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At Guido’s in Pittsfield, this wonderful vegetable is called a Cape Cod white turnip, but I did get some feedback on Twitter that I should have called them Eastham turnips! (Eastham is a town on Cape Cod.) As I write below, I first encountered them as Nantucket turnips. Furthermore, I have seen mention of a similar – or perhaps the same – vegetable called Florida Mountain turnips (there is a Florida, Massachusetts) or Gilfeather turnips (in Vermont, named for a farmer from the early 1900s). Some sources say it is a turnip-rutabaga hybrid, but most people are just happy to enjoy them over their short season.

Some years back the first night of Hanukkah was actually on Thanksgiving Day! I’m not sure if that’s the earliest it can be (in the Gregorian calendar) as I don’t know the intricacies of the Hebrew calendar, but this year it’s a pretty close second with the holiday starting the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

No matter when it falls, I always tell people to make a lot of latkes to freeze for later. Even though they are traditional for Hanukkah, they are so good, and I am always happy to have them as a side dish at other times.

I always like to have a package of puff pastry in the freezer which can quickly and easily provide the base for so many treats, both sweet and savory. Here I decided to use the puff pastry to make turnovers, filled with the flavors of choucroute, and made some modifications for a vegetarian version.

Pasta provides a wonderful palette for so many flavors, but sometimes it’s so easy to get stuck in a tomato-based rut! Italians love pasta with walnuts, and this vegetarian recipe is really quick and easy. I always keep several different kinds of nuts in the freezer, although I do need to make a point of buying ricotta when I want to make this. You can pretty much pull it together in the time it takes to boil the water and cook the pasta. You can find my column from this week here, or scroll down!

There is something so comforting about a bowl of soup. And yet, as a child, I didn’t really like soup. I am not sure why, as my grandmother was a phenomenal cook and she used to make tubs and tubs of soup for us keep in the freezer. I think, perhaps, my mother loved her mother’s soup so much that she wasn’t too upset when I showed little interest!

But my kids started on soup early, as did my niece, which I discovered when she gobbled down a curried cauliflower soup when she was just a toddler!

This past week I wrote about pumpkin soup for my Berkshire Eagle (link here), which is just right for the season.

Two weeks ago, my column for the Berkshire Eagle featured grilled summer vegetables and juicy ripe tomatoes! And now, two weeks later – although some summer vegetables are giving their last gifts of the season – we are moving into fall and looking for cozier, warming recipes. This is one of my favorite stews, and I know we will make it regularly through the fall and winter months.

The Berkshire Eagle column link is here, or scroll down the recipe.

So far, this weekend has truly felt like summer! Although the sun is rising later and setting earlier, today was beautifully warm and sunny, and tomorrow is predicted to be the same! This is one of our favorite ways to enjoy summer produce, especially the juicy tomatoes of late summer and early fall. Grab a few from a local farm, along with some other veggies, and savor the summer for as long as you can!

The Berkshire Eagle column link is here, or scroll down the recipe.

If you go apple picking this fall, here are three recipes for treats from the orchard: applesauce, gravy made with hard cider, and cider doughnut bread pudding.

When I worked as a recipe-tester for The Berkshires Farm Table Cookbook, not only did I have to make a lot of vegetable-focused dishes, but I also had to try some dishes in several iterations to include vegan, vegetarian, and with meat. Ever since then I have been more mindful of ways to modify what I make for a wider range of dietary restrictions. Of course, some dishes truly aren’t flexible: a grilled steak doesn’t have a vegetarian version. But this taco recipe can satisfy everyone! Although the recipe here is vegan, you can certainly offer cheese and/or sour cream as condiments for vegetarians, or even meat that omnivores can include in their tacos.

The Berkshire Eagle column link is here, or scroll down for details!

I had almost given up on corn pudding, even though I’m always looking for something else to do with what I freeze during the summer to use in the coldest months. I’m glad I didn’t give up, and decided to try once more this past winter, with lots of additions to spice up the flavor, and have been saving this recipe since then for a summer column, for when local corn arrived at farm stands. Certainly diced bacon lends a lot to the dish, but for a vegetarian version use a generous amount of smoked paprika, more than called for here. The link to the Berkshire Eagle column is here, or read below.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you may realize that I love beets. I have already written several blog posts with recipes for beets, and last week I wrote a “centerpiece” for the Berkshire Eagle with a few beet recipes. I don’t really consider the first one – roasted beets – as a recipe, but rather what you can do as soon as you get the beets home to have them ready to use in the other two recipes. Seriously, the helpful hint of wiping the skins off over the sink wearing clean rubber glove makes it so much easier to avoid staining!

I know it must sound odd to think about roasting in the summer! Generally speaking, I don’t want to heat up the house even more by turning on the oven. Besides the fact that it’s been rainy and cool for (too) much of July, I still like to bake bread all through the warmer months, which definitely requires baking. I’ve realized that if I do the oven fare in the evening, the house will have the overnight hours to cool off.

Most carrot salads I was familiar with used grated carrots. However, as I mention below, there was a bag of baby carrots in the fridge, and shredding them would have been a ridiculous endeavor. But I wanted to be able to eat them easily with a fork, so I decided to roast them. Not only did they turn out great, it’s also so much easier than shredding a pile of carrots, so I will definitely use this method even with regular-sized carrots, cutting them into sticks before roasting. The link to the Berkshire Eagle column is here, or read below.

I simply cannot even begin to guess all the different things I’ve put onto whipped ricotta toasts. And I am not sure I can even think of all the possible variations on the ricotta mixture itself! Although I did give a recipe in the paper, you can vary the herbs or use flavored olive oil depending on what toppings you have that day. For the Berkshire Eagle column, I composed a photo to show four different toppings: garlic scapes, roasted red pepper, grilled zucchini, and grape tomatoes tossed with olive oil and basil. That was definitely a lot, and I usually just have one or at most two toppings for a single meal.

I am not sure where I first read about it, but before burgers and dogs, the tradition in New England for July 4th was salmon and peas and freshly dug new potatoes. Back when people mostly had to eat what was in season, the salmon were running in the rivers of the region this time of year, and peas were among the earliest vegetables that were ready to eat. Although salmon still do run in a few places in New England, most of us can only acquire it from other places. Still, I think it’s important to be mindful of eating seasonally and many of our food traditions come from the seasonality of produce and other food products, so i offered a modern variation in the Berkshire Eagle this past week.

I realize it is a bit early in the season here in the Berkshires to be offering a recipe with corn! But a few weeks ago it was reported in the Berkshire Eagle that Elizabeth’s, one of our favorite restaurants in Pittsfield, had been sold, and so I wanted to write a column in gratitude for the special place that Liz and Tom created for the community.

Sometimes I call this soup T and 4 Cs, because that’s how I remember the ingredient list: tomatoes, coconut milk, corn, curry powder, and cream. That’s it. Be sure to adjust the amount of curry powder depending on your taste and the intensity of your curry powder, and you can omit the cream for a vegan version.

If this combination sounds unusual, I’m not surprised. Most people look a bit puzzled when I mention this recipe, but it is a favorite of my younger son. My older son, on the other hand, hates raisins! In any event, this week’s Berkshire Eagle column contains not only the recipe, but also, in the narrative, some tips I’ve realized over the years from making a gazillion meatballs, and how to make them ahead for the freezer to facilitate a quick weeknight dinner. During my children’s school years, I mostly made a more traditional version, of course, since everyone would eat them, and my tips here will work with any meatball version you choose!