Ken Haedrich - The Harvest Baker: 150 Sweet & Savory Recipes Celebrating the Fresh-Picked Flavors of Fruits, Herbs & Vegetables

The Harvest Baker goes way beyond zucchini bread and shows you wonderful ways to work more vegetables and fruits into your meals. I cant wait to try these recipes!

Barbara Damrosch, columnist of A Cooks Garden for the Washington Post and coauthor of The Four Season Farm Gardeners Cookbook

Ken Haedrichs recipes are always that perfect balance of simple and sophisticated , equally appealing to both the novice and veteran baker. His new book makes me want to sprint to the garden, then to the oven, then back again, ad infinitum. I love this collection!

Jenny Rosenstrach, author of Dinner: A Love Story

With its down-home and seasonal approach, The Harvest Baker will appeal to both gardeners and bakers, with recipes that are sure to become family favorites .

Kate McDermott, best-selling author of Art of the Pie

The Harvest Baker is dedicated to the pleasures of home cooking, to the foot soldiers of scratch baking, and to the farmers, gardeners, and other producers who keep us in provisions.

Hello, and welcome to my harvest bakers kitchen. Please, pull up a chair, have a slice of warm , and lets talk. You might have a few questions, after all such as, What does it mean to be a harvest baker, and how is it different from regular home baking? Do I have to grow my own food? Will my kids/spouse/partner eat it? And will I have to spend a lot of money on kitchen equipment I dont already own?

First of all, relax. Theres nothing mysterious or complicated about harvest baking. You dont have to grow a garden, though many harvest bakers do (even if its just a few herbs on the kitchen windowsill). Nor will you need to shell out a lot of money for kitchen tools.

Indeed, you may not realize it, but chances are youre a harvest baker already, at least some of the time. Ever made zucchini bread? Or piled fresh veggies on your homemade pizza? Thats harvest baking right there, the kind everyone relishes and wants more of. This book will simply take you farther down that path and help you discover fresh new ways to bake with the harvest, with delicious recipes youll return to time and time again.

Harvest baking is part of a larger movement thats gained tremendous momentum over the past few years. Its a movement toward wholesome foods, locally sourced as much as possible, and prepared in ways that nourish body and soul and look great on your plate. Just look around; there are signs of this movement everywhere. Farmers markets are more popular than ever, and the farm-to-table phenomenon is exploding. Supermarkets carry a wider selection of produce than ever before, much of it local and organic. Finding inventive ways to use fresh produce is the driver behind numerous food blogs. And the number of home gardens continues to soar.

Is it any wonder, then, that were experiencing a corresponding surge of interest in baking with the harvest? Harvest baking is right in step with the way people are cooking today an incredibly gratifying development for someone whos been at it for more than 30 years. If you have a minute, Id love to tell you how I got started.

I can scarcely remember a time when I didnt like to bake. My mom and dad were avid fruit pie makers, and when I left home in my teens it didnt take long to realize that Id inherited some of their baking DNA. No matter where I was living, and even in the tiniest and most challenged of kitchens, Id spend hours combing through cookbooks and baking everything that caught my eye.

It wasnt until the early 80s that fresh produce became a dominant theme in my baking. A few years out of the navy and looking for a new adventure, I packed a few belongings and moved from New Jersey to rural New Hampshire to take a position as the chief cook and bottle washer at a group home for kids whod been dealt a lousy hand and gotten off to a rough start in life. Frankly, my qualifications for the job were pretty slim about as slim as the salary they were offering so we bit our respective tongues and quietly agreed to ignore these shortcomings.

Besides, I was not overly concerned about the money. All this young cook saw was a golden opportunity: my meager pay would be offset by the fact that I could design my own culinary education and cook virtually anything I wanted, provided I didnt kill anyone or set off a hunger strike. Everything I prepared had to be vegetarian, and pretty healthy, but I was fine with that, too, because it more or less reflected my own diet at the time.

There was another perk that came with the job, and his name was Michael, our groundskeeper and gardener. Michael was born with dirt under his fingernails. He was a vegetable whisperer, someone who could miraculously turn patches of dense New Hampshire clay dirt into rich, organic soil capable of producing fat tomatoes, the most vivid greens, and the tastiest onions you have ever eaten. All of which, sooner or later, landed in my kitchen with a hefty thud.

Whats that? I would ask when he dropped off several bushel baskets of something unfamiliar.

Kale. Its sorta like spinach on steroids.

What am I supposed to do with it?

Youre the cook. You figure it out.

And thats how it began. Michael would grow it, Id cook it, and sooner or later Id find a way to work it into yeast breads, rolls, pizzas, calzones, biscuits, cakes, cookies, and the like. The critics could be merciless: since diplomacy wasnt their strong suit, the kids I cooked for left no doubt as to whether Id struck out or hit a home run.

Ive seen a lot of kitchens in the 30-some years since. And Ive been incredibly fortunate to have had a career figuring out how to make the best of the harvest and showcase it on our plates especially in our baked goods.

I hope youll spend a few moments flipping through these pages and taking a look at whats in store for you as a harvest baker. If youre not halfway to the kitchen within 5 minutes, some freshly dog-eared recipes flapping in the breeze as you sprint, Ill be very surprised.

Whether youre new to baking or an old hand at it, theres a lot to discover here. If youre an experienced baker, these recipes are going to expand your horizons. Theres at least a little of the artist in every home baker, and in that respect I think youll gain a deeper appreciation for the ways in which produce can be our palette. The harvest provides the colors, flavors, and textures we depend on to turn our baking into edible works of art.

If youre a relatively new baker, youre incredibly fortunate to be starting out at a time thats so rich with possibility. You have a wonderful world of fresh ingredients at your fingertips and more likely than not family, friends, and associates who are food savvy, curious, and anxious to sample your baking and offer words of encouragement. If you havent discovered this already, you will soon: good bakers are never at a loss for good friends.