Great Seattle-based cookbooks are happening in all forms these days: in print, on an iPad, and now here’s Amy Pennington with an eBook cooking series. Pennington is the author of Urban Pantry and Apartment Gardening, the host of Check, Please!, and as saucy a professional gardener/cook as you could ever hope to find. Her new project, Fresh Pantry, offers a year of monthly cookbook installments, each focused on a single seasonal ingredient. 

Pennington says the idea took root (pun definitely not intended) during winter’s rough slog of seasonal eating. “Too often, we get stuck in cooking ruts and it's easy to grow tired of an ingredient like.....oh......cabbage,” she writes. Except, you can actually do a lot of things with cabbage. Or winter squash or alliums, the subjects of January and February’s books.

The third Fresh Pantry is all about carrots and will be available this week; April will be all about rhubarb, and you can count on lettuce, peppers, and beets making an appearance later in the year.

Each installment contains about 15 recipes; with winter squash, for example, Pennington walks you through everything from breakfast squash bread with streusel to dumplings made with shrimp and butternut squash, plus tutorials on how to cut and handle the suckers. “It's subversively a tool to get people thinking about what they eat, instead of hearing the "local, seasonal" buzz word with no identifying feature,” she says.

Each issue comes out mid-month, usually around the 15th and is compatible with the Kindle, iPad, etc. Find it on Pennington's site or Amazon for $3 a pop. The whole series will be published as a single book in 2014.