Back to the Land

Merging traditional food and ancestral knowledge

Back to the Land is a level 1 training with a strong focus on building culinary technique, understanding traditional diets, and merging the forest & the farm for optimal health and wellness. Spanning over 3 days, we will spend lots of time in the kitchen as well as outdoors, enjoying the garden, spring fed pond, and the forest.

The weekend of:

August 21-23 2015

It's time to reconnect with the land and learn to live simply, eat properly, and work with nature's most valuable resources.

Enjoy a weekend of education and inspiration that you can put into immediate action and improve the life of those you love!

Join Chef Frank Giglio on Three Lily Farm in Midcoast Maine. Enjoy an active, hands-on culinary centered weekend focused around traditional diets and seasonal eating.

Weekend Retreat Includes

7 Locally Centered Organic Meals

Desserts, lots of Desserts!

Learn the Core of Traditional Cookery

Primitive Fire building and Cooking workshop

Food Preservation Workshop

A Family Herbal Workshop

Camping under the Stars at Three Lily Farm

Swimming in our Spring Fed Pond

Digital Recipe Book including all classes and meals from the weekend

Foraging & Nature Hikes

Frank's specialty lacto-fermented Birch Soda

Harvest & Make Medicine from the Land

Experience the Freshness of Wild Food from the Land

Learn, Explore, Share

Basic food principles of traditional diets and how to properly prepare the food you eat

How to incorporate wild foods into your daily diet

Knife skills, ingredient selection, and flavor balancing

How to implement seasonal foods into your daily diet

Harvesting herbs, making tinctures and salves

Basic butchering, fermentation, and cheese making

Learn how to build a primitive fire and set up an outdoor cooking station

Connect, Relax, Restore

A Sample Day

7:30 am - Coffee, Chaga tea, Local Fruit-Yogurt Smoothies

8:00 am - Movement on the Land

9:00 am - All about Eggs

10:00 am - Into the Garden (building raised beds, planting seedlings)

11:00 am Foraging and Harvesting Herbs for Afternoon

12-2 pm - Lunch and Break

2 pm - Fermentation Workshop & Cheese Making

3 pm - Herbal Tinctures & Salves

4:30 pm - Primitive Fire Building & Outdoor Cooking

6:30 pm - Dinner

8 pm - Fireside Hang & Chat

About Chef Frank

Frank Giglio wears many hats. At age 15, he fell in love with the fascinating world of food. Eager and intrigued, he began apprenticing directly under some of the top chefs in the US, which instilled a deep understanding of the creative process in working with food. He became a classically trained chef at the New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier, VT, Years later would go on to graduate from The Institute for Integrative Nutrition in NYC, a program would deepen his love for health and nutrition.

While Giglio’s culinary offerings are based in classic technique and traditional foods preparation, he has also been immersed in using food as medicine. Wearing his chef’s hat, he focuses on sustainable cuisine, seeking the highest quality foods grown locally and harvested in season, supporting the crucial farm to table method of preparing food. He remains deeply connected to the earth in his daily life, using wild harvesting as a way to ReWild himself by consuming foods found naturally on the landscape. Frank creates innovative dishes that are wholesome, full of vitality and have a very small ecological footprint. He is blessed to share this passion with his students and also with his wife Camille and their young son Wilder.

Frank and his family live off-the-grid in midcoast Maine, where enjoys spending as much time as possible outdoors, which he believes directly influences his time in the kitchen. He competes in endurance events through the mountains, prowls the woods for wild edibles, seeks out and collects spring water, seamlessly blending his love of nature with his love for food and authentic nourishment.

Giglio's adventurous culinary offerings have been showcased throughout the health community as Frank is the featured chef for Dr. Alejandro Junger’s NY Times Best-Selling Clean Eats Cookbook. Frank has catered weddings, special events, and weekend workshops across the country and regularly feeds guests at Daniel Vitalis and Arthur Haines ReWilding courses. Through his many ventures and projects, Frank Giglio is helping to bring the local and sustainable food movement to communities everywhere, making it extremely accessible and incredibly delicious!

Note from Frank:

This workshop is the culmination of my 15+ years working in the culinary field. It gives me great pleasure to invite a small group of like minded folks to mind home and share my skills, experiences and my passion for fresh, real, wholesome food. My goal in this workshop is to awaken the innate ability to nourish oneself and your family. By teaching you the basic fundamentals of cooking, from knife skills to flavor combinations, it is my hope that you will walk away with confidence and inspiration to take your culinary skills to the next level.