Eating

30 minutes today gives your tongue months of pleasure. Starting 30 minutes from now. C'mon, a few minutes of slicing and chopping + 10 minutes of stirring = Peach Chutney all Fall and Winter. Bright, sweet, tart, spicy and mellow. All at once.

Easy and exotic. Even when you use a big old regular pot on your stove instead of the traditional terra cotta cooker. It's the spices. They turn a simple stovetop stew into a wildly fragrant cool-weather feast.n

A luscious, impressive vegetable course featuring some of the season's greatest hits. You'll be amazed you made it yourself. Easily. If you love these vegetables, you'll love them even more. If you're a cauliflower and/or broccoli denier, this'll convert you to a lover.

A two-ingredient, savory-sweet, fragrant and almost luscious vegetable-fruit dish that's a perfect flavor combination right now. While the seasonal ingredients are ripe, just-picked, abundant and cheap. Too good and too easy not to try.

Earthy, juicy mushrooms baking into sweet, earthy, pungent, garlicky hummus on a crisp, thin pizza crust. A pizza with three of the best sources of dietary potassium: beans (chickpeas) and seeds (sesame) in the hummus, and mushrooms.

For the first time, I enjoyed succotash. A lot. Used to hate it. But this isn't what I hated. This is sweet, earthy, crisp, mellow, light, fragrant. No mush, no grit. Fresh corn and lima beans, sauced with fresh tomato juice and basil. And a lot of potassium.

The most luscious homemade fresh fruit ice cream, made in the "soft-serve" style. Nothing but half-and-half and fresh berries. $2 per pint. 50 cents per 4-ounce serving. Just 101 calories per serving. A low Glycemic Load of less than 3. Get a spoon!

Make a bowl of your own crisp, light, healthy ones for 20 cents. Or buy a bag of the commercial chips more responsible for long-term weight gain than any other food. Weight gain that leads to diabetes, heart disease and some cancers.