Well, your farmers markets should be up and going by now. Have you taken a Saturday afternoon stroll through the aisles of fresh green goodies yet? There's no time like the present! Maybe you can even find some luscious, wonderful treat to spoil your Mother for Mother's Day this weekend.

And then tell us what you made! We're interested in your seasonal recipe for the month of May. You can use the comments section below to share recipes with our readers, and encourage more seasonal cooking.

Not sure what's at its peak right now? Check out this list of in-season foods right now.

No matter how you slice and dice it, and regardless of culinary expertise, the best meals begin with the best ingredients. And when it comes to fruits and vegetables, it doesn't get any better than FRESH FRESH FRESH. Fresh food in season is more likely than non-seasonal food to have been picked close to the time of purchase, which means it'll be at its nutritional peak when you buy it, not to mention costing a lot less.

We'd love for you to share your recipes and ideas for using produce at its peak. Depending on where you live, the top in-season foods right now may vary a little, but most of us can now find some fresh goodies at newly opening farmers markets. What seasonal foods are you serving up right now? Got any great tips? Superb recipes? Post them in the comments section below to share them with our readers. Bon appetit!

ISTOCKPHOTO/MARCELO WAIN

Happy holidays everyone! I was reading the Healthy & Green Daily newsletter and came across this great recipe for a Thanksgiving dessert — Vegan Pumpkin Pecan Pie. It sounds delicious, so check it out!

Crust
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup pecans (chopped or whole)
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 tablespoon Sucanat (see notes)
1 cup trans-fat free vegetable shortening (see notes)
3 tbsp ice water

Filling
16 ounces extra firm lite silken tofu
2 cups pumpkin puree (canned, or fresh – here’s how)
1/2 cup Sucanat (see notes)
1/4 cup plus 2 tbsp maple syrup
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
1/2 tsp sea salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1 cup pecan halves

1. For the crust: Pulse flour, pecans, salt and Sucanat in a food processor until ground, then add shortening and pulse until almost combined. Add ice water and pulse until just blended.

2. Collect dough into two balls and flatten each into a disc. Cover in plastic wrap and refrigerate for two hours until firm. When chilled, roll out into a 9-inch circle on a floured board and place into an 8-inch pie pan. Refrigerate until ready to use.

3. Make the filling: Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Place tofu in a food processor or blender, and blend until creamy. Add pumpkin, Sucanat, 1/4 cup of the maple syrup, vanilla, salt, cinnamon, ginger and cloves, and blend well.

4. Set aside some pecan halves for garnish. Toss remaining pecan pieces with remaining 2 tablespoons maple syrup in a small bowl and then place evenly on the bottom of the pie shell. Pour filling into pie shell and bake approximately 1 hour, or until tester inserted in the center comes clean. Set pie aside to let cool. Garnish with remaining pecan halves.

NOTES
Sucanat is a great natural sweetener that you can read about here. If you don’t have Sucanat, you can use the natural sweetener of your choice.

For vegetable shortening, try Spectrum Organics which is trans-fat free and made with 100 percent organic expeller pressed palm oil.

This recipe was reprinted with permission by Care2 Inc. Care2 is an organization that strives to provide “powerful tools to make a difference in your life, community, country and world.”

Attention Vegetarians and Vegans: You too can have an enjoyable, delicious Thanksgiving dinner without compromising your lifestyle!

There are plenty of websites out there that offer meatless Thanksgiving Day menus. Many of them have complete, 3- to 5-course menus that are appetizing even if you’re not a vegetarian.

The appetizers usually consist of a variety of salads and soups. An obvious choice would be the Pumpkin Soup. Many of the sites have this recipe, but I thought this recipe looked interesting because it calls for a little sour cream. And don’t worry, this soup uses vegetable broth, not chicken.

Pasta dishes and vegetarian gratin would be nice main dish selections, such as this recipe for Three Sister Stew, which features the Ancient Three Sisters: corn, squash and beans.

