Vegetarian menu planning

We living in Michigan and have good access to farmer's markets. I'm always on the lookout for suggestions on how to do menu planning for vegetarians, esp. when you need to take into account not knowing precisely what's good and fresh at market this week until you go there.

Cookbooks or suggestions of menu plan books that are organized by season? It's going to vary from region to region, which makes it all that much more complicated.

Vegetarian Soups for All Seasons is excellent. The only other seasonal vegetarian book I can think of right now is Moosewood Celebrates - it's a multi-holiday cookbook that's organized chronologically through the year - there are even non-holidays like "Heat Wave Dinner" or "Rainy Day Picnic on the Porch." There are enough recipes within each menu that it's easy to avoid the ones that don't sound appetizing. I should mention that it's technically a pescaterian book, but there are only a few recipes (out of hundreds) that have seafood - most of them are vegan.

I'd recommend Farmer John's cookbook : the real dirt on vegetables -- I love it! We get our produce from a CSA farm so I appreciate cookbooks that are arranged seasonally. This cookbook sometimes calls for chicken stock but that's obviously easy to leave out. I've been using this book every week to plan our menus around whatever produce we happen to get, and we haven't been disappointed yet.

This a great topic! I am trying to get back into the habit of menu planning, but it is hard when you aren't sure what is going to look great at the farmer's market.

One thing that helps is that I am fairly flexible about the vegetables in any particular recipe. I am trying to pick out a few things that I want to make, then having a range of veggies that would be good in those recipes to look for. So far it seems to be working pretty well, but I am not doing any formal planning yet. I'll have to check out some of the other books listed on this topic.

#4 Yeah, the quality of vegetables where I am varies week to week so I change out vegetables for others fairly often.

Instead of planning an actual dish when I go to the store I think category, like Soup for instance. Then I look up a few recipes get some ideas and when I go shopping I can change my mind based on what is available.