Real Food

When Laura Kenny and I com­pleted Placer County Real Foods from Farm­ers Mar­kets: Recipes and Menus for Every Week of the Year, we had no inten­tion of writ­ing another cook­book. After all, we’d achieved our pur­pose, which was to expose peo­ple to the sea­sonal trea­sures of the farm­ers mar­ket by iden­ti­fy­ing lesser known fruits and veg­eta­bles and pro­vid­ing ways to pre­pare them. As we put our pens down and pots away, we had no idea our cook­book would do some­thing much more impor­tant: It would fos­ter a grass­roots dia­logue about food.

Why do we call it grass­roots? It’s because the peo­ple talk­ing include your sis­ter, your friend’s mother, and your neigh­bor. And given the nation’s increas­ing depen­dence on experts to tell us what to eat, who is talk­ing – we, the peo­ple – is espe­cially significant.