Join us for an afternoon with Placer County Real Food Cookbook authors Joanne Neft and Laura Kenny August 13, 2001 from 10:00 am – 12 Noon at Bushnell Gardens Nursery in Granite Bay. Come fall madly in love with the exquisite richness of eating fresh local in-season food and the rich local farms producing in Placer County.   Learn from Laura and Joanne how to shop local farmers markets and purchase all the meat, fruit, vegetables and nuts necessary to prepare meals from scratch. A number of their dishes from the cookbook will be offered for tasting Saturday, Aug 13, 2011. Cookbooks will also be available to purchase so you can have Joanne & Laura sign them.   We’re paring Hawks Restauran

Joanne Neft is known as the “farmers market lady” in Placer County, and for good reason. Neft has been involved with farmers markets since childhood, when her father sold produce in the St. Paul, Minn., farmers market. Joanne learned that a lot of people did not know how to make use of the bounty of fresh and sometimes unfamiliar food items they would find in the farmers markets. In conversations with a friend, Neft hit on an idea that would come to the aid of those who wanted to make use of the wonderful resource of farmers markets. She teamed up with Placer County chef Laura Kenny. Every Saturday for one year, they would shop the Auburn farmers market. On the following Monday evening,

Ever wonder if its possible to shop exclusively at farmers’ markets and eat nutritiously? Deliciously? The answer is yes, and Joanne Neft and Laura Kenny are making it easy for you. The duo spent every Monday night in 2009 hosting dinner parties where they treated guests to dishes prepared with local, seasonal ingredients purchased at farmers’ markets in Placer County. They recorded the menus they created and compiled them into a book with 360 recipes. "Placer County Real Food: Recipes and Menus for Every Week of the Year” is the finished product and Neft and Kenny were at Grange Restaurant and Bar Wednesday night signing copies, meeting readers and foodies, and eating. The $45, four-

Hungry? How about a slow-roasted pork roast with peppers, pink-eyed peas with Italian sausage and tomatoes, and then some roasted figs, peaches and raspberries with creme fraiche for dessert? Still not hungry? Grange Restaurant & Bar will host a dinner/book signing Aug. 18 with Joanne Neft and chef Laura Kenny, authors of "Placer County Real Food: Recipes and Menus for Every Week of the Year," where they will serve the above dishes and others, all prepared with ingredients from Placer County’s farmers’ markets. Neft and Kenny spent 2009 hosting dinner parties every Monday evening where they treated guests to dishes prepared with local, seasonal ingredients. Neft has been involved in Pl

Joanne Neft is on a mission to change the poor eating habits common in many households today. "We're eating really inappropriately," she explained to dinner guests at her home this past week. She pinpoints Americans' "inappropriate" eating habits to the cause of many problems. "We eat subsidized food because it's cheap, forgetting the huge price we pay for the resulting obesity, diabetes, cancer, and coronary problems. Americans pay a high price for cheap food." She is currently self-employed and owns a couple of commercial properties but these days she is putting most of her energy and passion into a crusade against poor eating habits found in the form of a cookbook. Neft and her clos