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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!

I’m not very good at pacing myself through all the things I freeze during the summer and fall harvest seasons. And it’s different every year, as we can see the next summer on the horizon, which items I find still tucked away in the freezer, so I never feel like I can plan accurately.

This year we still have a good amount of pesto cubes in the freezer, and so for this past week’s column in the Berkshire Eagle, I decided to share the recipe below. I think I like this even better than on pasta, as I find the acidity of the vinaigrette to be a nice counterpoint to the richness of the pesto.

There’s a sort of template I’ve used more times than I can count when making a vegetable pasta dish. The variations are endless, but generally speaking I rely upon the Sicilian addition of golden raisins and pine nuts to give some unexpected flavors to the recipe. I’m sure I’ve offered some version of this before, and yet here is another!

But my narrative here is one I want to highlight. Tastes can change; not always, but sometimes, an item we once swore off forever, can become a new favorite. Maybe it was poorly prepared, or maybe it was just a piece of meat that wasn’t great or an underripe piece of produce. Whatever the reason, I have now learned to keep tasting and keep trying, and I’ve definitely continued to expand my palate!

I think last spring I blogged at least three times about ramps! Although now you can find them in specialty stores and farmers’ markets, it’s so much more fun to forage for them yourself if you can find a secret spot for them.

In this week’s Berkshire Eagle column (actually one of two I wrote for this past week!), the grilled ramp hollandaise from one of last year’s posts makes a reprise. I also offered my idea for a risotto to highlight spring produce – peas and asparagus – using chopped ramp stems and bulbs in place of the usual onion or shallot, with the leaves stirred in at the end.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you may recall that I’ve included several recipes with figs. It’s no surprise, as fresh figs are among my favorite seasonal treats. I very much wish I could grow my own, and perhaps someday I will start that endeavor, but from what I’ve read, our climate in the Berkshires makes that a challenge!

Nonetheless we are lucky that they are available in local markets, and I have tried pretty much every fig recipe I have ever found – and then some! There are plenty of other times that I just improvise and create something off the top of my head, and this recipe below was one of those ideas which became my Berkshire Eagle article this past week.

I was really hesitant to offer this column (link here) for the March 31 edition of The Berkshire Eagle. We had enjoyed a little taste of spring, and it seemed out of sync to write about anything that would require a long simmer on the stove. And then it snowed on April 1, a pretty lousy April Fool’s Day joke if you ask me. So it turns out this was well-timed!

Of course I know it can snow well into April here in the Berkshires. Last year it was snowing on April 18 and I cooked and posted about French onion soup! The nice thing about the recipe below is that it yields enough sauce that you can use some right away and put the rest in the freezer for a quick and easy meal or two without having to stand at the stove.

I hear that these days we needn’t worry about children and grandchildren fighting over the family silver, because no one wants it anymore! But I do worry that with thousands of recipes available at the stroke of a few keys, many family favorites are not getting handed down, and those memories, those heirlooms, are all the more precious because they are intangible. Sure, some of us may have these recipes written down, and I treasure the ones that I have in my grandmother’s handwriting. But it’s more than just the yellowed recipe card that needs to be passed down; it’s also the collective memory of a special dish across generations, and often the features of those recipes carry the echoes of migration and adaptation to new lands, combining beloved traditions with new ingredients.

I hope these treasures from my family inspire you to safeguard some favorites from yours, to pass down to your children and grandchildren.

For my regular column this past week I decided to offer an easy favorite. You can find the column on the Berkshire Eagle website via this link, or you can scroll down here for my introduction and the recipe itself. We very often serve this with our favorite peanut (sesame) noodle recipe, available at this blog post.