THE PERENNIAL KITCHEN COOKBOOK

“Not only a cookbook but also a guide for how to transform our food and agriculture systems.”

-Danielle Danielle Nierenberg, President of Food Tank and 2020 recipient of the Julia Child Award

In The Perennial Kitchen, Beth provides the context of food’s origins, along with delicious recipes, nutrition information, and tips for smart sourcing. More than a farm-to-table cookbook, this book expands the definition of “local food” to embrace regenerative agriculture, the method of growing small and large crops with ecological services.

Knowing how and where food is grown can add depth and richness to a dish, whether a meal of slow-roasted short ribs on creamy polenta, a steaming bowl of spicy Hmong soup, or a triple ginger rye cake, kissed with maple sugar, honey, and sorghum. Here James Beard Award–winning author Beth Dooley provides the context of food’s origins, along with delicious recipes, nutrition information, and tips for smart sourcing.

More than a farm-to-table cookbook, The Perennial Kitchen expands the definition of “local food” to embrace regenerative agriculture, the method of growing small and large crops with ecological services. These farming methods, grounded in a land ethic, remediate the environmental damage caused by the monocropping of corn and soybeans. In this thoughtful collection the home cook will find both recipes and insights into artisan grains, nuts, fruits, and vegetables that are delicious and healthy—and also help retain topsoil, sequester carbon, and return nutrients to the soil. Here are crops that enhance our soil, nurture pollinators and song birds, rebuild rural economies, protect our water, and grow plentifully without toxic chemicals. These ingredients are as good for the planet as they are on our plates.

At the center of it all is the cook, linking into the regenerative and resilient food chain with every carefully sourced, thoughtfully prepared, and delectable dish.

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SWEET NATURE (2019)

“A beautiful new cookbook unlocks the possibilities of honey and maple syrup”

Star Tribune

Honey and maple syrup might be better for you than sugar. They might be better for the environment. But even better, and sweet as anything, is how these natural ingredients taste and the wonders they do for a dish. James Beard Award–winning cookbook author Beth Dooley and gifted photographer Mette Nielsen make the most of these flavors in this celebration of honey and maple syrup in traditional kitchens as well as cutting-edge food culture. 

Full of easy ideas that include honey and maple syrup in foods both savory and sweet, this book features a wide range of irresistible recipes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for snacks and salads, condiments and vegetables, entrées and desserts, syrups, cocktails, and elixirs. Sweeten your table with rosemary honey butter, green tomato chutney, curry marinated herring, brown butter honey popcorn, savory maple black pepper biscotti, oven-roasted chicken thighs with pomegranate molasses, honey-glazed salmon salad, maple vanilla half-pound cake, elderberry throat coat, bourbon maple smash, and more. 

With its innovative recipes, practical tips, conversion charts, historical and scientific facts, information on nutritional value, suggestions for storage and sourcing, and above all Mette Nielsen’s remarkable photographs, Sweet Nature invites us to fully enjoy these two iconic ingredients from nature’s pantry.

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the sioux chef’s indigenous kitchen

2018 Winner: James Beard Award for Best American Cookbook

Top Ten Food Books: LA Times, Smithsonian, Village Voice

Here is real food—our indigenous American fruits and vegetables, the wild and foraged ingredients, game and fish. Locally sourced, seasonal, “clean” ingredients and nose-to-tail cooking are nothing new to Sean Sherman, the Oglala Lakota chef and founder of The Sioux Chef. In his breakout book, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, Sherman shares his approach to creating boldly seasoned foods that are vibrant, healthful, at once elegant and easy. 

Sherman dispels outdated notions of Native American fare—no fry bread or Indian tacos here—and no European staples such as wheat flour, dairy products, sugar, and domestic pork and beef. The Sioux Chef’s healthful plates embrace venison and rabbit, river and lake trout, duck and quail, wild turkey, blueberries, sage, sumac, timpsula or wild turnip, plums, purslane, and abundant wildflowers. Contemporary and authentic, his dishes feature cedar braised bison, griddled wild rice cakes, amaranth crackers with smoked white bean paste, three sisters salad, deviled duck eggs, smoked turkey soup, dried meats, roasted corn sorbet, and hazelnut–maple bites.

