An autumnal feast. Photo: Brent Ridge, Beekman 1802.

Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer-Purcell are the farmers and innovators behind Beekman 1802, a 200-year-old estate and farm in upstate New York. We'll be running recipes, photos and tales from the farm as their crops come into season.

One of the true pleasures of life on the farm is walking out to the heirloom vegetable garden to decide what looks good for dinner. All summer, we've been sharing some of our own recipes, but we're not the only ones out there with a backyard garden and a little creativity. There are thousands of you!

We decided to hold a contest to see who came up with the best impromptu recipe from their garden this year.
And guess what? One of the most influential gardening chefs in the world, Alice Waters, is going to help us choose the winner. We'll even prepare the winning recipe and put it right here. You and your recipe could be famous!

To get you started on the right track, we're giving you one of our favorites this season.

Photo: travelbex, Flickr.

Recipes abound for quick, innovative main dishes. Much fewer are ideas for interesting but not too intensive vegetable sides. I tend to get stuck in a rut, always preparing the same veggies the same way. Often, inspiration comes less from cookbooks or websites than from friends. This was the case recently when I overheard a my friend Isabel's mother, Carol, describe a cabbage recipe while on the phone with her husband. My ears perked up when she mentioned poppy seeds, which I've never seen paired with cabbage, but which immediately seemed to make sense. Part of Carol's ancestry is from Hungary, and there cabbage is sauteed and tossed with more than a dash of poppy seeds. Sometimes apples are in the mix, and often the cooked cabbage is tossed with a roughly equal amount of cooked egg noodles. Carol also explained that cottage cheese is frequently mixed in to make the dish richer and creamy.

Last night, I needed a quick dish to accompany a grilled leg quarter leftover from a Super Bowl party I attended. A few days before, I'd bought a head of cabbage specifically so that I could make the Hungarian dish. I had no apples, cottage cheese, or egg noodles, though, so a healthy dose of poppy seeds (two tablespoons for one head of cabbage) was the primary adornment for the cabbage, which I'd roughly shredded and browned along with a sliced onion in a tablespoon each of butter and olive oil. I also added a liberal sprinkle of black pepper and a tablespoon of sugar, and, of course, salt to taste. The dish is yummy, unusual (for me, at least), and very easy to prepare. I can't wait to try all the variations of this Hungarian delight.

I think all Thanksgiving tables need some nice, slow-cooked cruciferous veggies - roasted Brussels sprouts with browned butter and pecans, braised spiced cauliflower. Or how about this winner: Savoy cabbage gratin, made with rich, triple-cream cheese. Molly at Orangette has adapted a recipe from Molly Stevens, and oh, does it look tempting. All you need to do is saute sliced cabbage and scallions in some butter, add a bit of stock and bake in a gratin dish before tossing on some flavorful cheese. The original recipe calls for a Saint-Marcellin; Molly subs a Delice de Bourgogne.

If all of Jonathan's excellent step-by-step instructions weren't enough to convince you that you too can cook up corned beef at home, then watch this episode of Fork You from last year so that we can walk you through the steps in live action. As an added bonus, the episode also includes a recipe for Irish Soda Bread (which was excellent but it doesn't keep well, so plan on only making the amount that you and your brunch/dinner guests can eat in sitting).

You want Irish food? You got it.

Jeannette, a Slashfood Flickr user - who also happens to write a fantastic blog, Everybody likes Sandwiches - shared her recipe for colcannon, traditional Irish comfort food made of cabbage or kale, mashed potatoes, and a healthy dose of butter or cream. Jeannette added leeks to hers (onions or chives are often added, as well).

Colcannon can be eaten anytime, obviously, but it's typically enjoyed around Halloween, and some families hide charms or coins in the mixture. The idea is that whomever finds it has luck for the coming year. There's actually an adorable scene that illustrates this concept in In America, a film about an Irish family who immigrates to America.

Check out Jeannette's recipe here.

The intensity of the purple caught my eye and said to me that this image deserved to be today's Food Porn Daily picture. I like to do a combination of purple and green cabbage in my slaws, but like the contrast between the cabbage and the pepitas. Thanks to Vvanessa for adding this on to the Slashfood Flickr group (with nearly 8,000 tasty pictures for your viewing pleasure)!

If yesterday's post on canning piqued your interest in food preservation, then you might want to check out this post over at Farm to Philly. Nicole took some of the Daikon radish that came in her CSA box, mixed it with ginger, garlic, Korean ground chile paste, salt, sugar and Swiss Chard and turned it into Kimchi. She skips out on the step in which you bury the jars underground for the Winter and instead just tucks them into a cool, dark place until the fermentation process is complete.

Photo link

I'm a big fan of quickly pickled things. I often make a salad of sliced cucumber and red onion, with a dressing of red wine vinegar, a little olive oil, dill, salt and pepper (and sometimes a pinch of sugar if it's too puckery). I like to let it sit for about a half hour, so that the cucumber soften a bit but still retain a little crunch and the red onion starts to turn a feisty magenta.

The Oregonian's food section printed a recipe on Tuesday for "Quickled Kraut," a local restaurant's take on a quick pickled cabbage. It's not as quick as my cucumber salad, they recommend that you make it at least 24 hours before serving, but it sure seems simple to prepare.

