Cooking Fresh: When Life Gives You Produce...

Good cooks advise us to go to the market and see what produce looks best before we begin planning our evening meal. That advice works when the market sells by the seasons, as farmers’ markets do. It doesn’t work at the grocery store, where a century of breeding produce to withstand three weeks of shipping has made for a bunch of pretty vegetables that don’t taste like much.

Farmers’ market tables and roadside stands are still in full swing, though the days are noticeably shorter. So the farmers’ market shopper still has tempting choices. Buying is the easy part. Trickier is not buying too much, deciding what to cook and wondering how to deal with what you’ve overbought.

Keep the burrito in mind. It’s ready to accept whatever you might purchase, or over-purchase, with equanimity. Perfect-sized zucchini, seven inches long and 1½ inches in diameter, are so tempting all in their little piles. Super-sweet colored peppers are second only to ripe tomatoes as my favorite summer vegetable. It’s easy to come home with too many.

Cooked outdoors over charcoal, both of these vegetables taste great as they are, as a side dish for hamburgers or steak, or turned into dinner meals with bowls of grains and beans. With the charcoal heating up for hamburgers or pork shoulder, I’m likely to cover the grill with a variety of summer produce and cook them to provide a stock for the week’s meals. These smoky-tasting vegetables make a burrito stuffing something special.

For the last couple of summers I’ve combined chicken orders with my brother, who drives to Henry County for bulk purchases from a farmer there, 10 or 20 whole birds at a time.

The mix of light and dark meat is my preference in chicken salad, among other chicken dishes, so whole chickens work for me. One chicken is enough to fill eight large burritos. You can simmer the chicken in the cool of the morning, yielding chicken for burritos today and broth for risotto tomorrow. If you’re making fewer burritos you can grill chicken for a meal and strip the meat from leftover pieces. (Save the bones of the chicken you strip, and simmer those for smoky broth.)

Finish the burritos in the oven, or on a covered grill, to heat through. My favorite way to top them is with a spicy green sauce—to which you can add more cheese if you want. Serve them with a pico de gallo: fresh tomato relish served the day it is made and piquant with lime juice, onions and hot chilies. I love it, and during tomato season it becomes more of a salad than a relish for me. And while you’re mincing jalapeños for the pico, mince a cup or two for your freezer. You’ll be able to add summer’s heat to everything from spaghetti sauce and chili to cornbread dressing and mashed sweet potatoes.

As summer fades farmers in Kentucky offer apples of many shapes and sizes. I love baking with these fruits—like tomatoes, local apples offer more flavor and dimension than the apples from the grocery. The cake recipe here is a riff off pineapple upside-down cake. The same butter–brown sugar topping holds apples slices instead of pineapple. And the cake gets its deep flavor from Kentucky sorghum, along with winter spices like ginger and cinnamon. Serve it with plain, unsweetened whipped cream for a great contrast in cool and spicy, light and dense, sweet and rich.