Dessert could really be anything, so pick your favorite and make it for the whole family! Pumpkin pie is a more traditional choice if you want to go the traditional route, but one site I found has a lot of unique suggestions for desserts.

If you think about it, the only part of the Thanksgiving meal that traditionally features meat is the turkey. And with tofu turkey and other main-course selections, a vegetarian Thanksgiving meal doesn’t have to be that different from the original.

Here’s a list of some websites to help you plan a vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner:

   * The Veggie Table

   * Boutell.com 

   * In a Vegetarian Kitchen

   * Farm Sanctuary

   * Recipe Zaar

A champion of vegetable cookery for more than 25 years, Andrea Chesman has written more than a dozen cookbooks that celebrate fresh food cuisine. When it comes to autumn's best root vegetables like parsnips, rutabagas, and sweet potatoes, Chesman thinks roasting is the best way to go.

"The dry heat of roasting coaxes out and concentrates flavors," Chesman says. "With parsnips, roasting brings out sweet, nutty flavors and aromas that otherwise would not exist." Roasted rutabaga melts in your mouth like butter, and a pan of Herb-Roasted Root Vegetables (recipe below) will transport easily and hold up well on a buffet table.

Chesman includes this recipe among 14 "Master Recipes" in Serving Up the Harvest: Celebrating the Goodness of Fresh Vegetables (Storey, 2007). As with the other master recipes in the book, you can vary the mix of vegetables, using what you have on hand. It's the method that counts, which in this case involves roasting in a hot oven until the vegetables are brown and tender.

If you don't have carrots or sweet potatoes, substitute cubes of winter squash for savory-sweet flavor and bright orange color. "It has similar cooking properties and works well with root vegetables," Chesman says. In addition to sharing the recipe for Herb-Roasted Root Vegetables below, Chesman offers these tips for roasting goodies from your garden:

* To prepare vegetables for roasting, cut into uniform-size pieces and slick with oil. Use a lightly oiled sheet pan or shallow roasting pan for good air circulation. Crowded vegetables will steam rather than roast.

* To ensure even browning, flip the vegetables with a spatula once or twice during roasting.

* Roasted root vegetables are beautiful; roasted green vegetables are equally delicious but somewhat less than beautiful.

* Make plenty, because vegetables shrink as they roast. Use leftovers in salads, omelets, quiches, and other quick-fix dishes. 

Herb-Roasted Root Vegetables

Serves 4 to 6

3 to 4 pounds (8 to 10 cups) mixed root vegetables or winter squash, such as beets, carrots, parsnips, rutabagas, sweet potatoes, turnips, and potatoes, cut into 1-inch cubes

1 large onion, peeled and cut into eighths, or 1 cup peeled pearl onions or shallots

6 cloves garlic, peeled

3 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil

2 tbsp fresh herbs (rosemary, sage, thyme, oregano, alone or in any combination, chopped

Coarse sea salt or kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

1 tbsp fresh parsley, chopped

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit. Lightly grease a large sheet pan with oil.

2. Combine the mixed vegetables, onions or shallots, and garlic in a large bowl. Add the oil, herbs, and salt and pepper to taste. Toss to coat. Transfer the vegetables to the pan and spread out in a single shallow layer.

3. Roast 40 minutes to 1 hour, or until the vegetables are slightly browned and tender, turning with a spatula twice for even cooking.

4. Transfer to a serving platter, taste, and add more salt and pepper if desired. Sprinkle with the parsley and serve.

Adapted from Serving Up the Harvest: Celebrating the Goodness of Fresh Vegetables (Storey, 2007), by Andrea Chesman. If you can't get enough roasted vegetables, check out Chesman's The Roasted Vegetable (Harvard Common Press, 2002).

Are some roasted veggie/herb combos so great everyone should try them? Share your best ideas for a veggie roast-a-rama in the comments section below!

Because it’s getting colder outside, it’s time to start finding ways to entertain yourself indoors. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still play with nature. If you like growing food, then a mushroom kit is right up your alley.

