It's fall and time to cook with potatoes

My autumn gene is starting to go from a recessive to a dominant state. I can't help it. I'm ignoring the 90-degree weather and humidity in South Florida during early October. Instead, I imagine fall is happening, like it is in most of the rest of the country.

I begin to read about stews, casseroles, simmering soups and apples in food magazines. Every cooking show on TV turns to squash, pumpkin recipes and slow-cooked foods.

This time of year, I feel homesick for the Hudson Valley kitchen of my youth. I long for the smell of the over-ripe fallen apples laying under the trees outside my bedroom window, where an abandoned orchard once blossomed.

Caramelized onions, simmering barley and burnt sugar come to mind.

Changing to cool weather ingredients is innate. I don't even think about it anymore. It's like a culinary timer in my head that goes off this time every year.

For some odd reason, I make more mashed and stuffed potatoes this time of year too. I recently

experimented with alternatives to plain mashed potatoes, and I came up with a couple of really flavorful combinations.

Using mashed potatoes as a base, I created a version with cauliflower and another with spinach. The good thing about both these mixtures is that they can be eaten as a side dish or stuffed back into the potato shell.

You also can scoop the cold mixture using a 2-ounce ice cream scoop, flatten it into patties, dust them with panko breadcrumbs and lightly brown them in a nonstick skillet sprayed with oil and set over medium heat.

Now if I can only find a way to lower the temperature outside, autumn might be here after all.