Rutabaga

Any root veg you have on hand will work for this easy dinner. Serve with eggs, fish, chicken, burgers, salads, or use it as a taco or quesadilla filling.

These root vegetable pancakes are a gift to eggs everywhere for brunch, served under a little crème fraîche and smoked salmon for a party app, or simply paired with sour cream and applesauce for an ideal sweet-savory combo anytime.

Chicken potpie is a dish many of us crave when we want to conjure up the warmth of home and hearth, and chef Ashley Christensen, owner of Poole's Diner in Raleigh, North Carolina, is no different. "This potpie is inspired by my mother's kind of cooking: dishes that shout out the classics, but with clean flavors and crisp textures," she says. Christensen grounds the pie in colder-month offerings of sweet potatoes and rutabagas and tender leaves of kale instead of the usual carrot and celery combo. Adding another bit of Southern flair, the chef uses a small amount of cornmeal in the crust, which provides a nutty, toasty flavor with an echo of sweetness to match the filling. "Though some potpies are encased in crust, I like the "island" approach, letting the gravy bubble up around the pillow of crust," Christensen says. "Crust is potpie's defining moment, no matter how delicious the filling."

Eating fresh produce in a variety of colors is key to good health, and this autumn medley of carrots, butternut squash, rutabaga, parsnips, and shallots provides an abundance of vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients.

A cross between a cabbage and a turnip, rutabaga also belongs to the Brassica family and contains some fiber and potassium along with vitamin C. Peel away the tough exterior of the root vegetable to discover hearty, firm flesh that’s tasty and filling.

Ribollita is a classic Tuscan soup traditionally made with leftover minestrone thickened with chunks of stale bread. This version is something quite different, and it’s based entirely on the one they serve at Ristorante Da Delfina, a wonderful ristorante in a tiny village nestled in the hills just outside Florence. It was described to me as a fried soup, so the first time I ate it, I didn’t know what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that they’d turned the soup into something wholly unsouplike that I could eat with a knife and fork. The way we make it, after cooking off the liquid, we thicken the soup with bread, we chill it, and then shape it into patties that we pan-fry in olive oil. We serve it as an antipasto but it could be a side dish or, served with a green salad, a light meal. I often recommend it to vegetarians, and to make it vegan, just omit the Parmigiano rind. One of our inveterate recipe testers, Tracey Harada, tested this recipe about eight times to get the flavors perfect. Cavolo nero, a variety of kale, is one of the defining ingredients of any ribollita. You can find it at specialty food stores and health-food stores, but if you can’t find it, use another variety of kale.

When you’re making a pot roast, the vegetables you add at the beginning contribute to the development of the sauce, but those at the end draw on the sauce for flavor (like the turnip or rutabaga in this dish), often making them the best part. You can skip browning the meat to save time (and mess) if necessary. Yes, browning creates complexity, but there is so much flavor in this particular pot roast that subtle complexity is overwhelmed.

As good warm as hot, this is a nice homey casserole to go with a roast or other dish in the spirit of Sunday dinner. Other vegetables you can prepare this way: rutabagas are not only traditional but wonderful, but other turnips are great too, as are carrots, potatoes, parsnips, and celeriac (celery root).

The chicken is in the oven—heat forming a golden crust that seals in the juices, salt working its silent alchemy within, denaturing some of the proteins in tough muscles making those parts more tender and flavorful. Roasting is the easiest way to cook chicken and the tastiest. All that is required to reach perfection is time and the perfect salt. Sugpo Asin, a king among salts, glowing rose-cloud white, lush and firmly crunchy, with dulcet brine notes that play lavishly (but with discipline) against the sweet tamed gaminess of poultry, honors this basic meat and vegetable meal as all basic meals should be honored—asserting the preeminence of simple home cooking as the cornerstone of eating well.

There have been many highly original versions of the straightforward miner’s lunch (if you couldn’t come up to the surface for lunch, you took a warm pasty down with you, holding the thickly crimped edge with your grubby hands, then leaving it behind to appease the spirits of the mine) but I have rarely enjoyed one as much as those I have eaten in Cornwall. My pasty is (categorically) not a Cornish pasty. I precook my filling, you see, which Cornish cooks would never do. I cook the meat and vegetables before wrapping them in the pastry crust purely because it results in a pasty whose filling is especially tender and giving. I also use a proportion of butter in the pastry too. The similarity between my pasty and a Cornish one is purely in the ingredients: beef, potato, onion, and rutabaga. Chaucer was partial to a pasty—they appear in The Canterbury Tales, and in several of Shakespeare’s plays, including The Merry Wives of Windsor, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Titus Andronicus. We shall gloss over the small point that Titus uses Chiron and Demetrius’s bodies rather than the more traditional beef skirt steak. I do suggest you let the finished parcels rest for half an hour before baking, if you get the chance.

Modern pasty recipes, especially those in the more touristy enclaves of Britain’s farthest southern county, stretch the recipe almost as far as Titus, swapping beef for pork, the rutabaga for apple, even daring to crimp the finished turnover on the top instead of at the side. I make one without meat, in which I use goat cheese and thyme along with the usual starchy filling of potato and rutabaga. It is filling, yet somehow soft and gentle, too.