To make this project as carbon-free as possible, I started out by looking for mushroom kit companies closest to my Mother Earth News home base in Topeka, Kan. I also wanted the logs and mushrooms to be certified organic. Luckily, I found Lost Creek Mushroom Farms in Perkins, Okla. Not only are they close, but their mushroom logs and mushrooms are “grower certified” organic. Another bonus was that a portion of their sales go to their Mushrooms in Ghana project.

Last year the two owners, Doug and Sandra Williams, visited Ghana to teach farmers how to grow shiitake mushrooms. In Ghana, they were growing oyster mushrooms in sawdust bags, which were contaminated and not producing even a moderate level of mushrooms. In hopes to help the production in Ghana even more, they’re trying to raise money to bring one particular farmer, Bernard Bempah, to the United States. They will take him to various shiitake farms to learn more about mushroom farming, so he can return to Ghana and hopefully change mushroom production in the country.

This seemed like a good cause, so I called them up, and they helped me determine which kit would be best for my mushroom-eating needs. I decided to start simple and get a 10-inch log to grow shiitake mushrooms on. So we’ll see how it goes, and I’ll keep you updated on my experience. Please post a comment below if you have any mushroom-growing advice to share.

For further reading, check out Grow Your Own Mushrooms.

Hey pumpkin carvers: Stop. Wait. Don't waste all those yummy seeds! (Happy Halloween, by the way.) You can save those seeds from ending up in the garbage can with 4 easy steps:

1. SOAK THE SEEDS in water for a few hours. Fill a bowl with water, drop in the seeds and rub them between your fingers to start loosening up any attached pulp. Don't worry about getting every last bit off, because soaking them for a while makes it easier to rub all the pumpkin-ey pulp off later.

2. DRY THE SEEDS on a towel for a few hours, or until they are dry to the touch.

3. SEASON THOSE SEEDS with whatever's on-hand and sounds yummy. Sweet and savory both work well — be creative. (Our friend Kim Wallace, over at Natural Home magazine has a step-by-step recipe for sweet cinnamon-n-sugar pumpkin seeds.) Using a little bit of honey or oil will add flavor and help herbs and spices stick well. For the pumpkin seeds I made as a salad topping (see below), I tossed the dried seeds in extra-virgin olive oil (Global Gardens 2007 Harvest first cold press, a wonderfully fruity and aromatic premium olive oil) and Maine Coast Sea Vegetables organic kelp with cayenne pepper blend (one of my long-standing favorite seasoning blends).

4. ROAST THE SEEDS in a 300-degree-Fahrenheit oven for about 10 minutes. Keep an eye on them: They'll be done when they're golden to light brown.

Crunchy seaweed- and cayenne-spiced roasted pumpkin seeds make a fabulous topping for a fresh arugula salad, and counterbalance the sweetness of crispy cucumber and pear slices.

More pumpkin know-how: Grilled Pumpkin with Rosemary and Sea Salt * Pumpkins Make any Dish a Smashing Hit * 7 Great Pumpkin Carving Tips * Wacky and Wonderful Halloween Pumpkin Designs * Three Phunky Pumpkins * The Great Pumpkin * The Great American Pumpkin * Make a Jack-'O-Lantern ... And Eat Pumpkin Pie, Too! * About Pumpkins * Beer America TV Pops the Top on a Pumpkin Lager 

We’re trying it before you buy it.

Company: Organic Valley
Product: Pasture Butter
Editor’s score: 5/5

Ingredients: pasteurized organic sweet cream, salt, microbial cultures
Price: $3.69 (Search Organic Valley coupons.)
Where to Buy: available at most grocery stores, or find a retailer near you

Why we liked it : rich, smooth, seasonal, high-quality, nutritious, unique, animal-friendly, farmer-friendly

“If you're afraid of butter, as many people are nowadays, just put in cream!” — Julia Child

Fact: Butter is one of nature’s simplest and most perfect foods. This is something Julia Child knew well — she sang butter’s praises until the end of her life, which turned out to be a not-too-shabby 91 years. And from the looks of it, Organic Valley knows it, too. That brand you likely recognize from the organic section of your grocery store has a fabulous new offering, Pasture Butter, and I give it two big ole thumbs up!

