Like so many New Yorkers, I rarely have free time to sit and eat, let alone cook. So when I finally had a spare moment to have a few friends over to a backyard summer soiree, temperatures had already begun to drop and daylight hours were dwindling. But although fall's arrival may mean replacing suntans with sweaters, I wasn't quite ready to ditch my favorite summer recipes--especially those that never got made this year.

          I decided to adapt one of my warm-weather favorites--cornbread, frozen yogurt, and summer fruits--to fit fall. With a little help from a piece on the blog See Girl Cook, I crafted a simple dessert that had my friends raving. We devoured two huge trays of the moist bread, peppered with molten chunks of sweet potato--and many friends still blame me for ruining their end-of-summer beach bodies.  The cornbread pairs well with warm stews, like our go-to vegetarian chili, on its own for dessert, or as a break from the cornflake duldrums of breakfast.

Sweet Potato Cornbread

 Ingredients:

6 small sweet potatoes
8 eggs
3 cups buttermilk
1 cup honey
4 cups yellow cornmeal
2 cups flour
3 teaspoons kosher salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup unsalted butter

Preparation:

Set oven to 375 and roast sweet potatoes for about an hour, or until soft.
Remove potatoes and mash. We used a fork and tried to keep some texture to the mix. (Doing so creates pockets of molten sweet potato in the finished product.)
Add mash, eggs, buttermilk, and honey to a large bowl and whisk.
Mix cornmeal, flour, salt, baking soda, and baking powder together in a separate bowl.
Add butter and mix until most lumps are gone. (Again, we used a fork, but a food processor would have been a welcome addition to the process at this stage.)
Combine the contents of the two bowls, bringing the dry cormeal mixture together with the sweet potato mixture. Stir
Pour into baking tray. For this quantity, we used two 9 by 13 pyrex dishes.
Put into oven, which should still be on 375, for 40-45 minutes.  

Cinnamon-Honey Frozen Yogurt

Ingredients:
1 16 oz. tub of 2% Greek Yogurt
2.5 tablespoons cinnamon
Honey (to taste)

Preparation:

Mix cinnamon and honey together in large metal bowl with chobani.
Place in freezer for an hour and a half. Remove, break apart any ice chunks with spoon, stir, and put back in freezer for another hour. (Note: leaving the yogurt in the freezer for too long can create an ice block of yogurt, so be careful to stir it.)

Roasted Fruit

Ingredients:
Seasonal fruits (we chose late summer peaches and red Bartlett pears)
Cinamon
Brown Sugar
Honey
Lemon Juice

Preparation:

Slice fruit into long, thin pieces.
Coat with cinamon, brown sugar, and honey to taste.
Place in oven (at 375) for 15-20 minutes, or until soft.