Our recipe this week is for a large whitish botanically-enigmatic knob in the turnip family. The Macomber turnip. also known as the Westport turnip, was introduced to Westport by the Macomber brothers in 1876. It’s crisp as a radish, sweet as rutabaga, white as a turnip, and winsomely smooth and mellow when cooked. Turnips suspiciously like these are also called Cape turnips. And before Eastham became famous for its turnips, Falmouth was known as the turnip capitol of the Cape (which is why...
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Last week we ran a recipe for roasted eggplant. This week we’re roasting cauliflower. Even people who profess not to like cauliflower one bit can fall in love with this dish. Roasting brings out the sweetness of cauliflower and slightly caramelizes it. And the recipe couldn’t be easier.

Roasted Cauliflower
1 lb or so cauliflower, washed and trimmed
3-4 Tbs. mild olive oil
salt and pepper
squeeze of  lemon juice
½ tsp. fresh chopped thyme, or parsley

Preheat oven to 400F. Slice a whole head of ...
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As evenings get cooler, we don’t mind switching on our ovens and roasting vegetables at high temperature. You might want to try roasting eggplants while they are still plentiful. Choose the regular glossy dark eggplants for this. The addition of a pinch of turmeric is less for taste than for color – it imbues the eggplant slices with a golden hue. You can omit it if you don’t have ground turmeric handy.

Roasted Eggplant with a garlic-yoghurt sauce
1 medium eggplant
2 Tbs. light olive oil,...
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It’s been the vogue for a while to barely cook green beans—just plunge in boiling salted water for a few minutes until crisp tender. And, especially if they are skinny, beans are good cooked like that, in a squeaky, vibrant-green sort of way. There’s something to be said, though, for cooking beans over very low heat in their own buttery juices until they’ve wilted into a sweet, rich, slightly caramelized heap. A comforting dish, especially now the evenings are drawing in.

Wilted Beans
F...
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Peachtree Circle has been growing at least half a dozen tomato varieties this year at its Sippwissett farm. They include sweet small Sun Golds, Lillian’s Heirloom Yellow, orange Kellogg’s Breakfast, beautifully lobed red Soldacki, Eva Purple Ball (reminiscent of Brandywines) dusky Cherokee Purple and some amazing long tomatoes with crooked tips that look like hot red peppers. Real tomatoes in all shapes and sizes, with loads of personality! (If you’ve read Tomatoland, Barry Estabrook’...
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Tomatoes, fresh basil, garlic and olive oil…. All are available now at our market. Together they form the basis of many a great summer dish. Including this one for baked tomatoes, which delivers great flavor with a minimum of fuss.

Tomatoes stuffed with basil and garlic

4 medium-large firm ripe tomatoes
2 fat cloves of garlic, halved lengthways
4 large basil leaves
sea-salt
olive oil

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Find an ovenproof dish that will hold tomatoes snugly – you want a tight fit. Core...
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Squashes of all sorts are settling in for the summer. Yellow squash, zucchini, eye-popping patty pans. Here is our market manager’s recipe for zucchini fritters, which you will surely make over and over again in the months to come.

Zucchini fritters
3 cups coarsely grated zucchini (delete, just for reference: 2 small to medium zukes, ¾ to 1 lb, approx 350 g)
salt, pepper
1 egg, separated
1/3 cup finely sliced scallion
1/3 cup crumbled feta
¼ cup flour
1 Tbs. each oil and butter for cooking

Mix gra...
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Right now your favorite market has an abundance of peas, so here’s a recipe for peas in all their seasonal variety. The dressing is very light but packs a big flavor punch, with a nod to South-East Asia. This is for 2, double up for 4 servings.
 
Three pea salad (with peanuts)
2 packed cup pea greens, also called pea shoots or tendrils
1 cup sugar snaps, trimmed
½ cup shelled English peas
1 Tbs. finely chopped fresh mint
1Tbs. crushed dry-roasted peanuts
 
For the dressing:
1Tbs. seasoned rice vineg...
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This has been a terrific season for lettuces, in case you haven’t noticed. So here’s an idea for all those luscious lettuces we’re seeing: Grilled lettuce. It’s amazing what a little smoky char and heat can do for lettuce’s familiar flavor. Almost any kind of lettuce seems to work, as long as heads are full and tight, and there’s enough stem to keep leaves attached and stop heads falling apart. You can use a medium-hot barbecue, a pre-heated stove-top grill-pan, or even on a hot l...
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Red-skinned potatoes roasted in olive oil with rosemary or other herbs are always lovely. But sometimes, especially around the holidays, we like our spuds old-fashioned and crusty. The trick to these potatoes is to rough them up first, and then handle them with kid gloves. If you have duck or goose fat on hand, or flavorful pork fat or beef drippings, you can use those in place of oil and butter.