Like all of Organic Valley’s products, Pasture Butter is produced without any harmful and unnecessary pesticides, antibiotics or synthetic hormones, and the animals involved in its production are humanely raised. But that’s not what’s so unique about Pasture Butter, so let’s move on.

Pasture Butter is only produced during the summer (May to September) from the certified organic milk of cows raised on pasture. (You can find out the specifics of the cooperative’s pasture-grazing standards here.) Grass-fed animals have their most abundant buffet of nutritious greens precisely during this time, and that translates into some supremely healthy dairy products.

Ever heard of CLA? The benefits of conjugated linoleic acid have been in the news a lot lately. CLA is a naturally occurring trans fatty acid (this is not the man-made bad guy you’ve also heard so much about) manufactured in the gut of animals that graze. CLA research is new, but early studies have found that it may be a really great cancer-fighter and immune-booster. If milk-producing animals aren’t allowed to graze — as is their wont — their milk simply won’t be high in this nutrient, so you can’t expect to get it from non-pastured dairy products. In fact, grass-fed animal products are the richest natural source of CLA.

CLA is just one of the omega fatty acids that have been found to be richer in grass-fed animals. The potentially important ratio of Omega-3 to Omega-6 fatty acids has also been in the news a lot, and Pasture Butter has a naturally occurring, heart-healthy optimal ratio. See the rest of the Nutrition Facts for yourself.

How is Pasture Butter different?

1. REAL FLAVOR. It’s rich, complex, a little nutty, a little grassy, and … well … buttery. Like it should be. Organic Valley produces Pasture Butter in small batches, and churns it longer than standard butter, which has the result of reducing moisture and increasing yummy butterfat. Regular butter is still butter, so it’s usually pretty good and improves the foods you pair it with. But this one can practically stand alone, and if you can resist the urge to snarf it down solo, it’ll make the foods you dress in it simply sing!

Part of the reason this butter is so dang good is that it’s cultured. That’s right, sophisticated. Well, it is a pretty sophisticated butter we’re talking about here, but no, that’s not what I mean. Before being churned, live cultures are added to the cream to ripen it, yielding sweeter and more complex flavors, not to mention making it easier to digest. Allowing cream to ripen — or ferment, or culture, however you want to put it — was once simply the status quo. If you know someone with an antique butter churn who can remember a time before refrigerators, ask them how long they would let fresh cream sit out before making butter with it.

2. AMAZING TEXTURE. It’s creamy, thick, dense, silky-smooth and super-duper-spreadable. Little-known fact: The spreadability of butter is determined by its ratio of saturated to unsaturated fat. If it’s relatively easy to spread, it has more unsaturated (good, healthy) fat and less saturated (bad, artery-clogging) fat. And a 2006 study found that the softer the butter, the more fresh pasture was in the cow’s diet. In fact, cows that eat nothing but grass have the softest butterfat of all.

3. GOOD AS GOLD. The pretty, pretty yellow of Pasture Butter is evidence of its high vitamin and beta-carotene content. Grasses eaten while they are alive are higher in vitamins E, A and beta-carotene than the standard commercial dairy diet, and those nutrients end up in the cream, and thus the butter. (More about that here.) But buyer beware: The pretty, pretty yellow of some nutritionally inferior butters is only evidence of its high food coloring and additive content. Would you like a side of annatto with your butter? Always check the label!

