CSA Cookbooks believes that strong relationships with our local farmers are the best ingredients to sustainable farming. We create customized cookbooks for farmers looking to help their customers create simple, healthy, and flavorful meals with the best possible produce: fresh from your farm!

CSA Cookbooks was borne with our realization that many farmers need an affordable way to efficiently answer CSA members' questions of "how do I best store this? And what are some good ways I should cook this?", or to quickly answer farmers market customers so we can sell to the next people in line. We know that farmers are extraordinarily busy: growing foods which bring us our greatest joys. In peak harvest season, the tasks of communicating with farmers' market and CSA customers can consume countless hours.

Best of all, we keep the personalized cookbooks priced low enough so that both CSA members and farmers' market customers can easily absorb the costs.

Julia Shanks -- chef, entrepreneur and multi-engine instrument rated pilot -- received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Hampshire College in Aviation Psychology, and her professional training as a chef at the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco. In 2006, she received her MBA, Magna Cum Laude, from Babson College's F.W. Olin College of Business.

Julia met Brett while working at Restaurant Nora in her native Washington, DC. Together, they cooked organic, American cuisine for local dignitaries, including (then president) Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Since meeting Brett, Julia takes every opportunity to visit Even' Star Organic Farm… to learn about farming and sustainability… and to cook with the freshest possible ingredients.

Julia's culinary education and experience spans the globe to cooking schools in Indonesia, Thailand, Mexico, China and Vietnam; and a 3-month culinary journey around the US that spanned 12,000 miles and 40 restaurants.

In 1997, Julia started her first business, Interactive Cuisine. Through this innovative service, she provided informal cooking lessons in the comfort of the home kitchen, while preparing a gourmet three-course meal. The business grew to include corporate team-building through cooking. In 2006, Julia brought her business to Sebastians in the incarnation of Sebastians Interactive Kitchen. She helped design the 1,600 square foot kitchen, launch, market and establish the operations.

Today, Julia consults with food businesses, helping them to optimize their operations and maximize profits. She is an Adjunct Professor of Accounting at Babson College and sits on the Cambridge Recycling Advisory Committee. You can visit her blog at www.growcookeat.com.

Brett Grohsgal has been the chef in 8 establishments and cooked in seven others, from New England to Louisiana to California and at sea, and over a twenty year period. Brett also earned a Bachelor's degree in Botany from Berkeley and a Master's in Soil Science from North Carolina State University. Brett's passion for cooking great foods evolved by 1996 into actually growing great foods when he and his wife, Dr. Christine Bergmark, bought 100 acres of prime land in Lexington Park, Maryland.

Brett manages Even' Star Organic Farm for reliable harvests and for respectful environmental stewardship. Brett and the treasured farm crew harvest diverse crops in all twelve months for 5 restaurants, two grocery stores, two universities, and one farmers' market. The economic driving force of the farm since 2004, however, has been its CSA, which serves over 200 families in the winter months and 300 families in the summer. Whether growing for dedicated chefs or for busy at-home cooks, Even' Star remains committed to the ideal that life is too short, and farm life too arduous, to ever grow or eat boring foods.

Says Brett, "I envy me my job. I get to grow diverse foods that are wonderfully flavored and impeccably safe, bring these to appreciative customers, and know that I am brightening the tables and exciting the palates of hundreds or thousands of people every week. And I get to do my work outside, in all kinds of dramatic weather, and rarely have to sit at any desk."

Brett has also published articles on winter farming, on crop genetics and seed saving, on buying farmland, on risk management, and on innovation in farming in Growing for Market, a nationally distributed magazine devoted to professional farmers.