Still In Season: Cooking With Autumn's Harvest

The nights may be cold, the tomatoes history, the scarves and heavy socks coming out from the back of the drawer, but the harvest season isn't over yet!

In the market and in the garden, many crops are just coming into their own. Winter squash, kale, cauliflower, nuts, beets, parsnips, turnips and many others are just now approaching their best (and cheapest, if you're buying instead of growing them).

Kale is sweeter after a frost, as are many wild greens which lose their bitterness once the cool weather returns. Dandelion greens hug the ground waiting for me to find them. Chickweed is back, tender and lush, just waiting to be used in one of my Cold Weather Pestos. Field garlic reappears with tops tender enough to be snipped like chives over a baked potato with sour cream.

This is also the season of root harvest. Frost sweetens parsnips and turnips. Chop them into a hearty stew, or try them mashed half and half with potatoes. A simple, old-fashioned cough syrup can be made by hollowing out a large turnip (save the scooped out part for that stew), filling the hollow with sugar, covering the turnip with foil or plastic wrap and waiting overnight. In the morning, the sugar will be dissolved into a turnip-y tasting liquid. Store this in a jar in the refrigerator and take by the teaspoon when you've got a rumbly chest cough.

While I'm gathering those dandelion greens, I dig up the roots to roast. Ground and mixed in with some regular coffee, this makes one of my all time favorite beverages with a molasses-like taste. People avoiding caffeine can make a pure brew of roasted dandelion or chicory root without the coffee. I scrub the roots, chop them and spread them on a cookie sheet. Then I roast them in a 250 F oven, stirring occasionally, until they are fully dry and dark brown but not burned. The sweet, earthy smell wafting through the apartment while they roast is wonderful! To use, grind in a coffee grinder and brew as you would coffee.

Jerusalem Artichokes are another end-of-the-year root crop. When I was growing up in California, we used to add sweet, crisp slices of Sunchokes (as they are also known) to salads. They are also good for replacing potatoes in any recipe. Scrub them well with a brush, but don't bother trying to peel the knobby little darlings. I grew these for the first time this year, and the tall, handsome plants are still blooming bravely in the garden long after the sunflowers, their botanical cousins, quit.