4. RESPECT FOR THE SEASONS. Early summer butter used to command a premium price as compared to the butter you could get the rest of the year. But that was before our food system replaced seasonal and regional variation with homogeneity. Pasture Butter is one of the few food products you’ll find at regular grocery stores these days that even acknowledges Mother Nature in this way. In my opinion, that’s a reason almost as good as flavor to go out and get some Pasture Butter for yourself. (Did you know that meat and dairy are seasonal foods, just like asparagus and tomatoes? Learn more about that in Eat in Sync with the Seasons.)

The butter’s downfalls: Um, does butter have a downfall??? Let’s ask Julia Child.

My backyard grown sugar pie pumpkins are finally ripening up in spite of the steady rains we've been experiencing here in the Pacific Northwest. A few of the pumpkins ended up being somewhat small and weren't worth the effort to process into pumpkin puree. So, what to do with these little guys? I wanted to do something new and, not having grilled pumpkins before, I was quite excited to give it a try.

During grilling, the sugars in the pumpkin caramelize. The combination of sweet and salty, coupled with crisp rosemary, will give you a different way of thinking about pumpkin. After trying this, you just might find yourself dreaming of expanding your pumpkin patch next year.

Make sure you use sugar pie pumpkins or the equivalent for this recipe — you really don't want to eat a jack-o-lantern type pumpkin as they are stringy. If you aren't growing your own sugar pie pumpkins you should be seeing them available in stores and farmers markets this month or, better yet, make a fun trip out of it and head out to a U-pick pumpkin farm. Don't forget to pick up a few extra for making your own pumpkin puree for pies and breads later in the year.

Ingredients:
Sugar pie pumpkins (preferably on the small side)
Olive oil
Fresh rosemary, chopped
Sea salt

1. Heat grill to medium-high.

2. Wash and cut the pumpkins vertically into 3/4 inch slices. Remove the seeds and stringy parts. Brush both sides of each slice liberally with olive oil. Sprinkle with sea salt and rosemary.

3. Place the slices on the grill for about 5 minutes a side or until dark grill marks appear. Turn and grill the other side until you can easily pierce the pumpkin slice with a fork. You want to make sure that the pumpkin is tender.

4. Since some of the salt tends to fall off during the grilling process, serve with a small dish of additional sea salt.

I got some lovely garlic scapes in my CSA bundle from Roxbury Farm last week, and finally got around to making Will Weaver's garlic scapes recipe that we featured in the Kitchen Garden department of Mother Earth News a couple years ago. Man, what a treat! The recipe seems simple, however the flavors are anything but! If you can get your hands on some garlic scapes from a local farm while they're in season, be sure to try this recipe.

Sauteed Garlic Scapes

I came across another intriguing recipe, for garlic scape pesto, but haven't tried it yet. If you know of more ways to use scapes, by all means, share the love! Just post your ideas and recipes in the comments section below.

Photo by Tabitha Alterman

This classic Italian starter (which is actually pronounced 'broo-sket-ta' and not 'broo-shet-ta'), almost always has a generous dose of raw garlic. If you absolutely must, you can tame the garlic bite a bit by adding the topping to the bread before popping it into the oven.

1 head raw garlic

5 tbsp cold-pressed, extra-virgin olive oil (You can really taste the olive oil in this recipe, so use a good one!)

4 fresh tomatoes

3/4 cup basil, chopped

Sea salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste

1 freshly baked baguette

1/2 cup pine nuts

Peel garlic and dice into tiny pieces. Toss with olive oil in a bowl. Slice the tomatoes, discarding juice and seeds, then dice. Add to the bowl along with a half cup of the basil and stir to coat with oil. Season with salt and pepper. Cover and set aside to marinate for at least an hour.

Toast pine nuts in a dry skillet on medium-high heat, stirring constantly, for about 5 minutes. Slice the baguette in half lengthwise, then cut into 3/4-inch wide pieces. Arrange on an oven-safe pan. Warm the bread in a 300-degree (Fahrenheit) oven for about 5 minutes. Remove from oven and transfer to a serving platter, if desired.

Scoop garlic-tomato mixture over each piece, then sprinkle with pine nuts and chopped basil. Serve immediately.