Fall Squash and Pepper Soup

And fall boxes always include a variety of winter squash. Use your butternut or delicatas in this recipe adapted from a recipe by Steven Satterfield of Miller Union as demonstrated at the Peachtree Road Farmers Market. You can use all the different peppers from this week’s box as well, but you’ll have to find your own hot pepper.

Field Peas with Butter, Mint and Lime

This recipe is from Matt and Ted Lee of The Lee Bros. Charleston Kitchen, author of several terrific Southern cookbooks. Scale down according to the amount of peas in your bag. The recipe was written for butter beans, but will work just fine with your field peas.

About this recipe, they say:

Along with muscadine grapes, butter beans are among the farmer’s market treasures of late summer—reason to wake up with gusto to another day of stultifying heat and oxford-soaking humidity. We do all kinds of things with butter beans: we make a hummus-like spread for the cocktail hour, we simmer them with seasoning meats of all sorts, and we compose marinated salads aplenty. But this may be our most simple treatment yet, and one of the most satisfying.

Butter beans come in many varieties: Some beans are green with purple speckles, some are reddish brown, a few are ivory colored, and there’s a shade of green besides. For this simple side dish, we like to use the small green ones (though you may use frozen baby lima beans if butter beans aren’t in season).

Curried Sweet Potato and Mustard Greens Salad

No, we haven’t received our first sweet potatoes yet, but they’re on their way soon. In the meantime, you could make this with the white potatoes that have been part of our recent boxes, or just make the mustard green salad and serve it alone. Demonstrated by Joey Ward of Gunshow at Peachtree Road Farmers Market. Love the yogurt chutney.

Okra, Green Bean and Seafood Stew

This recipe for okra stew is adapted from one in Saveur magazine and is from Senegal. They credit it as a predecessor of Louisiana-style gumbo which makes sense to me, given how much of our Southern cuisine comes from African culture and the cooking of slaves. It takes a good while to cook, which is absolutely typical of West Africa food, but is well worth it. In Senegal, this would be made with eggplant, but I’m substituting the green beans from this week’s box.

Spaghetti Squash Pie

Using spaghetti squash in a sweet dish might be a surprise, but try this recipe from Vicky Murphy. It will remind you of a chess pie with a twist. “A friend shared [the recipe] with me back in the late 1970s when I first became aware of the squash. You can use almond flavoring or probably most any flavoring you like. I like to serve it with low-cal whipped cream, from the can, not the good stuff, to keep it as low calorie as possible,” Murphy said. She also said you can vary the amount of flavoring up to 2 tablespoons.

If your spaghetti squash provides more “noodles” than needed, toss the remainder in vinaigrette with chopped fresh tomatoes, garlic and basil for a quick mock pasta entree.

‘Mother-in-Law’ Beet Salad

This last recipe is an adaptation of one from Marc Sommers, executive chef of Parsley’s Custom Catering in Kennesaw, who demonstrated it at the Morningside Farmers Market a year or so ago. He says he “borrowed” this recipe from his Belarusian mother-in-law. I just had a beet-and-potato salad at an Ethiopian restaurant last night and I can’t wait to try this one.