Not all appetite suppressants come in pill form. After all, food itself is an appetite suppressant. The trick is not to used hamburgers and macaroni and cheese, but to opt for more filling and less fattening alternatives. Fortunately, it is actually easy to incorporate some of these filling foods into your regular diet without totally changing the way you eat and without giving in to temptation too often.

Registered dietitians recommend high fiber, low fat foods as the best ways to fill up without filling out. Some top choices are:

• Pine nuts -- fatty acids in pine nuts trigger the release cholecystokinin (CKK), a hormone that could help suppress appetite.
• Spicy foods -- can boost your metabolism and "dull your taste buds so you're apt to eat less." On the positive side, the spices will taste great even if whatever you're tempted to eat after doesn't.
• Apples -- high fiber, low calorie. They have more fiber per bite than other fruits and one before a meal can help speed satiety.
• Milk -- the research is still up in the air, but some scientists think that the calcium in dairy can help break down fat.
• Light greens -- cabbage, celery and lettuce (as well as cucumbers) are very low in calories and can be added to most meals or salads to bulk them up.

There are two reasons why brussel sprouts are not the most universally popular of foods. The first is that they are easily over cooked and, like the larger cabbages that they are related to, can develop a mushy texture and an unpleasant smell. The second reason that they aren't that popular also has to do with smell, but this one is one that they cause, not one that the sprouts give off themselves. Fortunately, both problems are easily remedied by proper preparation.

"Overcooking causes chemicals in the sprouts to react and emit sulphur," in turn imparting a biter taste and smell to the sprouts. To properly enjoy sprouts, start with fresh, crisp ones that have tightly curled leaves. They should require only 6-8 minutes of steaming or boiling before they are crisp-tender. Taking care not to overcook them, try braised brussel sprouts or oven roasted brussel sprouts, which will hopefully change the way you think about (and smell) brussel sprouts.

If you still don't like the cabbagy flavor of the sprout once it has been properly cooked, you can always try Shredded Parmesan Brussels Sprouts or Bacon and Cheese Brussels Sprouts.

Without naming any names, some cultures have a tradition of overcooking vegetables almost to the point of mush. If you had a grandmother or a great grandmother who liked to prepare vegetables in this way, you are probably familiar with one of the least pleasant smells that the kitchen has to offer: overcooked cabbage. When overcooked, cabbage tends to emit a faint (or strong, depending on how much cabbage is being cooked) smell of sulfur. To cope, the usual strategy is to turn on a fan or open the windows, but this week I heard about a different technique. Apparently, if you add a whole, unshelled walnut or a celery stalk to the cooking water, there will be no smell.

I don't cook enough cabbage to test this - and certainly try to avoid overcooking it, in any case - but does this actually work, or is it just an old wives' tale?

We looked at a couple of spinach alternatives last week, but with the new warnings against lettuce, we're starting to reevaluate some of our salad options. After all, it is always good to have a backup plan, even though no one has become sick as a result of contaminated lettuce at this time. NPR has several suggestions for alternatives to typical salad greens. Their picks include arugula, baby bok choi, swiss chard, collard greens, watercress, cabbage and brussel sprout petals. Chef Patrick O'Connell came up with recipes for all of these alternatives, too.

The only potential drawback of this list is that most of the salads/sides are actually hot dishes, and not what you would necessarily expect to stand in for a pre-dinner salad. Fortunately, with fall and winter on the way, a warm salad can be very satisfying and this is a good opportunity to try a few new greens in a new way, such as Braised Baby Bok Choy or Brussel Sprout Petals with Coriander Vinaigrette.

[Thanks, Jose!]

Earlier this summer our family lost the Patriarch.

Dozens of people brought lasagnas, cakes, cookies, hams, ice cream, all lovely and appreciated. After a few weeks of this and a dozen added pounds I realized it was time to return to basics and stop "stuffing" everything, literally and figurative. I dug out a new Moosewood cookbook (moosewood restaurant, new classics) and picked, at random, a seemingly bland recipe. Since we are of immediate Irish descent it was fitting that a recipe called Valle d'aosta Cabbage Soup turned up. With some trepidation after a look at the ingredients I decided to lay it on my family, prepared for polite affirmations. The preparation, reminiscences during the prep, and the dinner itself will live forever. Although the dish is from the Italian Alps, we pretended all was Irish and it goes like this:

I saw this recipe in an old issue of Cooking Light (from 2003) that I had lying around and it immediately caught my eye. Why I didn't make it the first time I saw it, I'll never know, but I'm glad I did it now.

Waldorf salad isn't something that you see too often, but the combination of apples, raisins, celery and walnuts is not only addictive, but crunchy and satisfying. Coleslaw, too, is crunchy and refreshing, which is why it is such a popular side to accompany rich and meaty meals. Of course, both salads are slathered in mayo, so they're not exactly healthy foods despite having low-cal ingredients. This is one of the reasons why I liked the Cooking Light recipe, since it eliminates a lot of the fat but still tastes great. Combining the elements of the two salads into Waldorf Coleslaw worked beautifully.