Admittedly, the bases are loaded. The refrigerator contains small amounts of all sorts of things. Leftover kale that had been cooked with red-pepper flakes and lots of garlic. Cooked chickpeas, ditto garlic. Tomato sauce. Parsley. A hunk of sheep’s-milk cheese. A crumbly wedge of Parmigiano-Reggiano, picked up on the fly while dodging the San Gennaro crowds in Little Italy.

Oh. And the glossy, glamorous, ravishingly purple eggplants that seduced me at the Greenmarket.

I don’t know what came over me. It’s not that I dislike eggplant, but it’s not a vegetable I ever crave. But there these beauties were, at their absolute peak of sweet meatiness. I had to have them.

Then I wrapped them up, optimistically tucked them into the least-cold part of the refrigerator (they hate the chill), and promptly forgot about them.

Until now. Maybe it was time for the provençal vegetable casserole called a tian, which is infinitely adaptable. It can be simple (one or two vegetables) or complicated (adding a cheesy custard or cooked rice)—whatever suits your mood, your time frame, and your ingredients. And although I have never once had an original thought when it comes to eggplant, it doesn’t really matter. If I use a little common sense—and try to channel Richard Olney and Mirielle Johnston—how can the end result not be good? Besides, a great tian isn’t something you go out and shop for, it’s something that just happens when you make the most out of the resources at hand.

First things first. I preheat the oven to 375ºF, and haul the various bit and pieces out of the fridge so that they start coming around to room temp. After cutting the eggplants crosswise into nice slices—not too thin, not too thick—I toss them on a rimmed baking sheet with a glug of olive oil. (I never bother to salt eggplant first, especially when it is in season and fresh.) Then I spread the slices out and roast them until tender.

Stop: I need to make an important point here. The secret to precooking eggplant for a tian, say, or eggplant parmigiana (which is really just another casserole) is to make sure that the slices, especially the ones near the tough stem end, are completely tender. If you pierce them with a knife, the tip should encounter absolutely no resistance whatsoever.

So, when roasting eggplant, patience is its own reward. Here’s a chance to pour a glass of wine, open the mail, turn off the blasted cell phone, heat the tomato sauce up in a small pot, and and oil the baking dish. Or just get horizontal.

When layering a tian, I like to start with a thin layer of sauce (about a third of the total amount), so the vegetables on the bottom have something to absorb. This evening, half of the eggplant follows, then kale, with chickpeas and the grated cheeses scattered over the top. Another layer of eggplant, shingled very artistically, I think, and then the rest of the sauce. Extra Parm on top, which will end up a beautiful golden brown.

Because all the elements of the tian are already cooked, it only takes 20 minutes or so in the oven, until it bubbles around the edges and, more importantly, smells done.

It turns out I need the time, since I forgot about the dratted parsley. I chop it rough, along with a stray clove of garlic (which I take pains to mince, for some reason) and sauté both together in a little—all right, a lot—of butter for smearing on pieces of torn baguette.

We eat like savages.

© 2010 Pender Nursery, Inc.

I am waiting for a UPS shipment of a friend’s homemade fig preserves, and maybe today’s the day. The preserves are delicious on toast at breakfast, but I tend to use them more like a chutney. They embellish roast chicken, served with a judiciously thin slice of Benton’s country ham and biscuits or crumbly corn bread. They dress up cold leftover roast chicken. Mashed up and smeared on a piece of Manchego, they make an able stand-in for membrillo.

The preserves are made from a cultivar called Celeste—what people from my part of the world know as sugar figs. They are much more tender than Black Mission figs from California. Missions are okay in my book, but they’re a little thick-skinned. That characteristic (I’m trying to be positive here) allows them to hold their shape well when sliced and drizzled with cream (a combination I know I’m supposed to like but don’t) or cooked in a tart.

Celestes, on the other hand, have delicate, paper-thin skin that disappears into the strawberry-pink flesh the instant you bite into one. They are so ephemeral that they are impossible to ship and don’t keep more than a day or two, which grants fresh Celestes cult status among the fig-obsessed, even though the actual trees are as common as dandelions throughout the southeastern United States and as far west as Texas.

