Founded in 1998 by the late culinary luminary, author, chef, and entrepreneur Abby Mandel, the Green City Market is the venerable year-round farmers market held in Chicago’s Lincoln Park. Since its inception, the Green City Market has grown into one of the most popular destinations for finding organic and sustainable produce and products throughout the Midwest’s extensive farm-to-table culinary movement. It is a vital nonprofit enterprise for healthy and locally sourced food that, in peak months, attracts 8,000 shoppers, farmers, and merchants to its bustling biweekly marketplace.

The Green City Market Cookbook is the first collection of recipes from the celebrity chefs, local farmers, loyal customers, and longtime vendors that make up the Green City Market community. Beautifully illustrated with full-color photography, and thoroughly tested, the recipes in this book represent a diversity of wonderful meals that can be created from the fresh, sustainable output of the Midwestern family farms. Chicago’s leading chefs, as well as other market regulars, have contributed recipes simple enough for the inexperienced cook but sufficiently enticing to satisfy the most discriminating gourmet.

Organized by season, The Green City Market Cookbook provides eager readers with recipes that make use of fresh fruits and vegetables that come straight from the small regional farms that are the lifeblood of the farm-to-fork movement. Delicious, nutritious, and visually stunning, these recipes present the best that Green City Market has to offer. Alice Waters has called GCM “the best sustainable market in the country,” and now readers can be sure they're creating the highest quality, most straightforward meals to go with the highest quality ingredients locally sourced produce has to offer.