I left it to author Nigel Slater to tell me what to do with this season’s peaches, and the answer? Not much. A simple smattering of almonds, brown sugar, and butter–along with patience while the halved peaches bake–is all you need to make this recipe from Nigel’s Ripe: A Cook in the Orchard. Really.

Here’s the latest installment of our brand-new feature on The Recipe Club: What’s In Season, a fresh way to take the fruits and vegetables just reaching your farmer’s market and put them to use with recipes from our new cookbooks. Finally, it feels like summer—and we’re celebrating with a yummy vegetarian side, Zucchini and Lemon Pesto, from Frances Mayes and Edward Mayes’ great new Italian cookbook, The Tuscan Sun Cookbook (Clarkson Potter, March 2012).

Here’s the latest installment of our brand-new feature on The Recipe Club: What’s In Season, a fresh way to take the fruits and vegetables just reaching your farmer’s market and put them to use with recipes from our new cookbooks. With the cold snap this week, it seems wrong to leave the winter ingredients behind in search of fresher, greener spring veggies. So in this last brush with chilly weather, take advantage of the still-delicious grapefruits in your kitchen with this recipe for Chaud Froid de Pamplemousse au Romarin from The Art of Living According to Joe Beef (Ten Speed Press, 2011).

Chives are the smallest species of the onion family, but unlike onions, their flavor is not in the bulb; instead it’s in the leaves. One thing I really like about chives is that they allow you to easily add the flavor of an onion to a dish without any of its bite. In this recipe from Easy Growing (Clarkson Potter, February 2012), Gayla Trail captures the mild chive flavor of the purple chive blossoms (which are a short-term crop that come and go in the spring before you can bat an eyelash — so act quickly!) in a good-quality vinegar. We think this is the perfect way to enjoy chives well past their season.

April gives us the first moments of springtime bounty, when our grocery bags that were once loaded with root vegetables take a lighter, greener turn. A quick recipe like this Pea, Pesto, and Arugula Soup from Sophie Dahl’s Very Fond of Food: A Year in Recipes (Ten Speed Press, April 2012) will leave ample time to savor the new-found sunshine.