Modern Country Cooking

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's Modern Country Cooking teaches the kitchen skills you'd learn at her Maine workshops, like improvising when you're short an ingredient and thinking seasonally. Around now, she's drizzling crispy roasted porchetta with garden-grown salsa verde, and sliding a spoonful of crabmeat onto asparagus soup."--Martha Stewart Living, May 2020

"Annemarie Ahern, who runs a culinary school in Maine, takes a seasonal approach to cooking in this accessible volume. Ahern's month-by-month program includes a handful of recipes using ingredients that are at their peak, resulting in a mix of familiar comfort food classics.... [Readers] will appreciate the sound advice on kitchen basics, such as how to properly hold and use a knife, the art of seasoning to taste, methods for thickening sauces, and the difference between sweating and sautéing. Ahern's collection succeeds in its presentation of hearty, simple country cooking and entertaining."-Publishers Weekly

Annemarie has distilled so much of what I love about Salt Water Farm in each page, recipe, and story in this book. Her cooking is soulful, honest, insanely delicious, and if I could, I'd move to Maine to be closer to it. Meanwhile, I've got this book. --Alison Roman, author of Dining In

"Modern Country Cooking is a true expression of what it means to be a confident country cook. Annemarie's portraits of each month in Maine and her inspired seasonal recipes make me miss the great Northern state I hold dear." --Joshua McFadden, executive chef at Ava Gene's and author of Six Seasons

"Annemarie is your favorite teacher and classically trained chef rolled into one. Modern Country Cooking is an inviting culinary bible for anyone and everyone who craves an expertly prepared seasonal meal." --Julia Sherman, author of Salad for President