Despite the fact that we run Inn Serendipity B&B and “breakfast” is part of our business, we find the average American breakfast is, well, boring. With the same old, same old about everywhere you go, we wanted to give breakfast a makeover with a dash of serendipity: spinach and egg stuffed burritos; fried green tomatoes; a side of beets and root crops roasted with thyme. The delighted look on B&B guests’ faces when served a plate of the unexpected inspires us to keep experimenting creatively with the most important meal of the day using a smorgasbord of seasonal produce.

Breaking the rules a bit and leaving room for the unexpected proves to be Inn Serendipity’s appeal. Most of our guests are experienced foodies, flavor and health-conscious sleuths who appreciate the difference between heirloom tomatoes and those found on supermarket shelves wrapped in plastic. We’re eager to savor cuisine prepared in unique ways, or combinations. Foodie travelers don’t want a cookie-cutter motel room, cable TV and continental-style doughnuts for breakfast. They seek out places like our B&B, where a homemade cordial and chocolate greets them for a bedtime nightcap and our young son leads enthusiastic s’more making sessions around the campfire. They smile when roasted turnips and rutabagas appear at the breakfast table from the fall harvest. Authenticity drives culinary travelers off the Interstate and a few of them through our doors. Our tastebuds and our souls crave the real thing.

Wisconsin leads the nation in recognizing this growing market of travelers seeking authentic experiences that don’t ruin the planet in their process of enjoying them. Spearheaded by the Wisconsin Department of Tourism, Travel Green Wisconsin (travelgreenwisconsin.com) invites tourism-related businesses to undergo a certification process based on a range of environmental and social criteria, from sourcing food locally to adopting energy conservation measures. Restaurants showcase local cheeses and lodging establishments like ours are powered by renewable energy. Travel Green Wisconsin leads travelers to places that offer unique experiences that may help sustain, restore or enhance the very features that attract visitors, be it natural or cultural.

The movement is also afoot in Minnesota, spearheaded by the non-profit organization Renewing the Countryside under the moniker Green Routes (greenroutes.org). Their website provides an easy-to-use tool to help you find one-of-a-kind places to eat, play, shop, sleep and learn in Minnesota (and soon, to a place near you).

This green travel movement, echoing that of the organic foods movement, revitalizes small family farms and fuels interest in real food and flavors. Local farms are the ones saving seeds and sowing the Cherokee Purple Tomato and Royal Burgundy Bush Green Beans. Taste some, and you will be a believer in God’s true intentions. The real thing doesn’t come in the form of a dark-colored soft drink.

By stripping away packaging, processing and predictability, authenticity shines through. Jump-start your day with a dose of something different and smile when a turnip turns up on your breakfast plate. This flavorful, unusual recipe from our cookbook, Edible Earth: Savoring the Good Life with Vegetarian Recipes from Inn Serendipity, prompts folks to rethink their assumptions about rutabagas. Be sure to boil turnips and rutabagas first till they are tender yet firm since they don’t cook as fast as the other root vegetables.

Roasted Root Vegetables (Vegan)
Ingredients:
8 c. beets, turnips, rutabagas and potatoes, cleaned, peeled and chopped into bite-size pieces
2 ¼ t. garlic salt
2 ¼ t. dried oregano
1 ½ t. sugar
1 ½ t. dried thyme

Directions:
* Mix spices and oil in a glass jar and let set for about an hour or more.
* Place veggies in a 9-in. x 13-in. baking pan. Drizzle spice and oil mixture over veggies and toss to coat.
* Bake at 425 degrees for 20-25 minutes or until tender, stirring occasionally.

Serves 8.

As environmental stewards, we're used to taking the path less traveled to make a difference: pulling out the canvas bag in the check-out aisle, installing solar thermal panels on our roof, driving a hybrid before they became hip in Hollywood. Same theory works for food: by embracing new seasonal flavors, harking back to a more agrarian, land-based diet that evolves with the seasons, we eat nutritionally-dense foods that readily grow locally.

Fall ushers in the perfect time of year to explore some of these unusual vegetables as they tend to be hardy crops that grow well past the first frost, and will still appear at farmers' markets. Root crops such as rutabagas and turnips formed winter diet staples for centuries. In fact, rutabagas were among the first vegetables planted by colonists in America when they began farming, as the large and strong rutabaga roots helped break up poor soil. Some tips on experimenting with some unusual produce offerings:

For those of us trying to eat both healthy and earth-friendly, stereotypical "processed" food can be a double-edged sword: we may not want the additives, the packaging, the lack of nutrition, but we're still lured by the fact that we crave easy-to-serve-up comfort food like mac and cheese or pizza. Instead of trying to rationalize your guilty purchases with "it was on sale," or "this is the only stuff my kids will eat," think out of the expected blue box and take an un-processed approach to processed food. Some tips to get started:

• Focus on your favorite. What's the processed food you eat the most? Focus on creating healthy alternatives to that one dish. For us, mac and cheese motivated our out-of-the-Kraft box thinking as Liam kept requesting it on a daily basis. That is what led to our recipe below, now in our cookbook, Edible Earth: Savoring the Good Life with Vegetarian Recipes from Inn Serendipity. Surprisingly, healthy unprocessed alternatives to processed foods are simple to make and don't have nearly the long ingredient list as you'll find on the back of the blue box — and you can identify all of them.

