My mother, like mothers everywhere, is a very sneaky woman.

One day I sat down to dinner and found in front of me a perennial, all-Italian- American favorite: spaghetti and meatballs. Since it was the summer and, most importantly, time to eat, I could not help but sniff eagerly at the wafting aromas of basil and Parmesan while waiting impatiently for dinner to start. So far, so good. As I scarfed down my first plate of spaghetti, I had only a vaguely disquieting sense that my mother had an unusual glint in her eye. Only after I had finished reluctantly pushing my spinach around my plate and finally eaten it did I realize what had just happened. My mom had used me as a lab rat.

With a triumphant and unsettling grin, my mother informed me that what had just made its way to my stomach was, in fact, squash. Spaghetti squash from my aunt’s garden, to be precise. What was more surprising — it was actually delicious.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Every summer at my house culminated in a mad rush to eat the bafflingly large piles of zucchini (courgette, for our British friends) that the garden always produced and we were unable to pawn off to our neighbors. I liked zucchini, especially when mixed up with flour a­nd sugar and baked into bread, muffins or even a distressingly good chocolate cake. Pumpkins, in the form of pie at any rate, were acceptable, and the occasional yellow crookneck was tolerated in due course. But the idea of eating unmasked squash and actually enjoying it was something that should only have lived in the heads of parents and the criminally insane. My enthusiasm in chowing down was certainly indicative of my impending loss of sanity, or, worse, maturity.

A long time has passed since that fateful day. I have since progressed to butternut, acorn and even the occasional scallop squash. Spaghetti squash was my gateway pepo, and now I will even hit up a hubbard. Now that it is time for the fall harvest, I spend my time salivating at the Ithaca Farmers’ Market over the knobbly skins and smooth, creamy flesh of heirloom gourds and other delectable edibles.

So let’s say you’ve heard the call to squash and taken a trip to Steamboat Landing for the Farmers’ Market. Looking at these piled-high asymmetric vegetable gems, you would never guess that most of these are varieties (“cultivars” for the botanically inclined) of only a few species. From the diminutive UFO-shaped pattypan to baseball-bat zucchini to thousand-pound pumpkins, most squashes are taxonomically closer than redneck first cousins. Still, they are largely categorized into soft-skinned “summer squashes” like zucchinis and crooknecks and rindy “winter squashes” like spaghetti squash and butternut.

The traditional way of cooking many summer squashes is quick and light, either parboiling or pan frying in a little bit of oil until the slices are tender. Winter squashes, on the other hand, require a bit more planning. For most of them, slicing a winter squash in half, removing the seeds, brushing the inside lightly with oil, and baking at about 350 degrees for half an hour or so will yield something delicious, soft and mellow.

One of the best things about winter squash, aside from the taste, is their great nutritional content. One cup is loaded with your whole recommended daily amount of Vitamin A and a bunch of fiber and potassium, packed in just 80 calories or so. Granted, once you start adding butter, maple syrup, and brown sugar to your roasted acorn squash, it gets a bit less healthy. But it just goes to show that even though a vegetable might be grayish-blue and bumpy and bigger than a hipster’s ego, that doesn’t mean that it’s scary. Who could be afraid of something that’s just as happy on a plate with red sauce as in a pie crust with cinnamon, nutmeg, and a dollop of whipped cream?