Your first inclination when you see butternut squash in your box may be to roast it or turn it into soup. I like the idea of making these preserves, adapted from a recipe in the New York Times. Simple, delicious and starts to make your kitchen smell like fall.
Purple-hulled pink-eye peas. I could eat them morning, noon and night. This recipe is adapted from one published in Atlanta magazine. The original calls for dried red beans, but it adapts perfectly to fresh field peas of any sort. Duane Nutter is executive chef of One Flew South at the Atlanta airport.
I’m particularly fond of stuffing delicata squash and have adapted from a recipe in from a Freedom Farmers Market email newsletter. No idea who to credit for the recipe. Try these with your mustard greens or with something milder you pick up at a local farmers market.
This simple recipe came from Trader Joe’s. A great way to consume all kinds of peppers.
Asha Gomez, chef-owner of Spice to Table and the late lamented Cardamom Hill, says it was Fat Matt’s Brunswick stew that inspired this dish, a riff on the beef stew her grandmother made in Kerala, India. I’ve adapted this from a recipe published in Atlanta magazine.
One of the great things about delicata squash is that you can cube it up with no peeling. This recipe is adapted from one in “The Sugar Solution Cookbook.” I happen to be a big fan of the combination of rice and lentils. Perhaps you are, too.
A big gorgeous eggplant just cries out to be used in a dish like this one from Women’s Health magazine.
Hilary White of The Hil at Serenbe demonstrated this recipe at the Morningside Farmers Market last year. To cook your spaghetti squash, she recommends preheating the oven to 350 degrees. Split the squash in half and place it on a rimmed baking sheet with a little bit of water. Bake it until it’s tender, remove from the oven and cool. Then she takes out the seeds, and scrapes the squash with a fork to release the “spaghetti.” And then she squeezes the spaghetti in a dish towel to remove excess moisture.
Mary Moore of Cook’s Warehouse demonstrated this recipe at a recent Morningside Farmers Market. I’ve made it twice now, using okra and squash, and then okra and eggplant. It’s an easy recipe to adapt to whatever vegetable is sitting there waiting for you.
The secret of this elegant dish, served by chef Ian Chalermkittichai at his New York restaurant the Ember Room, is that it’s broiled in the oven, the direct heat source from above providing a heavy, steady heat that both tenderizes the eggplant and caramelizes its sweet-savory miso glaze.