You need to know somebody, you see. Somebody with a fig tree in the yard. Broad-leaved and shrubby, that tree is a descendant of one of the trees left behind in Florida by the Spanish in the 16th century. Those trees flourished and spread on up through Georgia, the Carolinas, and so on, where their fruit is surreptitiously passed around neighborhoods in paper sacks like it was moonshine. Until I was an adult, it never occurred to me that figs in general were something that many people actually bought, at a grocery store.

I was reminded of all this recently, when I found myself back on Ocracoke, an island off the coast of North Carolina that has thickets of fig trees, interspersed with yaupon and oleander, lining the sandy lanes. Whole-fig preserves are a genuine cottage industry here: There are jars full of the deeply sweet condiment stacked by the cash register in every mom-and-pop shop in town, and home cooks argue about who makes the best fig cake—a rich, moist affair filled with chunks of the preserved fruit.

I sure hope that UPS truck comes soon.

The last of summer’s peaches are larger than baseballs. They make me think of Dori Sanders, South Carolina novelist and peach farmer extraordinaire. The last time I stopped at her farm stand, there was a peach calendar, of sorts (“Expect Albertas about the first week of August”), so you could plan a trip accordingly, and there was a handy roll of paper towels next to the peaches for tasting.

Here in Northeast, the weather has made for Dori-worthy fruit—intensely sweet and juicy. Yesterday, I could have made a cobbler, with a thick, golden, biscuity crust; or a pie, with a flakier crust; or what in some Savannah houses are called “bourbonated” peaches—a syrupy, suave conserve that’s fabulous with ham or chicken for dinner, alongside pound cake for dessert, or straight out of the jar when no one is looking.

But instead I tried a stunningly simple approach I learned from the masterful Georgeanne Brennan just over a year ago: I put whole peaches in a baking dish and rolled them around in a nice amount of olive oil. Then I scattered a generous amount of sugar over them and tucked them in the oven before we sat down to dinner with friends we hadn’t seen forever.

In other words, I did no work whatsoever.

I didn’t really think about dessert again until the aroma reached the dinner table. “I could just roll around in that smell,” someone declared, and almost knocked over a wineglass. Embellished with a little crème fraîche, the roasted peaches had a deep-flavored sweetness and almost molten texture. They somehow managed to pull off the trick of being simultaneously understated and luxurious, which might be a little old-fashioned, but it is a very neat trick indeed.

Scratch—adj. Informal usage. done by or dependent on chance: a scratch shot.

These days, my life doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for planning and cooking meals. I do make the effort, almost every Saturday morning, to get to the Greenmarket at Union Square—I enjoy the actual shopping for provisions as much as I do the town-square atmosphere. But for part of the week, my commute takes two hours out of each day, and on the days I work at home, I tend to slog away and lose all track of time. Before I know it, it’s late, my husband has just walked through the door, and we are both starving.

The great thing about having a well-stocked refrigerator is that it’s possible to wing a meal and get away with it, especially since our notion of what a proper dinner entails has evolved from something fairly traditional to whatever we are hungry for.

Like, for instance, the flat green romano beans from Franca Tantillo. Franca’s Berried Treasures stand isn’t usually at the Greenmarket on Saturdays, so when I saw it, I came to a screeching halt. Franca is renowned for her gorgeous strawberries, and I automatically grabbed a pint or two, but what really spoke to me were those beans. They were so fresh, they practically jumped out of the basket. I pounced.

Romanos are usually braised in a tomatoey sauce, but, on this absolutely perfect late-summer evening, that seemed like a misuse of Franca’s beans and my time. Instead, ten minutes in a pot of boiling water brought the beans to that crisp-sliding-into-tender moment that is equal parts “gosh, I timed that well” and “thank you, Jesus.”

By the time they were done, I’d sliced tomatoes and introduced them to some salt, pepper, and olive oil, and was rummaging through the fridge for the bag of herbs I knew was in there somewhere.