Interested in diversifying your seasonal diet? Give leeks a try for the following reasons:

• Mild, sweet flavor. Classified as alliums, leeks prove to be the milder, sweeter version of their more popular poignant counterparts, garlic and onions. A delicate, graceful vegetable with broad, flat green leaves around a contrasting white base, leeks produce a pleasing aroma and sweeten as they cook. Trying using leeks wherever you typically use onions and notice the subtle flavor changes. Experiment with adding cooked leeks to mashed potatoes or lightly sauté chopped leeks alone or with another sautéed vegetable

For most parts of the country living in four-season climates, these last weeks of October mark the final farmers' markets of the year. For the local, seasonal food groupies, this marks a bittersweet time, reminiscent of the last days of summer camp: while we promise to see each other next year, we desperately hug each other for a long goodbye, trying to hang to the fleeting magic of summer.

So rather than mourn over the loss of fresh abundance, celebrate the Fall abundance and stock up on autumn produce. If carefully stored, these goodies can tide you over into the new year — when Spring asparagus and spinach greens will be abundant once again.

Some tips on celebrating the last farmers' market:

Potluck gatherings

Here are some tips on what to do when the host says "bring a dish to pass":

• Non-cooks think fresh. Don’t panic if you're not a cook. Instead, think of yourself as the fresh and seasonal produce provider. A simple bowl of fresh, plain produce – from apples to baby carrots – adds a nice touch to any buffet. This strategy also works well if you're riding a bike or taking public transportation to a potluck: fresh and raw food are easier to transport.
• Educate on ingredients. Add a note card by your dish explaining where your ingredients came from. This not only helps guests with food allergies, but it educates on sources of local food sources. "Easy Oat Apple Pie" takes on deeper flavor and meaning when folks know the apples came from Turkey Ridge Organic Apple Orchard in Gays Mills, Wisconsin (which just happens to be cooperatively run), and the butter from Organic Valley Family of Farms, another cooperatively run, farmer-owned business based in Wisconsin.

While potlucks are inherently a simple concept, in our ten years of hosting such gatherings on our Wisconsin farm, we've realized that a dash of thoughtful planning can green the event and make it educational fun through food for everyone. Here are some thought-starters:

• Create a seasonal food theme. Give guests a general menu theme like "savoring the local flavors of the season." With food on average racking 1,500 frequent flyer miles from growing field to our plate, eating local and seasonal saves fossil fuel. If you have culinary friends up for a challenge, host a seasonal theme in the dead of winter and get creative with root crops such as rutabaga, turnips and potatoes.
• Ditch the disposables. Environmental issues aside, who wants to eat a plate of delicious food off a floppy disposable plate? Don't have enough serving ware? One trip to your local Goodwill store will garner a load of inexpensive plates, silverware and cups for years of gatherings to come. The more mismatched the set, the more character.

While stocking up and buying bulk can help both the pocketbook and planet, having too much food at home can do the opposite by generating waste. The average American throws out about 1.28 pounds of food a day, adding up to over 467 pounds of food a year. Worse yet, this statistic doesn’t include items that end up in the compost. Whether that wasted food is a wilted salad or graham crackers years past expiration code, by managing and eating our stockpile of food at home, we don’t contribute to this waste.

Some thoughts on using up the food you have:

* Be leery of sales. Couscous on special? All of a sudden you buy five boxes and forget the fact that you’ve never made couscous before. Unless something is on the top of your “foods I adore” list, be leery of purchasing more than one, even if the price is right.

Think of your kitchen pantry — whether it's an cabinet or deluxe walk-in closet model — as your own private mini-convenience store, a place readily stocked with the basics that give you options from making dinner tonight to whipping up dessert for friends serendipitously stopping by. Being stocked with cooking staples at home saves both time and money while helping the planet, since no last-minute car trips are needed to the supermarket for missing ingredients, and there's no pricey take-out temptations because you know you can quickly pull together a healthier, cheaper meal at home.

A dash of thoughtful planning helps in stocking up and buying bulk:

• Shop bulk for key staples. Find a local store that has a bulk food aisle, such as a food cooperative or health food store. Buying in bulk will not only save cash, particularly with organic options (while prices vary, bulk foods are often one third cheaper), you’ll save all that unnecessary extra food packaging. Some key staples we always have on hand and buy in bulk include all-purpose flour, sugar, cocoa, rice, pasta and powdered milk.