The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen is a rich education and a delectable introduction to modern indigenous cuisine of the Dakota and Minnesota territories, with a vision and approach to food that travels well beyond those borders.

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SAVORY SWEET (2017)

“It’s Lovey. … a contemporary collection of recipes based on Scandinavian practicality, a must have for busy cooks”

Star Tribune

“Let’s dispense with the usual old notions of preserving,” Beth Dooley suggests, leading us into Mette Nielsen’s kitchen, where old-world Danish traditions meld with the freshest ideas and latest techniques to fill the pantry with the best of the season, all year long. Because those seasons can prove especially challenging in the northern heartland, Nielsen’s Nordic heritage is handy as she and Dooley show cooks, first-time and experienced canners alike, how to make the most of a short growing season. Their approach combines the brightness and bold flavors of the Nordic cuisines with an emphasis on the local, the practical, and the freshest ingredients to turn each season’s produce into a bounty of condiments. 

From corn salsa to carrot lemon marmalade with ginger and cardamom, crispy pickled red onions to garlic scape pesto with lemon thyme, and caramel apple butter with lemongrass to puttanesca sauce to “Fit for a Queen Jam”—these recipes bring the best of the sweet and the savory to every menu. Low tech, simple, and fast, they eschew hot-water-bath methods in favor of chilling and freezing, keeping flavors and colors bold and bright; and they ease up on sugar to make way for the true savory sweetness of nature’s finest food.

Savory Sweet is not your grandmother’s canning cookbook—but it is likely to be your grandchildren’s. 

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In winter's kitchen (2016)

“Beth Dooley personalizes the path from farm to fork with heart and skill”

The Wall Street Journal

The explosive growth of the local food movement is hardly news: Michael Pollan’s books sell millions and the spread of farm-to-table restaurants is practically viral. But calls for a “food revolution” come most often from a region where the temperature rarely varies more than a few degrees. In the national conversation about developing a sustainable and equitable food tradition, the huge portion of our population who live where the soil freezes hard for months of the year feel like they're left out in the cold.

In Winter’s Kitchen reveals how a food movement with deep roots in the Heartland—our first food co-ops, most productive farmland, and the most storied agricultural scientists hail from the region—isn't only thriving, it's presenting solutions that could feed a country, rather than just a smattering of neighborhoods and restaurants. Using the story of one thanksgiving meal, Dooley discovers that a locally-sourced winter diet is more than a possibility: it can be delicious.

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the birchwood cafe cookbook (2015)

“Locavores will love The Birchwood Café Cookbook …”

Minnesota Monthly

Creating a better world starts at home—in the kitchen—and for twenty years the Birchwood Cafe has guided diners to live and eat sustainably and joyfully. Now you can sample Birchwood’s recipes—adapted for home cooks—and fill your own table with some of the irresistible fare that has made the cafe one of the region’s best-loved restaurants.

In these pages, find Birchwood’s light-hearted, innovative menu: hearty hand pies and multigrain salads, decadent pastries, and award-winning desserts. Organized by eight seasons, these dishes are inspired by the way weather affects our appetites and determines what comes from our land. With Spring, we celebrate beginnings, tossing up fragrant herbs, tender greens, and tart rhubarb. Come Summer, we fire up the grill and get outside; when Scorch hits and those dog days dampen appetites, we whip up cool soups and refreshing salads. Then Autumn, with its collision of apples, pears, pumpkins, and kale; and as Dusk falls, we get cozy with bowls of savory soup. Frost tempts us back to the stove with nourishing roots. Ready for Winter, we gather close with friends near the hearth, ladling up warming stews. Come Thaw, look to the first food of the season as the maple syrup runs and we anticipate a new year. The pantry chapter features Chef Marshall Paulsen’s condiments—chutney, jam, preserves, and vinaigrettes—which can transform the simplest dish into a spectacular plate.
 
Owner Tracy Singleton and Chef Marshall share Birchwood stories and memories, plus practical tips and insights. Just as Birchwood Cafe is more than a restaurant, this is more than a cookbook. The Birchwood Cafe Cookbook shows you what it takes to make a sustainable kitchen and a joyful table, to prepare “good real food” that really does more than a little good. 