Handfuls of roughly chopped parsley, tarragon, and chives went into the blender, followed by equal amounts of Duke’s mayonnaise and sour cream (in lieu of the usual buttermilk), a squirt of anchovy paste, a smidge of chopped garlic, and a little white-wine vinegar. The end result was one of my favorite summer dressings, Green Goddess*. Rich and thick, it ribboned like cake batter over the warm, meaty beans.

Those perfect beans were the star of the show, although plenty of juicy ripe tomatoes and a couple of pieces of cold leftover roast chicken filled in the cracks. It was the kind of meal I love best: simple and plain, but really delicious and sustaining.

* There are times when I discover something that delights me down to my toes. It’s well established that Green Goddess dressing, named for a play, came from the Palace Hotel, in San Francisco, but when researching and writing the headnotes for The Gourmet Cookbook, I found myself getting more and more curious. On a chance visit to a dusty drama bookshop, I unearthed a copy of the melodrama, written in 1921 by William Archer, a Scottish drama critic (his translations introduced Ibsen to the British public) and playwright. It was quite a page-turner—three English travelers, a plane crash in the fictional Asian kingdom of Rukh, a rajah who does the bidding of the powerful Green Goddess, and, yes, even a butler, who could either save the day or be nastily killed. The marvelous London actor George Arliss starred as the rajah, and during the play’s run in San Francisco, he stayed at the Palace, where chef Philip Roemer created his herbaceous homage. Arliss went on to reprise his Green Goddess role in the silent picture (1923) and the talkie (1930). Although he was nominated for an Oscar for his role in the 1930 film, in a wonderfully melodramatic twist, he lost—to himself—in another movie.

This hot dry summer has produced staggeringly great tomatoes, and I’ve even taken a shot at growing a few varieties in a sunny corner on Long Island that belongs to my in-laws. As much as I’ve enjoyed cultivating the little crop, I think what has delighted me the most is the chance to eat them straight off the vine, which is how I fell in love with them in the first place.

As a child, I’d spend hours in my grandfather’s garden, doing some desultory weeding or trying to see if I could slip, silent as a Cherokee, through the tall asparagus ferns without alerting Beau and Bonnet, the two hunting dogs penned up close by. But mostly what I wanted to do (after heeding the constant parental admonition to “watch out for snakes”) was find a cool spot underneath the vast tangle of tomato vines, breathe in their musky scent until I got almost dizzy, and then settle down to read my way through the Wizard of Oz books. My mother thought they were trash, so I had to sneak them, one at a time, from the bookshelf of my friend next door. About every chapter or so, I’d take a big bite of the ripest tomato within reach, trying like murder not to drip juice or seeds onto the adventures of Dorothy or Princess Ozma. It was heaven.

These days, I choose my tomatoes at the Union Square Greenmarket, either from Keith Stewart’s fabulous organic farm or the incomparable Sue Dare, of Cherry Lane Farms, who also keeps me supplied with okra.

I choose tomatoes at different stages of ripeness to get us through the week. I keep  them at room temperature but out of direct sunlight, and always stem side up—their plump, curved shoulders bruise easily, otherwise. I stew some of the smaller tomatoes with the okra and spoon everything over hot buttered rice; I slice the big, rich-tasting Brandywines on a platter with fresh mozzarella and basil; at the end of the week, I cut up whatever tomatoes are left, salt them, and let them get along with one another for a few hours before tossing them with spaghetti.

But still, nothing beats biting into a sun-warmed tomato just pulled off the vine. Wow, can you smell that smell? What a wonderful summer.

I’ve been a huge fan of Ed Mitchell’s whole-hog barbecue ever since John T. Edge first championed the pitmaster’s crazy, pure vision—to source and serve the juicy, full-flavored, pastured pork of his childhood—in the pages of Gourmet almost exactly five years ago. The only things that surpass Ed’s pork are his beaming countenance and enveloping embrace whenever our paths cross.

Against all odds, Ed’s vision of pig in the 21st century has become reality at The Pit—the barbecue palace that he and his savvy business partner opened on the outskirts of Raleigh a couple of years back.

