From Our Table

A weekend supper: roasted spaghetti squash halves as the bowl, piled with green-chili taco meat, cheese, salsa, and sour cream, crowned with tortilla chips.

Shepherd’s pie, baked in its own bowl: roasted acorn squash mashed with Keuka Gold potatoes, piled over browned beef and onion, and baked again until golden.

We treat spaghetti squash like the pasta it wants to be: real meatballs, real sauce, and the one trick that keeps the strands from going watery.

The dessert for when the duck eggs pile up: bigger, richer yolks set a silkier custard, and maple syrup makes it the most Upstate dessert there is.

The gateway pickle: sweet, tangy, turmeric-gold. No canner required — cucumbers to pickles in a day, and they keep a month in the fridge if they last that long.

Every September there’s a week where we know it’s the last of the corn. This is the pot that week gets — and the stripped cobs make the broth.

Butternut wants to be soup — silky with no cream tricks, a pour of goat milk for tang, and it freezes so a couple of October squash feed you into winter.

Everybody who says they’ve never had rabbit has had chicken pot pie — and this tastes like that, only the meat is more tender and the gravy has more to say.

Golumpki, halupki, or just cabbage rolls — a head of cabbage, good ground pork and beef, and a pan that feeds a crowd Sunday and reheats better Tuesday.

One bird, one pan of roots, one oven. The vegetables roast in the drippings, and the carcass becomes next week’s soup. This is how a whole chicken earns its keep.