A perfect dinner for the first week of school -- quick, nourishing, not too heavy after a warm day, but just soupy enough for the first cooler nights. It comes together in less than half an hour and uses those zucchini you know you've got laying around. (You do want small-to-medium zukes, though, not the baseball bats.)

This dish is brightly colored and warmly flavored; a great soup for a cold, gray day.

This dish is perfect for the end of summer, when all the bounty of the season is still available, but evenings are beginning to cool and a big, hot bowl of dinner is something to be welcomed. Shell beans are really just immature dry beans, and can be cooked like dry beans that have been soaked. There is a bit of a spectrum between the "shell" and the "dry" stages for beans, and just how long they take to cook can vary a lot based on just where they are on that line. So we recommend cooking the beans separately from the rest of the vegetables in this dish in order to make sure the beans get cooked all the way through without endangering the rest to overcooking.

This is a great recipe, warm and filling. It uses dry beans, winter squash, and frozen corn, as well as onions, canned tomatoes, and garlic. All of these might be in your winter pantry if you managed to plan ahead a little - and if not, they're all available at the coop! This recipe is adapted from one in Feeding the Whole Family by Cynthia Lair.