Cookbooks by restaurant celebrity chefs can be exciting, even revelatory.  Yet sometimes they should be taken with a grain of salt.  Generally, their recipes are overly complex and time-consuming, loaded  with steps that are best accomplished by professionals in a restaurant kitchen.

The Lost Kitchen cover photo

But Erin French’s new cookbook, “The Lost Kitchen” by the chef/owner at the highly acclaimed restaurant, The Lost Kitchen, in the far reaches of Freedom, Maine, is a case in point that’s an exception. Her book is the essence of simplicity.  Which doesn’t mean that all the recipes are a cinch to make.  Rather they are built on flavor profiles that are exacting. Given her location in the farm-rich fields of Freedom, Maine, and its environs, there’s an assumed locality in her ingredients that are so readily accessible in her neck of the woods.  She’s not apt, therefore–nor should you–to go to the supermarket to get a plastic wrapped chicken for her cast-iron roasted chicken with lemon and rosemary.

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