Another one of our favorite cookbooks from 2012 is
The Farm: Rustic Recipes for a Year of Incredible Food
by Ian Knauer. Who among us doesn't harbor the secret fantasy of giving it all up, abandoning the city and the cubicle bound job to live off the land? After the sudden shuttering of Gourmet magazine, editor Ian Knauer did just that. He spent the next year on the farm in Knauertown, Pa, which his family has tilled since the 1800s.
The result is The Farm, a look at farm life and homegrown food that manages to be both earthy and chic, with thoughtful recipes and essays from Knauer, paired with rustic and elegant photography from Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton of the Canal House.
The book follows a year of growing and eating on the farm, organized by seasons, with chapters on farmly arts like foraging and preserving and info on how to best cook game. The recipes are imaginative but easily executed dishes like radishes with bacon butter, cold Spring night asparagus soup, ramp tagliatelle, and black walnut cake with personal essays about plunging into a frigid pond after a fiercely long day in his fields and a sentimental look at the rows and rows of his grandmother's canned goods which have outlived her.