A Review of "Local Flavor" by Jean Mann

You’ve got the veggies, “Local flavor” has the recipes.

So you go to your local farmers market and — because it’s hard to resist all that freshness — you come home with bags full of vegetables.

Now you’re faced with doing something with all the beets, broccoli, peas and peppers — and to do it fast, if you want to capture the seasonal freshness.

Fortunately, there’s a local cookbook that can come to your rescue. Created and compiled by Jean Mann, the recipes in “Local Flavor: From the Farmers’ Markets of the Monadnock Region” run the gamut from A to Zucchini. Just for veggies, there are more than 30 pages of recipes.

But that’s not all. The cookbook also has recipes for herbs, salads, soups, meat and poultry, and fruit and sweets. There are a dozen different recipes for making vinaigrette dressing, everything from lemon-dill to pesto to shallot vinaigrette.

“Local Flavor” is far more than recipes, though. Mann provides the readers with useful hints, food characteristics and benefits, how to keep food from spoiling (especially helpful) and how to freeze it.

She also advocates for  farmers markets (“the food is as real as it gets”) and the people who supply them (“when we buy directly from our local farmers, we’re helping to make sure they can enjoy financially sustainable lives”).  

If you like fresh and local, you’ll love “Local Flavor.”