The Farmer's Kitchen Handbook: More Than 200 Recipes for Making Cheese, Curing Meat, Preserving, Fermenting, and More

by Marie W. Lawrence

More and more cooks are turning to their own gardens or to local farmers’ markets to find inspiration for their meals. Eating fresh, local produce is a hot trend, but lifelong Vermonter Marie Lawrence has been cooking with produce from her gardens, buying milk from the farmers up the road, and lavishing her family and lucky friends with the fruits of her kitchen labor since she was a kid. In this book she includes recipes for everything from biscuits and breads to pies and cookies, soups and stews to ribs and roasts. Also included are instructions for making cheese, curing meats, canning and preserving, and much more.

Organized by month to coordinate with a farmer’s calendar, cooks will find delicious recipes including orange date bran muffins and old fashioned pot roast in January, hot spiced maple milk and fried cinnamon buns in March, mint mallow ice cream in July, Vermont cheddar onion bread in October, and almond baked apples with Swedish custard cream in December. Other recipes include grilled chicken with peach maple glaze, veggie tempura, raspberry chocolate chip cheesecake, and dozens of other breads, salads, drinks, and desserts that are fresh from the farmer’s kitchen.

In addition to the recipes, readers will find old-fashioned household hints, a harvest guide, and a place to record your own favorite family recipes. Whether you have your own farm and garden or support your local farmers’ market, this book will make seasonal cooking a true pleasure.

Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Good Books and Arcade imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of cookbooks, including books on juicing, grilling, baking, frying, home brewing and winemaking, slow cookers, and cast iron cooking. We’ve been successful with books on gluten-free cooking, vegetarian and vegan cooking, paleo, raw foods, and more. Our list includes French cooking, Swedish cooking, Austrian and German cooking, Cajun cooking, as well as books on jerky, canning and preserving, peanut butter, meatballs, oil and vinegar, bone broth, and more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking, Food, Nonfiction

272 pages, Paperback

First published June 3, 2014

Reviews

[Gayle 📚 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This isn’t your regular cookbook at all. Yes, it has recipes but it also has a lot more! There is A LOT of information and a bio of someone who actually farms!! Sustenance Farming it used to be called- sort of like Modern Homesteading movement. First and foremost you grow to sustain your family- excess gets sold. Okay, when you live that way you are eating seasonally. So the recipes are broken down into what would be available each month and how people live through these months. The beginning of each month reads like a journal entry! And in between some of the recipes there are tips that a farmers wife would know. Like with Baking and suggesting making extra and freeze the dough so you can pull it out and bake the item fresh another day to save time in the future. Unlike most cookbooks, the pictures are not JUST about the finished food but their life, their property, the apples picked, the lake the pulled out the Perch, the winter herb garden with ice crystals hanging from the plants. So, I LOVED this book!! I live a bit like this book, chickens for eggs, bees for honey, grow my own herbs both culinary and medicinal, fruit trees and berries and a huge garden I can or freeze for winter! Grind my own flour and make my own bread. My pictures on my phone are a lot of flowers and vegetables, sunrises and sunsets across fields. I once set up my phone to capture a time lapse of the green beans popping out of the ground! Slo Mo closeup of a honey bee in a cucumber flower doing her thing. So, if you are interested in good food plus being entertained by a farmers lifestyle this is the perfect book for you! It is for me!

[Country Goose · Rating 2 out of 5]

Let's start with saying, there are plenty of decent recipes, but the layout is weird. There are thirteen different table of contents (ToC). Yes, thirteen. The main ToC separates the contents by month, but if you buy the eBook, it doesn't open on this page, so I missed it the first time I opened the book (and it would have affected the review negatively had I not gone back and looked, which leads to the weird layout note). I suppose being a farmer's kitchen, having it written by month would make sense considering you eat what is in season at that time. Each month has it's own ToC, and there is an Index. The author has a short paragraph preceding each recipe. Some are informative, others..... Well, not so much. They are more like blog-style quaint little "this is nice" that just leads into it. By all accounts, I feel like the author of this book drew a lot of inspiration from Ree Drummond.

As with most good books, the introduction starts out with tips and food safety warnings. I do not agree with the pasteurizing milk information. Pasteurized milk is not healthy for the body, and if you can find good, quality raw milk from a reputable source, pasteurizing is not recommended. The author lost a star because of this because it is a subject I am very passionate about. Pasteurizing does kill the bad bacteria, but it kills off all the good bacteria. I could write a book about it, but there are already plenty out there to read. (wink) Moving on! As previously stated in another review, the title is very misleading. Where it gives the sense of "live off the land" or homestead vibe for preserving foods, this book just is not that (knock two more stars). It's more of a quaint book full of recipes for family dinners. I am impressed there are couple of dairy recipes, but there are better books out there if that's what you're looking for (might I suggest Milk Cow Kitchen by Mary Jane Butters).

I can tell you, this person is not a farmer, though there are a lot of farming aspects associated in the formatting of the book, along with a lot of good recipes I plan on trying. SOPAPILLAS! For a free book? Definitely worth it. I would not buy a physical copy as the formatting does not suit it (IMO).

[Kandi A. Hudson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cool Recipe Book

This book is amazing in term of the layout, the pictures of the food, and even has background stories to many of the recipes. The New England bent to the book is also something I like because I consider New England my home although I am not originally from there or live there now. The best and most unique thing I like about the book is that the recipes are broken down into months of the year. This is great because recipes center around the foods common to that month and season. If you are looking for a cool book to read about food, recipes that are pretty easy to follow, and just a good book about food, this one is enjoyable!

[Charles Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Treasure Trove of Recipes for Food and Other Things

Besides hundreds of recipes for delicious dishes you will find recipes for soap, shaving soap, silver cleaner, stain removers, clarified suet (fat), and other forgotten nostrums our ancestors used. There are a large number of food preservation methods which were used before we had refrigeration -- which may become important techniques again.

Any chef, or cook who loves making great food, will like this book for it recipes and the large number of tips for easing kitchen tasks.

[Trudi Stuber · Rating 3 out of 5]

Miss g pages i. Ebook

I really wanted to read this higher however there were a few missing pages that made reading it difficult and some of the recipes impossible. I would have rated this much higher if those pages haven't been missing in ITIT is really sad that they were missing in the 1st place.

[Diane Kuhn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent read

Full of information, some really great recipes. Wish I knew how to mark or save a recipe. I don't want to forget them.