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minnesota’s bounty - the farmer’s market cookbook (2013)

“Richly observed paean to the state’s farmers markets and small-scale farmers”

Star Tribune

The moment you step into a farmers market you are enveloped in a swirl of colors, aromas, and sounds—brilliant orange squash, vibrant green beans, glossy eggplant, crimson crab apples, the spicy bouquet of hot and sweet peppers, ripe muskmelons. Tables are bursting with sunflowers, honey, and eggs. To your right, freshly fried doughnuts and steaming coffee; to your left, acoustic guitar and beautiful flowers. But the local market is not just a place to immerse the senses—it is where communities come together and engage in an exchange as old as civilization.

Minnesota’s Bounty is a user’s guide to shopping and cooking from your local farmers market, and it applies a practical, easy approach to creating a truly seasonal kitchen. Organized alphabetically by type of food, it encourages readers to scrap predetermined recipes and forget the long lists. Instead, shop with an eye for what looks best and what you are hungry for. With more than twenty-five years of firsthand experience and a deep knowledge of Minnesota farmers markets, seasoned cook and food writer Beth Dooley has suggestions and recipes that inspire simple, modern, and healthy meals following an ingredients-first philosophy, helping readers to be more confident and spontaneous both at the market and in the kitchen.

Including a fascinating history of Minnesota farmers markets—with particular focus on the downtown St. Paul and Minneapolis markets—Dooley presents an extraordinary introduction to our markets and the region’s sustainably grown fresh foods. From a warming Coconut Curry Winter Squash Soup and Heartland Brisket to a summer’s meal of Minted Double Pea Soup, Lamb Burgers with Tzatziki, and Blueberry Lemon Ginger Sorbet, the guiding tenet of Minnesota’s Bounty is splendidly uncomplicated: take this book to the market, buy the market’s best offerings that day, then come home, cook, and enjoy.

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the northern heartland kitchen more than 200 recipes to satisfy seasonal appetites (2011)

“Revel in the seasons and in the ingenuity and brilliance of local artisanship, sit back and start reading – then head for the kitchen”

The Splendid Table

The Northern Heartland is governed by the seasons. The long and cold winter, bright and warm summer, and crisp and refreshing spring and fall shape our physical and emotional landscape. Shouldn’t the seasons and their harvests also shape the way we eat?

Beth Dooley’s The Northern Heartland Kitchen presents delicious and practical solutions to the challenge of eating locally in the upper Midwest. Celebrating the region’s chefs, farmers, ranchers, gardeners, and home cooks, this is the essential guide to eating with the year’s local rhythms. Recipes are organized by season: fall and winter inspire Chestnut Soup and Venison Medallions with Juniper and Gin, while summer harvests contribute the ingredients for Watermelon Gazpacho and Grilled Trout with Warm Tomato Vinaigrette. Other chapters provide instructions on pickling and preserving food, as well as tips on growing your own food and getting the most out of your CSA or farmers’ market. There are also profiles of local farmers, butchers, and chefs who are using new technologies—as well as rediscovering heritage practices—to enrich regional selections.

Dooley shows that far from being a sacrifice, eating in season and locally is a tribute to the year’s changing riches—encouraging an appreciation for the unmatched flavor of a juicy July tomato or a crisp October apple with garden salads, soups and stews, free-range meats and poultry, fish and game, farmstead cheeses, wholesome breads, pastries and fruit pies. The Northern Heartland Kitchen presents delicious recipes alongside the stories and compelling research that illustrate how eating well and eating locally are truly one and the same.

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savoring the seasons of the northern heartland (2004)

“A book rich in its knowledge, coherence, and usefulness” - The New York Times

Embracing the traditional cooking of the diverse peoples of the Upper Midwest—from the Ojibwe and Dakota to the immigrant communities of Norwegians, Swedes, Germans, Italians, and Hmong—Beth Dooley and Lucia Watson present more than two hundred recipes for the modern kitchen, many with seasonal variations to take advantage of the freshest fruits and vegetables available.

With this inspiring array of recipes, you can start with Radish and Cucumber Salad, feast on Grilled Coho Salmon with Lemon-Ginger Marinade, and then top it off with the Best Sugar Cookies. Along the way, Savoring the Seasons of the Northern Heartland is sprinkled with historical photographs and the lively stories behind recipes handed down for generations.

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