"A Midwest Gardener's Cookbook", the product of fifty years of cookery according to seasonal principles, contains recipes for 94 different fruits, vegetables, and herbs (including such wild crops as mulberries, pawpaws, and violets), locally grown and used at their peak of flavor and freshness. Take it with you as you stroll through the local farmer's market, or consult it after bringing in the harvest from your own garden. If it's spring and the mint is up, what could be more delicious than a yogurt-mint marinade for shish kebab, or a dish of minted citrus carrots?Under Summer, you'll find unusual and tasty ideas for everything from blueberries to zucchini. In Autumn, make Towne's easy and inexpensive Apple Coffee Cake, or stir up a batch of her mennonite-style apple butter. In the section for Winter, you'll find recipes for kale, leeks, and other winter vegetables, hints for growing herbs indoors, and much more.From the Preface - I grew up during the Great Depression on a farm in southeastern South Dakota where we had to rely for our 'daily bread' upon nature, hard work, and the help of relatives and friends, particularly after the death of our mother when I was not yet four years old. We ate primarily what we could raise ourselves and what others shared with us from their bounty. What was grown beyond our daily needs we preserved for future use, canning (and later freezing) up to four hundred quarts of food each year and storing other produce such as potatoes and squash in an unheated cellar.Wherever my family and I have lived since I married and left South Dakota, Kansas, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana whether in city or town, we have always managed to have some kind of garden, even if only a postage stamp-size tomato patch in the backyard of a Chicago townhouse. This cookbook has been organized according to the growing seasons, from spring to winter, and alphabetically within each season those fruits, vegetables and herbs then in plentiful supply.For it is at that time that the home gardener (or careful shopper at farmers' markets) is able to secure the freshest, most nutritious, and least expensive produce. Whenever spinach is in season, for example, the home gardener needs to have close at hand (without looking in ten cookbooks) at least ten recipes for using spinach in a variety of ways so that one's family will not get bored with the vegetable before the season is past. When zucchini are abundant the gardener wants to make good us of his/her harvest and know of ways to preserve it for winter.