The single most important trick to elevating the home cook’s potential to create quality, restaurant-level food is the sourcing of quality ingredients. Such ingredients yield better results than buying the oven or immersion circulator I use. Instead, buy the same tiny waxy golden potatoes, or the rainbow chard, or the real farm-fresh eggs, or the exact baby arugula borne of seeds carried by hand from the shadow of Vesuvius and grown by a farmer I know and love.

The real story here is that the farmers from whom chefs buy produce and meat are capable of changing the food you eat at home much more significantly than equipment or cookbooks or tips or TV shows you watch. This creates the new paradigm: Where chefs once ruled the waves, local small farmers are the new rock stars…

After hearing about and tasting the great products of these farmers, I was inspired to create recipes that featured them in all their glory, and that is what you’ll find on the following pages. These are not the actual recipes gleaned from a restaurant or a television show, but are instead a loose itinerary, or road map, that will hopefully lead you to develop relationships with local farmers, as well as to the improvisational style of cooking that will elevate the flavor of the dishes you create in your own kitchen when you buy products from a farm or at a farmers’ market and bring them directly to your table.