Healthier Fall Comfort Classics Featuring Seasonal Produce

The arrival of autumn comes with a cornucopia of beautiful and nutritious seasonal produce: squash, pumpkin, cruciferous vegetables, and assertive greens are each at their best once autumn rolls around. We’ve rounded up our most flavourful and comforting recipes that feature these ingredients, including fall produce-heavy chili, soup, stew, macaroni and cheese, and takeout-worthy pizza.

Whether you prefer a traditional Tex-Mex-inspired chili recipe or one with some added culinary flair, each of the following chili recipes incorporate a variety of autumnal ingredients. Canned pumpkin, which makes an appearance on some of the ingredient lists below, adds dietary fibre as well as vitamins A and K. When shopping for canned pumpkin, be sure to choose pure pumpkin purée and not canned pumpkin pie filling (mashed squash should be the only ingredient listed on the can.) If you don’t have any canned pumpkin, any kind of steamed and mashed sweet squash will work in its place.

Healthy recipes for comforting soups and stews are an ideal way to make use of seasonal produce, especially when it comes time to clean out the crisper before your next trip to the grocery store. In the recipes listed below, seasonal produce is typically cut into a small dice or puréed, giving you the opportunity to use imperfect veggies or those that are slightly past peak freshness. Butternut squash provides a creamy, slightly-sweet base in many of these recipes, but acorn squash and pumpkin can be used instead with similar results.

Mac and cheese, as well as other creamy pasta and grain dishes, stays surprisingly rich when puréed seasonal non-starchy vegetables are added to the sauce. In these lighter yet still decadent recipes, squash, cauliflower, pumpkin, and broccoli are blended into the cheese sauce, giving these classic comfort dishes a silky, familiar taste and texture without increasing the Points value of each serving. Looking for another way to build on flavour without adding points? Try cooking the pasta (or grain, if using instead) in chicken or vegetable stock.

Making your own restaurant-quality flatbread and pizza at home is one of the easiest ways to show off beautiful and boldly-flavoured produce. The recipes below feature familiar, neutral veggies such as cauliflower and squash, as well as some of our favourite seasonal bitter vegetables: broccoli rabe, radicchio, and Brussels sprouts. When bitter and assertive produce is included as a topping, we’ve counterbalanced them with contrasting ingredients such as sweet figs, salty prosciutto, and tangy goat cheese.