20 Fall Vegetables in Season Right Now and What to Make With Them

Fall is the one season where the produce aisle rewards you for knowing stuff.

The frost made it sweeter. The part you throw away is the good part. The “pumpkin” in the can is allowed to be squash.

Everything below is in season across most of the U.S. in fall, though what’s local depends on where you live.

Here are 20 fall vegetables worth buying this week, each with a trick and a dinner idea.

1. Butternut Squash

Your cute squash-and-apples display is shortening the squash’s life. Ripening fruit gives off ethylene gas, and squash stored near it doesn’t keep as long.

Pick one that’s hard, heavy for its size, dark beige and matte. Shiny means it was picked too early, and green streaks mean it isn’t fully ripe. A whole butternut keeps for weeks, and for two to three months somewhere cool.

Then it’s soup, tacos, risotto or mac and cheese sauce.

2. Delicata Squash

This is the squash for people who hate peeling squash. The skin is thin and tender, and you just eat it.

Halve it, scoop it, slice it into half-moons and roast. Pile the rings on a grain bowl or stuff the halves.

3. Spaghetti Squash

You’ve been cutting it the wrong way. The strands run around the inside in circles, not from stem to tip, so splitting it lengthwise cuts every strand in half.

Cut it crosswise into rings and you get long strands that twirl on a fork. Then it’s marinara, pesto, or butter and a ridiculous amount of black pepper.

4. Pumpkin

The pumpkin in your pantry might be squash, and that’s completely legal. The FDA has let canners call certain golden-fleshed squash “pumpkin” since 1938.

Libby’s uses a squash-type variety called Dickinson, not the orange carving kind. Good call, because carving pumpkins are bred for looks, and the flesh is stringy and watery.

So buy a small pie or sugar pumpkin for curry, soup or chili, and leave the big one on the porch. Roast the seeds either way.

5. Sweet Potatoes

Get them out of the fridge. Raw sweet potatoes kept below 55°F can pick up an off flavor and discolored flesh, so a cool, dark cupboard is the move.

Also, a sweet potato isn’t at its sweetest the day it’s dug. It gets about a week of curing somewhere warm and humid first, and starch turns into sugar while it sits.

Load a baked one with black beans, or go fries or mash.

6. Brussels Sprouts

You weren’t a picky kid. The sprouts really were worse.

Back in the ’90s, a Dutch scientist figured out exactly which compounds made them bitter. Seed companies then dug through their archives for old low-bitterness varieties and crossed them with modern high-yielding ones. Plain old plant breeding, and it worked.

Roast them hard until the edges char, or shave them raw into slaw.

7. Cauliflower

You’re throwing away free cabbage. The leaves closest to the head are tender, behave a lot like cabbage and cook down soft and silky, and the core’s edible too.

Roast the leaves alongside the florets until they crisp like kale chips. The head can go in whole, become cauliflower steaks, or go buffalo.

8. Broccoli

I will die on the hill that the stalk is the best part. You’re paying by the pound for it anyway.

Peel off the tough outer layer like you’d peel a carrot. What’s left is mild and crisp, like broccoli crossed with a water chestnut.

Slice it into coins for stir-fry or shred it into slaw.

9. Cabbage

Cabbage will outlast everything else in your fridge. A whole green or red head can keep for up to 2 months.

The catch is savoy and napa, which only get up to a week. And once any cabbage is cut, use it within days.

Grab a firm, dense one for slaw, sauerkraut, roasted wedges or colcannon.

10. Kale

Kale tastes better after it’s been through something. Same, honestly.

When temperatures drop below freezing, cold-hardy plants free up sugar they’d stored as starch, and that sugar lowers the freezing point of the water in their cells. It’s antifreeze you can eat.

That’s why late-season kale, carrots, parsnips and Brussels sprouts can taste sweeter after a frost. It happens in the field, so your freezer won’t do it.

For a kale Caesar, massage it. Squeezing the leaves breaks down the cell walls the way heat does. Curly kale needs a good five minutes, Tuscan kale about one.

11. Collard Greens

Stop pouring your collards into a colander. Swish them in a bowl of water and lift them out, so the grit stays at the bottom.

Strip each leaf off the tough center rib and use them within a few days. For a slow-braised smoky pot of greens, smoked paprika or liquid smoke does the job.

12. Swiss Chard

Chard is two vegetables on one stalk. Chop the stems and get them in the pan first, then add the leaves at the end.

It’s also the diva of this list. Three to five days in the fridge, unwashed, and then it’s over.

Do it garlicky on toast, in a frittata, or stirred through dal.

13. Beets

Buy them with the tops on and you just got a free bunch of greens. Sauté them or throw them in a salad raw.

Go for small to medium beets, and leave about an inch of stem on when you cook them so they don’t bleed red everywhere.

And yes, eating a lot of them can turn your pee pink. It’s harmless. Alarming, but harmless.

Borscht, beet hummus, beet burgers. All good.

14. Carrots

Twist the tops off the day you get home. Left on, the greens keep feeding off the carrot and it goes limp.

Trimmed and kept in an open bag, they’ll stay firm and sweet for at least a couple of weeks. Don’t toss the tops, though. Carrot-top pesto is great.

15. Parsnips

Parsnips are the classic frost vegetable, and they have exactly one flaw. The woody core.

Slice them on a diagonal and those tough fibers get short enough that you stop noticing. I’d also grab the smaller ones. If it’s all headed for mash or soup anyway, don’t bother coring anything.

Otherwise, parsnip fries.

16. Turnips

Go for the small ones. Turnips are white-fleshed, sharp and peppery, and they’re typically harvested at only 2.5 to 2.75 inches across.

Mash them half-and-half with potatoes, quick-pickle them, or simmer them in miso soup.

17. Rutabagas

The one that looks like it’s been dipped in a candle has been dipped in wax. On purpose.

It’s food-grade paraffin, it’s often put on to stop the thing drying out, and it comes off with the peel. Underneath is the turnip’s bigger, yellower, sweeter cousin.

Mash it with butter or cube it into a veggie pot pie.

18. Potatoes

Green on a potato isn’t the problem. It’s the flag.

The green is just chlorophyll, which a potato makes when light hits it. But light also bumps up a colorless compound called solanine, and that’s the one you don’t want.

So store potatoes in complete darkness, and cut away any green parts and sprouts before cooking. Then it’s smashed potatoes, gnocchi, latkes or potato-leek soup.

19. Mushrooms

Mushrooms are about 90% water, which is why a sealed plastic bag turns into a tiny sauna.

Paper breathes. Plastic sweats. Move them to a paper bag.

You can buy these all year, but fall is when mushroom stroganoff and ragu over polenta make the most sense.

20. Radishes

If you only know radishes raw and angry, roast them. That peppery bite comes from compounds also found in mustard and horseradish, and it mellows when they’re cooked.

Daikon and black radishes are the fall types to look for. Keep the greens too, since they’re mild and a rich source of vitamins C and K.

Pickle a few for tacos and blitz the greens into pesto.

The Bottom Line

None of this takes cooking talent. It’s just knowing which bag, which cupboard and which way to point the knife.

Now go rescue your squash from the fruit bowl.