Not that the attention ratatouille garners is undeserved; packed with vegetables at the height of summer ripeness, it is one of the best testaments available to the joy of eating seasonally. In fact there may be no better way to enjoy zucchini, eggplant, bell peppers, onions and tomatoes all at the same time. But the real lesson of ratatouille lies not in the adherence to those core ingredients but in the happy combination of peak season produce, with nothing that’s not in season. Just about any combination will do, as long as the vegetables are fresh and ripe.

Luckily, this is the time of summer when the overabundance in farmers markets helps keep my kitchen stocked with nothing but fresh, ripe vegetables. The motivation for this summer stew was two large eggplants, but as I stooped down to remove these from the crisper drawer I kept seeing additional prospects for a seasonal stew: half a head of cabbage, a green pepper, five small leeks, tomatoes (the latter not, of course, stored in the refrigerator).

The great thing about a stew is you can be pretty lax about procedure since it’s all getting cooked together anyway. I cubed and salted my eggplant, since conventional wisdom suggests doing so will remove some kind of bitterness. I then sauteed sliced leeks and green bell pepper in a large amount of olive oil until the leeks were starting to brown deeply. I added the eggplant cubes and let them brown a bit too. Next went in the half head of cabbage, thinly sliced, a large sprig of thyme, and about ten roma tomatoes that I had pureed (and salted and sugared to make up for really lackluster flavor — you don’t win ‘em all at the farmers market). I added water to just about cover everything and let the pot stew away for a half an hour while I cooked some white rice. Right before serving the dish, I sprinkled it with fragrant basil shreds.

I was happy with the way this turned out, but I hope I don’t have you headed to the store in search of two eggplants, a half head of cabbage, a green pepper, five leeks and ten roma tomatoes because the point of all this was that if the ingredients for your summertime stew are fresh and in season, you won’t go wrong — it’s the spirit, not the letter, 0f a ratatouille recipe.

I am confident to cook most of my farmers market haul without consulting references, but zucchini blossoms send me into panic mode and I dive deep into whatever my miscellaneous Italian cookbooks and the Internet have to tell me. In past years this has yielded up some interesting, if ultimately flawed, techniques. Patricia Wells’s Trattoria recommends making a meringue of a batter with three egg whites (along with flour, water and beer) which makes a nice fluffy coating. Nice and fluffy, that is, until the meringue produced after furious whisking starts to droop, and the battered blossoms with it. Even the first few flowers when the meringue was working were coated in a great puff of a shell that drew most of the attention to itself. I don’t remember on what website I found the recipe for the disaster of the year before that (I think club soda was involved) but if it had been any good, I would have saved it.

With two consecutive years of failure under my belt, I was determined as ever not to buy zucchini blossoms this year. I put up a pretty good fight, having delayed the purchase until late July before Martha finally got her way and we went home with a bundle of bright orange blossoms in our basket. Unsuccessful in my attempt to avoid them altogether, I was at least determined not to repeat the mistakes of the previous years, and by my calculation principal among them was reliance on dubious and finicky recipes. So I scrapped the recipes and went with what I knew in my heart to be true: when it comes to frying vegetables or anything else, you can’t go wrong with beer batter. Mine was made with half a bottle of my home-brewed Irish red ale and enough flour to achieve a thin consistency that was still substantial enough to fully coat the flowers.

It just goes to show you, to paraphrase a wiser man than myself, beer really is the solution to all of life’s problems. These fried blossoms were just what I was after: the batter was crisp but still delicate enough that you could tell you were eating a flower. Light salting after they came out of the oil was all the needed seasoning.

If you have the option, buy zucchini blossoms with long stems. These impart two advantages: the stem serves as a handle allowing you to swirl the flower fully in batter without getting your hand dirty, and this handle also affords you a method for lowering the blossoms into 350°F vegetable oil without burning off your fingerprints. It’s a real win-win.

While I’ve faced substantial doubt in the past about what to fry zucchini blossoms in, there’s never been any question what to dip them in once they are fried. I make aioli (whisk together a mashed clove of garlic, an egg yolk, citrus juice, salt, pepper and a little mustard then slowly whisk in about 3/4 of a cup of oil) thinned by using a higher proportion of lime or lemon juice — the thinness of the sauce is important as the delicate flowers won’t stand up to being dragged through a thick mayo.

What I did have, though, were cucumbers. And what are pickles but cucumbers plus vinegar plus salt—and maybe sugar—plus time? I could kill two birds with one stone here: I could start my salad dressing while at the same time transforming fresh cucumbers into quick pickled ones, another key ingredient to the salad.

I began by whisking two tablespoons of brown sugar and two teaspoons of salt into about a cup of white vinegar until the sugar and salt were dissolved. To this I added one peeled, seeded, quartered and thinly sliced cucumber and stirred well. I also added a few chopped small onions to the cucumber, thinking the vinegar might tame some of the onions’ wicked heat. I let the cucumber and onions sit and pickle while I boiled thick slices of potato for the salad.

When the potatoes were just cooked, but not at all falling apart, I drained them and added them to the bowl with the cucumber, onions and vinegar. Adding the potatoes to the vinegar while they’re hot helps to season them. After the potatoes had cooled, I added a healthy scoop of mayonnaise (Hellman’s, or you could use homemade), a quarter cup of minced cilantro, and salt and pepper to taste.

To taste, by the way, is an instruction that shows up in recipes again and again, especially in reference to salt and pepper, but that’s rarely explained. It’s a great cop-out for recipe writers, actually: if the recipe ends up sucking, you probably didn’t salt it properly (or you have bad taste). I’m sure each cook has a different definition. In the case of this potato salad, though, and actually most instances where I use the phrase, what I mean by “salt to taste” is keep adding salt until you take a taste of the dish and you immediately go back for another, and another, and you almost can’t stop. That’s what happened when I got the salt right in this potato salad — I actually yelled out an expletive, and that’s not something I usually do in the kitchen unless I’m bleeding or on fire.

