Bright and piney, with a slight bitterness that goes well with meat and chicken. This robust herb should be chopped or rubbed. Rosemary's needlelike leaves release an aromatic blast of evergreen popular in Italian cooking. It makes potatoes roasted in olive oil a side dish to remember.

From a quick omelet to a simmered stew, just about any savory dish benefits from fresh thyme's slightly minty lemon flavor. It's a key ingredient in the classic French bouquet garni, a perfectly balanced mixture of thyme, parsley, and bay leaf bundled in cheesecloth. This bouquet is essential to French soups, stocks, and sauces.

Add crunch and punch to sandwiches, salads, and burgers with these sweet, colorful onions. We relish them raw they also add a mellow moistness and flavor to frittatas, pasta primavera, and stir-fries. It's hard to imagine a summer kitchen without a basket of these purplish-red beauties.

Spicy, juicy, baseball-sized bundles of flavor. These pungent staples release their flavor when sautéed, braised, grilled, or roasted. Dredge with flour and deep-fry for decadent onion rings. These tear-inducing onions are usually considered too strong for eating raw.

Garlic adds an earthy, robust layer of flavor that makes it a year-round essential. Crushed raw into summer pesto, garlic is bracing, almost biting, and fresh. Roasted in winter, it's nutty and mellow. Chopped…

When we hear the words "hot pepper," the tingle most of us remember is probably from those jalapeño rings that come with a plate of nachos. Small and torpedo-shaped, jalapeños may be pale green, blackish green, or red. As with all chiles, the riper and redder, the sweeter. When smoked and dried, the jalapeño is known as chipotle.

This beautiful squash adds sunny color and bright flavor to your menu. Toss it into a sautéed vegetable medley to add color and taste. The skin is as nutritious as it is attractive. Try yellow zucchini sliced and raw, dipped in creamy garlic dressing or hummus. Prepare as you would a green zucchini.

This squash adds flavor to your menu. Toss it into a sautéed vegetable medley to add taste. Try gray squash sliced and raw, dipped in creamy garlic dressing or hummus. Prepare as you would a green zucchini.

Butternut squash has a lush, sweet flavor that goes naturally with roasts and game. No harvest feast is complete without a steaming bowl of mashed butternut squash. We season it with a touch of nutmeg an old New England trick. Roast and puree this versatile squash as a base for a comforting winter soup.

Also known as Romas or Italians, these slightly tangy, deeply sweet tomatoes are ideal for sauce. They are fleshy and thin-skinned and have few seeds. Slow cooking brings out their full rich essence. We add fresh basil to the sauce five minutes before serving. In salads and sandwiches they are good pinch hitters for beefsteak tomatoes.

(x3) Sun-gold, sweet, crunchy perfection, with crisp, milky kernels that burst when bitten. Corn is a native American crop that's really a grass. It has grown on our continent for tens of thousands of years. We love this classic simply boiled and slathered in butter.

The starchiness of a potato with the sweetness of a banana. Fried yellow plantains, called maduros or amarillos, are a staple of Latin American tables. They are like potato chips, but warm, irresistibly chewy, salty, and almost candied. Serve these big "cooking bananas" as a side dish with black beans and rice or roast chicken.