Placer grown
Chefs and farmers team up for unique new cookbook.
Joanne Neft’s dream of connecting community to local foods started out 20 years ago and now it’s a reality. Her new cookbook, “Placer County Real Food,” is a how-to guide for eating fresh food in all four seasons. It includes 52 menus and recipes for meals from the farmers market year-round. The longtime Placer County resident was inspired by the dwindling customers during the fall and winter and worried about the lack of business for her local farmers.
Her project began after a friend admired a home-cooked, locally bought meal at Joanne’s and was interested in learning how to do the same. So along with professional chef Laura Kenny, Joanne decided to show her friend and the rest of us just how to eat totally local and in season all 52 weeks of the year.
So while more folks become knowledgeable about locally grown foods, Joanne and Laura hope to paint a bigger picture—one that includes the face of the farmers who produce the foods that feed us. Besides shopping at the local farmers markets, Joanne and Laura invited different folks over for dinner every Monday night for a year to test out recipes. This book is a collection of those menus and recipes organized in an easy-to-follow manner, while highlighting the region’s farms and succulent foods.
Their dinners were an instant hit and the cookbook is now telling its own story. In a few short months, the book has sold nearly 10,000 copies and is undergoing the second printing. Joanne and Laura say they hope their collaborative and community-based effort has enabled them to make an impressive imprint on the lives of others.
For more information about the cookbook, visit www.placercountyrealfood.com.
