"For Timmermeister's prose in "Farm Food" pulls you in -- you walk with him, through the weather of the wintry days, sharing his troubles and satisfactions, meeting the farm's very small but infinitely important cast of characters such as Mario, his dairyman whom he considers like a son. Warming recipes of local wintertime ingredients are all through the book, and the writing about cooking is also full of Timmermeister's contemplative tone, with the feeling of being spoken to by a trusted, longtime friend.

"There are few dishes that embody this place as much as a Bolognese sauce with noodles," he writes, in his elegant but unaffected cadence, in the introduction to the following recipe. "It just tastes like here. It's dark, rich, and fatty ... Most of the ingredients are from here: the vegetables and the cider and the meats. The eggs from my chickens make golden noodles. Even if you don't have a farm, you can still make this dish yourself. It will be great." It is calm writing, low in key but strong, reassuring, maybe a little hypnotic. There's no reason to overstate anything on the farm -- the simple food made with care, the days lived right, and the food all speak for themselves."

"In an age when media and fact are under attack, what could be more comforting than a very handsome, intelligent self-published book written on a farm about eating, especially one impeccably photographed by the author?  This particular book, Farm Food, volume 1, Fall & Winter,(Cookhouse, softcover, $19.95) takes serial form, with a projected spring and summer volume to come.  Kurt Timmermeister used his success as a cook and restauranteur to finance a farm on Vashon Island in Washington.  Fourteen years later, the core is a small herd of Jersey cows, whose milk makes cheese and ice cream, sold in Seattle.  There is also, of course produce for the farm's kitchen.  The text has some of the qualities of a diary, and leaves a strong sense of the work it takes to keep up.  Most of the orchard fruits rot where they land:  "Hard to believe that I could allow excellent fruit to fall, never to be eaten, but harvesting them is simply overwhelming."  The 26 recipes, grouped by month, convey above all immediacy.  Coming from the cold half of the year, they range from baking-powder Americana to grain dauphinois, beef marrow compound butter (for steak and green beams), and rum raisin ice cream."

"Make the trek out to Vashon Island sans ferry crossing with Kurt Timmermeister's latest cookbook. Through photos, essays, and recipes, Timmermeister pulls back the curtain on Kurtwood Farms, showing what life is like during the muddy fall and winter seasons. Luckily for us, that exact weather lends itself to apple cider cocktails, buttermilk biscuits, and beef bourguignon. Seasonality is so key to the book's premise that Timmermeister divides it into months, meaning you'll never have to scour the grocery store (or shell out extra cash) for something that's out of season. Not to mention the photos are pretty breathtaking: Buy it for the caramel ice cream recipe, keep it for the coffee table aesthetics."