Spaghetti Squash with Eggplant

I started cooking spaghetti squash years ago when I saw a display of them in a grocery store. I read the how-to-cook-it sticker on one and was intrigued. A winter squash that's a stand-in for pasta? Why bother? How could anything be as tasty as pasta? I thought I'd give it a try anyway. I was pleasantly surprised. It has a mild flavor, and it has a bit of bite to it. It's so much fun to use it as a sub for spaghetti.

Spaghetti squash is easy to prepare, and it's high in nutrients while low in calories. Toss it with your favorite pasta sauce and maybe some cooked lean ground meat or other veggies. You won't be missing the pasta.

Multiple-Bean Salad

This is a wholesome salad that's easy to throw together.

Throw-Everything-In Slow-Cooker Veggies

Sometimes we get so many different veggies in our farmers' market produce box and we're busy with so many other weekend activities that we don't have time to prepare special dishes with each type of produce. That's where this dish comes in. It's the perfect summer entrée, and it doesn't require any messing with the oven or the stove—an important attribute of any dish on a hot day.

Kalamata Olive Tapenade

The first night of summer the year we got engaged, Debbie and I ate dinner with my dad and his girlfriend at Seasons 52. It's an upscale joint with some marvelous seasonal dishes. Along with dinner, we had a small vegetable dish called Organic Tomato Tapenade. The aromas and flavors of this dish stuck with us long enough that we had to try making our own.

Zucchini Rice Gratin

What do you make if you have lots of garden zucchini? Yummy choices are zucchini bread, baked breaded zucchini sticks, and stir-fry. If you have several pounds of garden zucchini, give this dish a try. It makes a great side for grilled chicken.

Two-Berry Pie

As the CSA has been the inspiration of many things we cooked this summer, so was it the motivation with this pie. We had received yet another bunch of blueberries, and had worn thin on adding them to cereal. There was still plenty of the blueberry sorbet left over. So what better could we do than make a blueberry pie?

Basil Pesto

For several years running my mom and now I grow basil in the garden. It's a pleasant plant which doesn't take over, yet grows nice and bushy when the weather is right. I love the smell when you pick it, take it in, wash it, and start to cut it up. And there's plenty of ways you can cook with it. My favorite thing to do is to make a pesto and serve it over fresh angel-hair pasta. Or maybe on crackers.

Veggie Pasta al Pomodoro

Looking for a way to use up some veggies you just came home with? Have an intense fascination with pasta? If so, you just might be my better half. We came home with an eggplant, a summer squash, a couple tomatoes, some broccoli, and an onion from a previous week. After a little searching, we decided to make a fresh and light pasta al pomodoro.

Veggie Quinoa Stir-fry

Have you ever tried quinoa? It's a low-carb, grain-like alternative to rice, packed with complete protein (meaning that it contains all nine essential amino acids) and nutrients. We've used both red and the traditional white before. For this dish, we used equal parts red and white for a fun mix.

Summer Corn Salad

You might notice a trend among our recipes this summer. We bought a share in a CSA, and we've continued to get interesting combinations of vegetables and fruit every week since sometime back in May. This week we received some corn and some ripe peaches and decided to make a quick salad out of them.

Impromptu Lentil Salad

This is a quick lunch salad we threw together one early afternoon. We were getting hungry in Trader Joe's and happened across a package of ready-to-eat steamed lentils in the produce section. It has some salt, so we didn't add any to the dish ourselves. If you steam lentils from scratch, you may want to season them.

Serves 2-3 as a main dish, 4-6 as a side.

Blueberret (Blueberry Sorbet)

Debbie and I signed up with a CSA this year, and one of the things we heard to expect finally came true. We got a lot of one thing. More than either of us would ever buy at once. However, unlike the torrid tales of suffocating under five bushels of zucchini, we had a pound and a half of blueberries!

Granola

This is a healthful, easy-to-prepare granola that contains fruit juice instead of oil. Although it takes a while to bake this in the oven (a half hour), the oven temperature is kept pretty low, so the kitchen doesn't heat up too much, even in summer.