The building alone, in the heart of the capitol city’s historic Depot District, is worth savoring. The flat-roofed, low-slung warehouse was constructed in 1936 as the Armour Meat Processing Plant. Redeveloped in 2004 as a chophouse, it retains its massive roll-up doors, smartly converted into glass panels, and its original Art Deco cast-concrete caps. It has buckets of charm and atmosphere and is the perfect setting for the King of ’Cue.

Inside, beyond the convivial barroom, there’s a white-tablecloth dining room that manages to be clubby without being exclusive. That’s not easy to pull off when you’re talking barbecue, which has a tricky mix of race, class, and region at its core, but Ed, with his great generosity of spirit, nails it. This day, the banquettes are occupied by local real estate brokers and lawyers, fresh-faced volunteers wearing matching “Vacation Bible School” T-shirts, and a large group of office workers celebrating someone’s birthday. One of them, I see, ordered the house burger, crowned with pimento cheese and a fried green tomato. It looks magnificent.

It’s the fried green tomato that’s really speaking to me, though, and so I opt for those to start; they are crisp on the outside and tangy and almost custardy within. The plate of East Carolina–style chopped barbecue—steeped in the flavor and aroma of the pit and bathed in a well-mannered vinegary sauce (it’s gently acidic rather than sour or harsh)—makes me happy to be here. One of “Mother Mitchell’s” fried chicken thighs, filched from my husband’s plate, is moist and tender under a coppery, just-salty-enough crust.

But what really rocks my world are the vegetables, all grown by North Carolina farmers and cooked with care. The collards are deep-flavored and velvety, the nubbly creamed corn, sweet and summery. And the black-eyed peas are absolutely transcendental. Mind you, I cook black-eyed peas all the time in New York, and they are pretty damn good, but these taste like they’d been picked that morning and shelled in time for our afternoon meal. Mild yet rich, simply cooked with a little seasoning meat and maybe the barest hint of cayenne, they defy the easy, slightly dismissive categorization of side dish. They have a visceral power that, as my father would say, “moves you closer to God.” That works for me.

Early summer is the juiciest time of year. Cherries, berries, tomatoes, spring onions and garlic—even the lettuces and new potatoes are heavy with juice. But this day at the Union Square Greenmarket, I find myself gravitating toward a heap of the season’s first beets. They are so fresh that their thick, leafy tops still feel alive to the touch. Before I know it, I’ve gathered an armload and stand in line, waiting to pay and marveling at those in front of me who request that their beet greens be wrenched off and discarded. By the time I’d eased up to the cash register, there was a plastic crate full of them, and, at an inquiring nod from me, the farmer stuffed a few huge handfuls into my bag. “Glad these won’t go to waste,” he said.

Beet greens have a mild, minerally flavor that feints and parries with sharper, more assertive greens. It’s the texture, though, that I especially love: When cooked, the succulent greens turn lush and satiny. Quickly braised with garlic and red-pepper flakes, they go with almost everything under the sun, and if you want to take them in a different direction, simply steam them and toss with a ginger- and miso-spiked dressing.

Beet greens also give any vegetable soup great body and depth, and they suit the improvisational nature of a Creole gumbo z’herbes, which you would traditionally eat in New Orleans during Lent, particularly on Holy Thursday and, if you are very lucky, seated at Dooky Chase. Here in New York, I always bide my time until now, finally busting loose when locally grown tender young greens are—at last!—available farther north. Bunches of collards, mustard greens, kale, and chard soon find a home in my market bag, and for dinner that night we have big, restorative bowls of the gumbo ladled over rice.

“But what do you do with the beets?” a friend asks, a little crossly. Because these beauties are so juicy and thin-skinned (and I don’t mind magenta stains on my hands or cutting board), I don’t bother to peel them. I scrub them well and cut out any gnarly bits, then slice and dice and toss them into a pan with a glug of olive oil. I cook them over moderate heat until they start to soften, then add a little water and simmer until the beets are tender and the water evaporates. I’m in the mood to combine the beets with boiled new potatoes, a vinaigrette with some minced shallots smudged in, and a scattering of chopped fresh tarragon, rosemary, and thyme. Any leftovers are wonderful the next day, scooped up with crisp leaves of endive and eaten over the sink.