Kitchen skills and seasonal recipes from Salt Water Farm by Annemarie Ahearn. Photographed by Kristin Teig.

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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.