From the Preface:
First published in 2005, Simply in Season is a community cookbook about good food: foods that are fresh, nutritious, tasty, and in rhythm with the seasons. This Expanded Edition adds seventeen new recipes to more than three hundred in the 2005 edition.
Simply in Season explores the complex web of factors that brings food to our plates. Before the advent of modern transportation and storage systems, eating local food was the norm as it still is in much of the world. Within our memories we see our parents and grandparents with hands full of fruits and vegetables from their gardens or gardens nearby. Eggs, milk, and meat also came from local sources.
Spring explores the environmental impact of modern agriculture. Summer, Autumn, and Winter follow with thoughts on health, time, and the economic factors of food. The final recipe chapter, All Seasons, presents a vital overview of food production and food security issues, bringing us full circle in our understanding of the meaning and place of food in our lives.
Simply in Season also remains a cookbook filled with delicious recipes. Part of the fun of cooking with the seasons is learning to use what s locally available, and that often means taking recipes as starting points: a theme on which to playfully improvise rather than a blueprint to follow precisely.
Whether you have long cherished local food or are new to these ideas, we hope you are encouraged in your journey with food choices. The journey is long and continuous, with innumerable points of entry. None of us has arrived, and each of us will have to decide what choices are right for our own circumstances. But it is a delight to share the stories and recipes of fellow travelers who love good food.
Welcome! And enjoy!
Mary Beth Lind, Cathleen Hockman-Wert, authorsMary Beth Lind is a registered dietitian and nutritional consultant. She and her husband, Lester, are market gardeners in West Virginia: they grow enough fruits and vegetables for their own year-round needs as well as surplus to sell at local farmers' markets. They are also the founders of Mountain Retreat, a Christian retreat center that has as its mission discovering the connection between the spiritual and the organic sources of life.
Mary Beth, a member of Philippi Mennonite Church, grew up eating local seasonal foods in the mountains of West Virginia. Her mother loved gardening and her father, a country doctor, was occasionally paid in produce. Mary Beth graduated from Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, Virginia, with a degree in home economics, and from Oregon State University with a degree in foods and nutrition. She returned to EMU briefly to teach nutrition.
Mary Beth wrote the foreword for the 25-year anniversary edition of More-with-Less Cookbook. With her sister, Sarah E. Myers, she has also written Recipes from the Old Mill: Baking with Whole Grains.
Food is a part of my spirituality,
Mary Beth says. My garden and kitchen are the places where I am most aware of God's mysterious presence, as well as the places where I flesh out my beliefs and values. For me there is a connection between what I eat and how I pray.
Cathleen Hockman-Wert has served as editor for Mennonite Women USA since 1997. In that role, she founded Timbrel, a magazine by Mennonite women in Canada and the United States. She previously served as assistant editor of Gospel Herald, a weekly magazine of the Mennonite Church.
An Oregon native, Cathleen graduated from Goshen College in Indiana and later earned a master's degree in journalism from the University of Oregon. She is a member of Corvallis Mennonite Fellowship and an avid farmers' market shopper.
When I was young, my mother worked fulltime yet always kept us stocked with homemade bread from MCC's first cookbook, More-with-Less. But my journey with local food entered a new level in the 1990s as my husband Dave and I began learning more about environmental issues,
Cathleen says. We were discovering the many ways in which our lifestyle choices choices which we are privileged to have as middle-class North Americans affect God's creation and other people.
We gradually became more and more committed to seeking out local, sustainably grown foods. Sometimes this has meant paying more; making that adjustment, for two people ingrained with the frugality ethic, hasn't always been easy. Sometimes we chant a little mantra: 'Cheaper is not always better.' But by now, buying local foods is all joy.
