A CORNUCOPIA OF VEGETABLES

Scallions, radishes, honey nut squash, baby eggplant, orange carrots, sweet corn, red beets, red leaf lettuce, white/orange/purple cauliflower, French cucumbers, figs, purple bell pepper, Asian corn.

A jaunt through the farmers market exposes customers to the varieties of produce that come available during the various seasons of the year. I’m especially fond of green onions —"scallions,” if you will— no matter the season. And I do like radishes, too. Some people are crazy about them with butter, others with them roasted. Haven’t tried roasted, yet. How about a composed salad of veal brains, radish, anchovy and quail egg with butter vinaigrette! Now that one crazy dish. Maybe your preference is for raw radishes with a bit of salt . . . no crazy dish that. There are oodles of creative ideas here if the above two are way too over the top or way too boring. I’ve gone goofy over the honey nut squash. I looked and looked and looked for them. I thought surely here in the bountiful fields of California some would be grown, brought to market, and would confound me in all their varieties. Once I found just one variety, I baked them in Hasselback fashion. I made them into a soup. Then, mysteriously, I got distracted by eggplants, carrots, sweet corn, beets, red lettuce, white/yellow-purple cauliflower, French cucumbers, figs, purple bell peppers, and Asian sticky corn.

Scallions are a member of the Allium family —think garlic, onions, leeks, and shallots. They grow in clumps. They develop dark green hollow tube-like leaves I use them and potato salad, egg salad and chomping them raw with a can of albacore, a species smaller than skipjack or yellowfin, in olive oil. Albacore is found throughout the world in warm waters...

Some say radishes are the most underrated root of all. Not so, say some food magazines. If those 47 recipes don’t give you inspiration, here are 25 more. If all these ideas fall flat, I’ve got one for a salad of not-every-day treats for y’all!

All that you may want to know and more about this elusive honey nut squash.

Did you know there were at least 294 baby eggplant recipes in the world? We’ll, on this particular web site, one of dozens, mind you, there are 2 million recipes of all kinds, which absolutely is more than I want to scan to decide what to have for dinner tonight.

Carrots are terrific roasted with potatoes and a massive pot roast. Make a cake with them, a marmalade with them, or pickle them But roasted: That’s just my fav. They are root vegetables that were first grown in Afghanistan around 900 A.D. Orange is their best-known color, but try purple, yellow, red, and white. Need some ideas? Here are 20 or so.

I once worked at Green Giant Co., in LeSueur, Minnesota, where the sweet corn was dumped by the truckload on mass concrete pads before being pushed by a tractor onto a conveyor belt and into the factory for shucking and canning. I did time on that conveyor line. One hour on, 10 minutes off. Each ear had to be fed into a set of knives a certain way that escapes me. I could hardly last a whole day. I’d buy some sweet corn off the pad, take it home, in its utterly perfect state of to-the-day-ripe sweetness. A perfect food. I’m smitten by it to this very day. Grill, boil, steam, or roast. Here are but a few ideas.

I so love red beets. I roast them and drowned them in butter. I find them sweeter than yellow beets. Wow! This recipe page on line says there are 438,817 beet recipes “that take into account your taste preferences.” I’m going to go take a nap before I decide to dive into this encyclopaedic treasure or choose my old fav once again for this week’s dinner.

It’s hard to tire of eating red leaf lettuce. Reasons to try another variety may well lead you to more than a half-dozen other spectacular greens. Who knows, you may find you take a cotton to numerous ways to delight in the aforementioned composed salad.

I like grilled or steamed cauliflower. Never eaten golden or purple. For starters, here are a couple dozen recipes. For some clever ideas, check out this page. Roasted cauliflower recipes. If this is your fav vegetable. Into orange or “cheddar” cauliflower? Ever eaten red cabbage? Drunk red wine? Well, this purple cabbage gets its purple in the same place.

This French cucumber is the only product that one Frenchman offers at his stall at the Walnut Creek, Calif., farmers market. I passed on them one week and bought them the next because, hey, they’re French!, and they looked appetizing. The seller said Google the name, Google a recipe, and I’m done. Well, I couldn’t find anything anywhere the first time. So, I age them raw. But, alas. Click above “recipe.” Delish!

There are couple different types of figs. They vary enough from one to the next that my foodie friend prefers what she prefers. No, she’s crazy for them! Check out the figs here.

Purple bell peppers sure have the good looks. I’m guessing these are purple beauty peppers. Almost a decade ago by now, one gardner grew a peck of purple peppers, much to her delight.

Asian sticky corn. Such is a new one on me. There’s so little to say about sticky corn except I did see it at the Diablo Valley farmers market in Walnut Creek, Calif. It appealed to my eye. I took its picture. I looked it up on the web. Seems it was first acknowledged about 100 years ago in the U.S. having ventured here from China. And not much else there but this.