My pickle shortage ended up being a blessing in disguise. Freshly pickled cucumbers — soft yet still crisp, sweet and sour — were better than anything found in a jar.

But Mother Nature threw us a curveball this week, in the form of 90ºF+ day after 90ºF+ day. Consequently, the Magic Chef, usually my ally in turning the weekly farmers market haul into various kinds of delicious, has become my bitter enemy and I avoid turning him on at all costs. Indeed, I absolutely refuse to give the Magic Chef the time of day. But there are still the vegetables sitting in the crisper drawer, begging for some transformation that I feel powerless to effect as Martha and I stew in our air-conditioningless apartment.

While the Magic Chef has betrayed me with his apartment-heating ways, a steadfast friend — one that stands by me in hot and cold — stepped to the fore: my Benrinner Mandoline. Even though I spend a lot of time cooking, I am really not much of a kitchen gadget person — you’ll rarely see me endorsing gear on this blog. That said, everybody should have a mandoline. Its uses are many, not least among them when you’re completely out of ideas for dinner you can pull out all your vegetables and just start slicing. Shredded purple cabbage? Beautiful! Fine julienne of carrots? Not if I don’t get to do radishes too! Green peppers? Well, I don’t really like them raw, but slice them thin enough and who can tell the difference? As my salad bowl began to fill, an idea started to form in my mind.

A purple cabbage, a half onion, a green pepper, several carrots, a couple of radishes and an ear of corn later I decided this was going to be a vaguely Asian salad, so I set about putting together a dressing of garlic, ginger, peanut sauce (in fact left over ají de mani from last week), soy sauce, rice wine vinegar and olive oil. Six tomatoes withering in the heat on the counter made a natural vessel for the salad, just as their pulp was a nice addition to the vegetable roster. To top it off, I happened to have some five-spice pork aspic sitting in the fridge from bánh mì — the kind of thing you save because you should but have no idea what you’re going to do with.

And that’s the great thing about no ideas — sometimes they turn into something else.

Perhaps you hadn’t noticed, but I haven’t been posting much lately. This is mostly for positive reasons: fun and interesting social engagements, steadily progressing training runs in anticipation of a marathon in October, excellent meals eaten outside the home, all working together to spare you of my culinary musings.

Related to the aforementioned activities or not, I’ve also been feeling a little blah about cooking lately. I’m still putting food on the table most nights, but it has mostly seemed pretty automatic — nothing quite interesting or delicious enough to share. I was uninspired.

Inspiration, happily and frustratingly, comes at unexpected times. So it was this afternoon, in a moment of distraction from the tasks at hand, I allowed my RSS reader to direct me over to the latest post on our friend Brett’s blog Trout Caviar: Grilling the Market. Whether it was the picture of a beautifully charred carrot or Brett’s call for simplicity in summer preparations, something about his post got my wheels spinning again.

My mind jumped immediately to dinner, where suddenly a pasta with some kind of onion, summer squash and cream sauce — most definitely blah food — started to take on a more interesting character. For one thing, pasta was out: no need for imported starch when a bowlful of market new potatoes sat underutilized on the counter.

The summer’s first squash could still be used, accompanied by some of its first carrots. Given our current urban living situation, grilling was not a possibility; luckily, roasting can also develop those deeply browned surfaces I was after. A quick dressing with olive oil, vinegar, market parsley and garlic, and plenty of salt and pepper was all that was needed to showcase the best of the season.

I read fifty to one hundred food-related blog posts in any given day; most of them are discarded with the spin of a scroll wheel. Sometimes though a post comes along like Brett’s that changes what I’m doing in the kitchen — and even my outlook on this blog. It’s enough to inspire someone to write a post.

Roasted Summer Vegetable Salad

• 1# golf-ball sized potatoes
• 5 or 6 small summer squash
• 10-12 small carrots
• 3 small onions, sliced
• 2 T butter
• 1/2# flavorful sausage, cooked and sliced
• 4 oz goat cheese

Dressing

• 1/3 c olive oil
• 2 T apple cider vinegar
• 1 cup parsley leaves, minced
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• Salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 450ºF.

Cut the potatoes in half and place in large microwave-safe bowl. Microwave on high for 8 minutes, until starting to become tender. Toss potatoes — careful, they’re hot! — in ample quantities of olive oil, salt and pepper. Don’t wash the bowl just yet. Arrange the potatoes on a sheet pan, cut-side down. Roast 20-30 minutes, until cut-sides are deep brown, just about to burn.

Meanwhile, cut the squash into 1″ chunks and place them in the bowl you tossed the potatoes in. If your carrots are pencil thin like mine were, you won’t need to peel or cut them; thicker carrots can be quartered. Toss carrots and squash in bowl, adding more olive oil, salt and pepper as necessary to make everything good and moist and seasoned. Turn the contents of the bowl out onto a sheet pan and roast in the oven 3o minutes, until the surfaces start to brown. It’s probably a good idea to flip these veggies around about halfway through the cooking so both sides get brown.

Heat the butter over medium-low heat in a small skillet and add the onions. Cook until greatly reduced and deep brown.

While the vegetables are roasting prepare the dressing by combining all the ingredients. Salt and pepper should be added to taste; given the quantity of vegetables, you may need more salt than expected. Add in the sausage (I used the beef, bleu cheese, and Surly Bender sausage from Clancey’s Meats & Fish).

As the vegetables are done roasting/caramelizing, add them to the bowl with the dressing. When all is ready, toss the vegetables well. Top with crumbled goat cheese and serve.