, pie making and entertaining. Before turning 30, Ahearn was named "Top 40 Under 40" in Food & Wine Magazine, "changing the way America eats." Salt Water Farm has been featured in Bon Appetite, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and the Portland Press Herald. Ahearn is the author of Full Moon Suppers, published by Roost Publishing and contributes a monthly recipe column to DownEast Magazine. Recently, Ahearn initiated a program called "Back to Basics" in her local school system, teaching fundamental cooking skills to high school students in Maine.
