Recipes and resources connect thoughtfully grown, gathered, and prepared ingredients to a healthy future-for food, farming, and humankind Knowing how and where food is grown can add depth and richness to a dish, whether a meal of slow-roasted short ribs on creamy polenta, a steaming bowl of spicy Hmong soup, or a triple ginger rye cake, kissed with maple sugar, honey, and sorghum. Here James Beard Award-winning author Beth Dooley provides the context of food's origins, along with delicious recipes, nutrition information, and tips for smart sourcing. More than a farm-to-table cookbook, The Perennial Kitchen expands the definition of "local food" to embrace regenerative agriculture, the method of growing small and large crops with ecological services. These farming methods, grounded in a land ethic, remediate the environmental damage caused by the monocropping of corn and soybeans. In this thoughtful collection the home cook will find both recipes and insights into artisan grains, nuts, fruits, and vegetables that are delicious and healthy-and also help retain topsoil, sequester carbon, and return nutrients to the soil. Here are crops that enhance our soil, nurture pollinators and song birds, rebuild rural economies, protect our water, and grow plentifully without toxic chemicals. These ingredients are as good for the planet as they are on our plates. Dooley explains how to stock the pantry with artisan grains, heritage dry beans, fresh flour, healthy oils, and natural sweeteners. She offers pointers on working with grass-fed beef and pastured pork and describes how to turn leftovers into tempting soups and stews. She makes the most of each season's bounty, from fresh garlic scape pesto to roasted root vegetable hummus. Here we learn how best to use nature's "fast foods," the quick-cooking egg and ever-reliable chicken; how to work with alternative flours, as in gingerbread with rye or focaccia with Kernza (R); and how to make plant-forward, nutritious vegan and vegetarian fare. Among other sweet pleasures, Dooley shares the closely held secret recipe from the University of Minnesota's student association for the best apple pie. Woven throughout the recipes is the most recent research on nutrition, along with a guide to sources and information that cuts through the noise and confusion of today's food labels and trends. Beth Dooley looks back into ingredients' healthy beginnings and forward to the healthy future they promise. At the center of it all is the cook, linking into the regenerative and resilient food chain with every carefully sourced, thoughtfully prepared, and delectable dish.

A beautiful, delicious celebration of two natural sweeteners in irresistible recipes Honey and maple syrup might be better for you than sugar. They might be better for the environment. But even better, and sweet as anything, is how these natural ingredients taste and the wonders they do for a dish. James Beard Award-winning cookbook author Beth Dooley and gifted photographer Mette Nielsen make the most of these flavors in this celebration of honey and maple syrup in traditional kitchens as well as cutting-edge food culture. Full of easy ideas that include honey and maple syrup in foods both savory and sweet, this book features a wide range of irresistible recipes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for snacks and salads, condiments and vegetables, entrees and desserts, syrups, cocktails, and elixirs. Sweeten your table with rosemary honey butter, green tomato chutney, curry marinated herring, brown butter honey popcorn, savory maple black pepper biscotti, oven-roasted chicken thighs with pomegranate molasses, honey-glazed salmon salad, maple vanilla half-pound cake, elderberry throat coat, bourbon maple smash, and more. With its innovative recipes, practical tips, conversion charts, historical and scientific facts, information on nutritional value, suggestions for storage and sourcing, and above all Mette Nielsen's remarkable photographs, Sweet Nature invites us to fully enjoy these two iconic ingredients from nature's pantry.

The moment you step into a farmers market you are enveloped in a swirl of colors, aromas, and sounds--brilliant orange squash, vibrant green beans, glossy eggplant, crimson crab apples, the spicy bouquet of hot and sweet peppers, ripe muskmelons. Tables are bursting with sunflowers, honey, and eggs. To your right, freshly fried doughnuts and steaming coffee; to your left, acoustic guitar and beautiful flowers. But the local market is not just a place to immerse the senses--it is where communities come together and engage in an exchange as old as civilization.

"Minnesota's Bounty" is a user's guide to shopping and cooking from your local farmers market, and it applies a practical, easy approach to creating a truly seasonal kitchen. Organized alphabetically by type of food, it encourages readers to scrap predetermined recipes and forget the long lists. Instead, shop with an eye for what looks best and what you are hungry for. With more than twenty-five years of firsthand experience and a deep knowledge of Minnesota farmers markets, seasoned cook and food writer Beth Dooley has suggestions and recipes that inspire simple, modern, and healthy meals following an ingredients-first philosophy, helping readers to be more confident and spontaneous both at the market and in the kitchen.

Including a fascinating history of Minnesota farmers markets--with particular focus on the downtown St. Paul and Minneapolis markets--Dooley presents an extraordinary introduction to our markets and the region's sustainably grown fresh foods. From a warming Coconut Curry Winter Squash Soup and Heartland Brisket to a summer's meal of Minted Double Pea Soup, Lamb Burgers with Tzatziki, and Blueberry Lemon Ginger Sorbet, the guiding tenet of "Minnesota's Bounty" is splendidly uncomplicated: take this book to the market, buy the market's best offerings that day, then come home, cook, and enjoy.

"Let's dispense with the usual old notions of preserving," Beth Dooley suggests, leading us into Mette Nielsen's kitchen, where old-world Danish traditions meld with the freshest ideas and latest techniques to fill the pantry with the best of the season, all year long. Because those seasons can prove especially challenging in the northern heartland, Nielsen's Nordic heritage is handy as she and Dooley show cooks, first-time and experienced canners alike, how to make the most of a short growing season. Their approach combines the brightness and bold flavors of the Nordic cuisines with an emphasis on the local, the practical, and the freshest ingredients to turn each season's produce into a bounty of condiments. From corn salsa to carrot lemon marmalade with ginger and cardamom, crispy pickled red onions to garlic scape pesto with lemon thyme, and caramel apple butter with lemongrass to puttanesca sauce to "Fit for a Queen Jam"-these recipes bring the best of the sweet and the savory to every menu. Low tech, simple, and fast, they eschew hot-water-bath methods in favor of chilling and freezing, keeping flavors and colors bold and bright; and they ease up on sugar to make way for the true savory sweetness of nature's finest food. Savory Sweet is not your grandmother's canning cookbook-but it is likely to be your grandchildren's.