By Mackenzie Smith

Let's talk quesadillas. Photo by Mackenzie Smith.

I get it. The world doesn’t need another quesadilla “recipe”, but we can always use a reminder that a thoughtful meal prep session puts us in a place to make beautiful riffs on the concept of melting cheese inside a tortilla on a hot surface -- and use up the goods from our CSA box. This is no dig on the quesadilla, which makes up about 20% of my diet and has since elementary school, just a hard sell for stuffing as many veggies as you can into the mix.

This past Sunday, I boiled a big pot of potatoes in salty water while also roasting most of the veggies in my CSA -- pretty much the extent of meal prep most weeks. I got pulled away for over 30 minutes to put my baby to bed, and completely forgot about what was going on in the kitchen. Turns out when you boil potatoes for too long, they still work like a boiled potato, but the taste is slightly bitter (nothing grating them into hash browns and serving with fried eggs and a tangy garlic yogurt sauce or turning them into straight up buttery mashed potatoes can’t fix).

When you roast beets and summer squash at 425 tossed in olive oil and salt for “too long” without stirring, they turn into veggie candy. By candy, I mean the sugars in the vegetables caramelize and much of the water evaporates, so what was once a full sheet pan of squash has reduced to ¼ of the original mass. Summer squash, which has a tendency to be a little bitter, is now slightly sweet, chewy and charred around some of the edges. The beets are also chewier than what you’d expect, almost meaty -- both a super tasty pairing for sharp cheddar and a corn tortilla.

Roasted veggies, ready for any application. Photo by Mackenzie Smith.

Unlike their less-cooked counterparts, long-roasted veggies are nice and malleable, making it easy to stuff a LOT of them into a quesadilla. Based on what I started with, I would estimate that the quesadilla in this pic has about 2 medium-sized summer squash packed in, and 2 small beets. Practically health food?

Overstuffed quesadillas are so good because the cheese and veggies that don’t fit into the tortilla melt onto the sides and get a little crispy as the tortilla finishes cooking in the pan.

The dipping sauce here is another version of my spinach stem green sauce, wherein I throw an entire bunch of spinach stems in the blender with a couple of bunches of soft herbs (usually parsley, cilantro and basil), a clove of garlic and a few scallions with lemon juice, pickle juice or vinegar, a few tablespoons of olive oil and salt to taste. Bright green goodness, somewhere between a chutney, a pesto and a chimichuri, and good on anything savory -- especially these quesadillas.

Since getting pulled away to take care of a baby is my new brand of cooking (ha), lukewarm quesadillas are totally a thing around here these days. Sure, oozing hot cheese on a tortilla is one of the world’s greatest pleasures, but an almost warm quesadilla packed full of caramelized local vegetables and sharp cheddar with an herby green sauce is a fine quick summer lunch.

If you need a recipe for quesadillas, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt has a great blog post about them on Serious Eats. As for the vegetables, cook them like this:

Preheat oven to 425 F

• 5-6 medium summer squash or zucchini, cut into ½-inch coins
• 4-5 beets -- peeled and cut into slices
• Olive oil
• Salt & pepper to taste

Place squash on one sheet pan, and beets on the other. Drizzle generously with olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Cook for about 10 minutes and stir. Cook for another 20 or so and stir again, then walk away for 10-15 minutes before removing from the oven.