This tart is a winter mainstay, and a great way to use those heavy-duty carrots you’ve got rolling around in the root cellar (or vegetable drawer, as the case may be). It’s somehow at once filling and light and the combination of the cooked onions, rice vinegar, and tarragon lend a really unusual, savory flavor you don’t often find in a vegetarian dish. Last year, I served this as the main veggie course at Thanksgiving and it was a big hit.

It must be summer, because the ice cream maker has taken up permanent residence in our freezer, pushing out other, lesser items, like the half-dozen whole wheat everything bagels we dragged back from New York, or that not-so-great borscht I inconceivably made way too much of last autumn, or even the wonderfully chewy udon noodles that survived the hourlong trip back from the Asian grocery in Albany unscathed.

We do have our priorities, you know. You do not mess with ice cream and summer.

This whole part of the world knows very well that ice cream and summer go hand-in-hand. All over New England there are these delightful little dairy bars. Reeking with good old-fashioned Americana, they’re usually roadside stands selling fried clam strips, hamburgs (as they call them here), soda, and towering cones of sugarbomb ice cream. My visits to these places are few and far between, and for nostalgia value only — the food is not really my thing, but the stands themselves remind me fondly of my Dairy Queen filled childhood summers at the New Jersey Shore. Sitting at a weathered picnic table behind one of these dairy bars, with the humidity hanging heavy in the air, I can almost feel the salty ocean breezes and the sand crumbling between my toes. And then I take a bite of that high-fructose-corn-syrup-laden ice cream, and, well…back to reality it is.

Luckily, I can make own ice cream at home. Most ice cream recipes involve making a four- or five-egg custard, letting it cool, and then mixing it all up. The nice thing about frozen yogurt — aside from its ostensible healthiness — is that it requires no cooking whatsoever. No heat in the kitchen, no cooling five-egg custards (which are delicious, by the way), and the immediate gratification of ice cream on demand. Fresh-made frozen yogurt actually tastes like yogurt — with a pleasant tang — not at all like the “yogurt” peddled at those soft serve yogurt shops at rest stops off the highway. (Take it from me — I actually worked at one of those places in high school.)

This recipe features two things fairly singing with seasonality at our CSA right now. The strawberries are ripe and juicy in the fields, and the tarragon is growing in tall, willowy stalks up in the herb garden. I’d made a bit of compound butter with the two, then decided the combination would be just as good for dessert. And it is. The minty, anise-y tarragon provides a cool contrast to the sweet berries, and the smooth bite of the yogurt keeps both flavors from getting out of hand. If you don’t like tarragon, a little mint would probably be a fine substitute.

It should be said that homemade ice cream, and frozen yogurt especially, is best eaten the day it is made. But I didn’t need to tell you that, did I?

Strawberry Tarragon Frozen Yogurt

• About 8 oz. very ripe strawberries, hulled and sliced
• 1 tsp. pure vanilla extract
• 2/3 c. sugar
• 2 tsp. finely minced tarragon
• 3 c. whole milk yogurt

1. Put the strawberries, vanilla, and sugar in a medium bowl to mascerate, breaking up the strawberries with the back of a fork, while you prepare the tarragon.
2. Add the tarragon and yogurt to the berries and stir. Cover the mixture with plastic wrap and chill until the sugar has dissolved and the mixture is very cold, about an hour or so.
3. Freeze according to the directions provided by your ice cream maker. Eat it immediately, hovering over the frozen bowl with the biggest spoon you can find, or transfer the frozen mixture to a container and set it in the freezer to harden for an hour.

Last weekend was glorious. It was sunny and warm, and not just for a mere six hours at a time. We’re talking about day-long stretches of intense heat and sunshine, piercing blue skies dotted with cotton-candy clouds, and warm breezes filtering through the dense green foliage on the hills that rise up all around us.

It was prime alfresco dining weather, and I was determined to soak up as much of it as I could, with as many summertime eats as I could possibly jam into one meal. I’d come home from our CSA on Friday night with a bag of purple-skinned potatoes and a fragrant bouquet of herbs. You know where this is going, don’t you?

This potato salad recipe comes from Alice Waters, the veritable queen of “keep it simple.” Boy, she was really onto something, wasn’t she? She was light-years ahead of us. And she somehow seems to know that a good potato salad, made with just-dug potatoes and a fantastic olive oil, doesn’t need to be encroached upon by that hated condiment, mayonnaise. It’s light, yet filling, and you can serve it warm or cool. It’ll even keep in the refrigerator for a couple of days, so you can tote it out to the old swimming hole the day after you make it, and sit, cross-legged and breathless, on a worn woolen blanket spread out in the grass, eating in straight out of the container in embarrassingly big forkfuls, your hair dripping warm rivulets of lake water down your back.

Herby Potato Salad

Adapted from Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Food

1 1/2 lbs. waxy potatoes, peeled or unpeeled (I like the skins)
2 hard-cooked eggs, peeled and chopped
1 tbs. wine, cider, or rice vinegar (or a mix of the three)
salt and freshly ground pepper
1/2 red onion, cut into small dice
2 scallions, sliced thinly
1/4 c. extra virgin olive oil
2 tbs. rinsed and chopped capers
1 tbs. chopped chives
1 tbs. chopped parsley
1 tbs. chopped tarragon

Cook the potatoes in boiling salted water until tender, then drain, cool, and cut into bite-sized pieces. Mix together the wine, and some salt and pepper. Pour over the potatoes, stir gently, and let sit for 7 minutes or so, to let the potatoes absorb the vinegar. Add the onion, scallion, oil, capers, and herbs and mix carefully. Taste for salt and pepper and adjust as necessary.