Summer Squash

Don’t be scared off by the use of sugar in this highly aromatic one-dish meal. It just heightens the flavors of the spices, onions, and pecans.

This vegetable-rich entrée is a breeze to make with prepared polenta.

Roasting vegetables usually takes 45 minutes or longer. The technique we use here takes only 15 minutes, yet provides excellent slow-roasted flavor. For a change, omit the pasta and serve the vegetables as a side dish.

Lemon-tinged cream cheese tempers peppery arugula in this nutrition-packed entrée.

An attractive dish for entertaining, this recipe has a Middle-Eastern flavor. If you are really in a hurry, try the alternate cooking method.

With their slightly caramelized flavor, roasted vegetables make a wonderful spread. Serve with pieces of toasted whole-grain pita rounds or baked tortilla chips.

This zippy Italian-style hero proves that a vegetable sandwich can be as hearty as one made with meat. We take colorful slices of grilled, lightly charred vegetables, an oil-and-vinegar dressing, tapenade (a pungent black-olive spread), fresh basil, and provolone cheese, and serve the whole things on a crackly seeded roll that will keep its texture while soaking up the delicious dressing. This satisfying sandwich is delicious with spiced Terra sweet-potato chips.

Here is how my family in India prepared our everyday summer squash. It was utterly simple and utterly good. The squash itself was different, shaped liked a bowling pin and slightly curled up, but the taste and texture were similar. I like to use yellow squash and zucchini together, but you could use just one or the other. This dish may be served hot at most Indian meals, and cold as a salad.

An appealing vegetable trio is enlivened by a wine-scented sauté.

Here’s a summer harvest dish that I absolutely love. Fresh corn kernels are a must if you want to get the full impact of the fresh flavors. This is great with veggie burgers, soy hot dogs, and tortilla specialties.

This quick and colorful pasta dish will give you a summery feeling any time of year.

This is a fat, stuffed vegetable sandwich that’s great for a picnic. The olive tapenade is also good spooned on bread toasts and served as an hors d’oeuvre.

Serve small wedges as an appetizer or large wedges for a vegetarian main dish.

We remember falling in love with a photograph of petits farcis in an old issue of Cuisine e Vins de France We're sure that most chefs of our age who dreamed of cooking professionally since childhood feel the same when they open a vintage copy of Cuisine et Vins de France, or of Georges Blanc's De La Vigne à l'Assiette. There is not greater food era than when Michel Guérard, Bernard Loiseau, Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Georges Blanc and Roger Vergé were at the top. Petits Farcis are vegetables stuffed with sausage mix, then baked and eaten lukewarm. We make them in the summer when the growers show up with pattypan squashes. What else are you supposed to do with those little squashes other than admire them? The stuffed vegetables are awesome with a mâche salad and partner perfectly with a nice rosé or pastis. Get the smallest vegetables you can find, about the size of a gold ball.

Talk about a lean bean! Adding about 1/2 cup of filling high-fiber chickpeas to your daily diet can cut your consumption of fatty foods, a study in the journal Appetite finds.

Highway 84 runs from Santa Fe to Colorado. About forty minutes north of Santa Fe, the highway cuts a paved path through Ohkay Owingeh, a Native American reservation, and the roadside becomes dense with fast-food outlets, outposts of national grocery chains, Walmart, and billboards for Ohkay Casino, Hutch and Norma Naranjo's sprawling midcentury home is set about fifty years back from the road, a shrine to the tug-of-war between new ways and traditional ones. In the backyward Mr. Naranjo built two hornos (behive-shaped adobe ovens). Inside the house, a handmade wreath of dried chiles hangs on one wall and a string of made-for-tourists ceramic peppers on another. A naïve painting of St. Francis hangs not far from a cluster of the dream catchers that the couple and their two grown children fashion from string, feathers, and yarn, just as their Pueblo ancestors did. "We go to church one Sunday and dance the traditional dances the next," said Mrs. Naranjo. A retired social worker, she gives cooking classes and does a little catering. But she spends most of her mornings working the two-acre minifarm where she grows vegetables from seeds that have been passed from one Pueblo generation to another for at least a thousand years. "The history of our people is in those seeds," she says. In the evenings, when her husband builds hornos on the terraces of hotels and McMansions, Mrs. Naranjo visits the elderly women in Ohkay Owingeh, who remember life and cooking when it was closer to the land, and collects their recipes and food stories. "Our history lives in our hands as well," she says. Mrs. Naranjo moves with the efficiency of a modern professional as she smooths cornmeal paste on damp cornhusks. Tiny white kernels from several ears of heirloom corn, and diced green chiles and squash, along with a thick, bloodred chile sauce and shredded fresh cheese, are lined up in small stainless-steel bowls at the head of her tamale assembly line. She notes that tamales were stuffed with rabbit, venison, pork—whatever people had. Vegetable tamales were a fine way to make use of the gardens' overflowing crops. She swathes the dough, sprinkles filling, folds, ties, and places the tamale bundles on a rack set over water in a big enameled pot. From time to time, she glances out the window to the backyard, where her husband is feeding small, dry sticks into this new four-by-four horno. Her smaller tamales are, she says, her only concession to modernity: "People love the little ones as snacks, and Hutch and I love them in these green chile stews we make in the horno."

My friend and fellow food writer Angela Knipple cherishes memories of childhood visits to her Great-Uncle Curtis and Great-Aunt Marian's big farm. Perhaps her passion for food, cooking, and sustainable agriculture took root during her summer days in their enormous garden. She loved weeding and harvesting vegetables, and turning her fingers a fabulous shade of purple while picking purple-hull peas. Meals were major delights of homegrown, homecooked goodness, including this beautiful summer squash pie—deliciously creamy, sweet, and a little bit tart. You could use yellow squash instead of zucchini, or do a combination of the two.

Thai red curry paste and unsweetened coconut milk are sold in the Asian foods section of some supermarkets and at Asian markets. Be sure what you're buying is coconut milk, not sweetened cream of coconut, which is used for cocktails.

This dish is particularly delicious in summer, when zucchini, peppers, and summer squash are farm-fresh. You can also pile the grilled vegetables onto crusty French bread that's been slathered in creamy chevre. Or make hors d'oeuvres by topping Crostini with slices of grilled vegetable and some crumbled chevre. The vegetables can be grilled up to 1 hour in advance; assemble just before serving.