Six Seasons: A New Way With Vegetables

Chefs and vegetables seem to be everywhere at the moment, with some of America's finest cooks urging us to think differently about seasonal produce. While some extraordinary examples are really chefs speaking to other chefs, Joshua McFadden—who is very definitely a chef—is speaking here to cooks of many skill levels, offering an exciting line-up of vegetable dishes that are designed to take you farther than "how to eat tomatoes in August, peas in April, and butternut squash only when there's frost on your car windshield."

McFadden's culinary career includes stints at Lark Creek Inn, Blue Hill, Franny's, Momofuku, and working for pioneering farmers Eliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch. He's now in running his own kitchen at Ava Gene's in Portland, Oregon. That range of credentials offers a hint at the influences he brings to his gorgeous and practical tour of the six seasons of vegetable (fall, winter, and spring are followed by early summer, midsummer, and late summer). While he's urging you to think about early harvest potatoes differently from those dug just before the first frosts of the fall, he's also offering bright, fresh takes on garden bounty.

Roasted beets with avocado, sunflower seeds, and fresh herbs. Celery, apple, and peanut salad. Little gem lettuce with lemon cream, spring onion, radish, and mint. Turnips with prunes and radicchio. This is not the material you have been seeing everywhere else and it's a very enticing tour of the garden and its delights

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.