New series: my favorite ways

Due to the way I've structured my grocery purchasing habits, I almost never go shopping with the intent of picking up the ingredients for a particular recipe. Instead, once a week an assortment of plant parts comes to me, the content of which I have no control over; once every week or two I pick up an assortment of plant parts that are in season; and once every four to six weeks I refresh my supply of frequently-used, long-keeping staples.

This means that when I come home at night and want to make dinner, I first look in the fridge to see which plant parts seem most eager to be eaten. Usually leaves are at the head of the line, then fruits (peppers and tomatillos) and buds (broccoli and cauliflower), then roots and durable fruits like winter squash when everything else has been used up. Once I've selected a victim, I poke around in a cookbook or online to find a new recipe that showcases the vegetable. This is a fun process, but lately I've started thinking it takes too long. Also, I rarely make the same thing twice, and this seems inefficient.

Instead, I want to amass a collection of short recipes that serve as the best quick way to dispose of any given vegetable. I'll still post other tasty recipes that I'm moved to test out, but hopefully over the course of a year I'll cover ways to prepare each vegetable as it comes into season (and other ingredients too).