Crunchy roast potatoes

2 lbs. floury potatoes, such as russets, peeled and cut into evenly-sized pi...
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One way to hold on the bright flavors of the market is to pickle and bottle them. Like other grandmotherly skills, home-preserving fruits and vegetables is making a come-back. Pickling is the new knitting, says Sherri Brooks Vinton, author of Put ‘em Up! A Comprehensive Home Preserving Guide for the Creative Cook. A couple of us from the market team met Sherri at the Chefs Collaborative Summit in Boston last week. We were won over by her fresh take on the old kitchen arts – pickling, cann...
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Shaved Fennel Salad with Citrus Dressing
4-6 servings

2 medium fennel bulbs
juice of 1 lemon (2 Tbs. or so)
1 tsp. fresh orange juice
Sea salt, fresh ground black pepper
3 Tbs. extra virgin olive oil, such as Fattoria Il Lago, plus extra to drizzle
¼ cup Parmesan cheese shavings (or more, to taste)
2 Tbs. chopped parsley
Optional: handful of baby arugula or tender field greens, rinsed and dried

Wash fennel; cut the stalks from the bulbs where they meet. Trim bulbs at their root end. Cut each bulb i...
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Summer comes to an official end this week, but it’s still mild enough to barbecue, and tomatoes and corn and other summer vegetables are in plentiful supply. So, for this week’s recipe, here’s a way to grill corn from Andrea Norris’ new book, From Val’s Cape Cod Kitchen: Recipes For Comfort and Pleasure. It’s great for a late-season get-together with family and friends. Look for corn at the market and at local stands, such as Andrew’s Farm.

12 ears native corn on the cob
4 tablesp...
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A few weeks back we ran a recipe for zucchini ribbons, remarking how a zucchini becomes a whole new vegetable when you change the way it’s cut. Here’s yet another way to slice zucchini. Susan Ackell, chef and market-team-member, says it was inspired by pommes parisiennes, which are balls or more homely squares of potatoes cooked until golden in oil and butter.  Zucchini are called courgettes (little gourds) in Paris, so here you have it, courgettes parisiennes, all the way from Falmouth.

C...
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Cutting is an underappreciated part of cooking, at least in Western countries. Sometimes by changing the angle of a cut you can turn an old familiar friend like the zucchini into an entirely new vegetable. Don’t worry if your knives and knife skills aren’t super-sharp. For this a humble vegetable-peeler will do nicely, and use the best olive oil you can afford.

2 medium zucchinis, about 1 lb., rinsed and dried
8 large basil leaves, or a mixture of mostly basil with a little mint, rinsed and...
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Makes about 16 small pancakes

1 cup corn kernels (2 ears, shucked, with silk removed)
3 tbs. chopped scallion or onion greens
1 tsp. minced jalapeño (or pinch dried red pepper flakes)
1 ½ tbs. finely minced red or green bell pepper
1 tbs. minced fresh cilantro
1 egg, separated
¼ tsp salt, pinch of cumin seed
2 tbs. flour
1 tbs. butter, 1 tbs. peanut or corn oil, or more as needed
lime wedges

To cut corn from the cob: stand ear upright in a soup bowl and, slicing down with a good knife, cut kernel...
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You’ll need to buy what seems like a prodigious amount of pods for 3-4 modest servings. The recipe is easily doubled, however (and all those discarded pods and shells can be composted).

2 lbs fava bean pods, for roughly 2 cups shelled beans
1 tbs. olive oil
1-2 fat garlic cloves, peeled and bruised
sprig of fresh thyme
squeeze of lemon juice
I tbs. chopped fresh parsley
salt & freshly ground black pepper

Shell the fava beans: snap or slit open the pods and remove beans from their fur-lined cocoons....
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