Instructions: Over the past 30 years, chef Alice Waters of Berkeleys earthy but elegant Chez Panisse restaurant has led the charge to change the way we eat.

If she had a mantra, it would go like this: Fresh, local, seasonal. Fresh, local, seasonal.

Dinner should be driven by what is in abundance at the green market, she preaches. Forget out-of-season exotic ingredients. Get to a market and get to know some farmers.

Easy advice to follow in the summer months, when green markets are a riot of color and an embarrassment of riches. But come autumn, the selection changes to a bulbous array of tubers and squashes and roots. To be very frank, some people just dont know what to do with these vegetables.

The sizes and shapes of squash can make them unwieldy to cut and, lets face it, somewhat intimidating. You can almost see some folks pausing over the hard shell of a hefty acorn squash, knife in hand, pondering just how to proceed.

(Hmmm, you can always just bake it whole ...)

Then theres the matter of all those gnarled root vegetables - rutabagas, turnips and parsnips. All interesting enough, but what do you do with them once youve got them home? Pose them for pictures?

Eve Felder of the Culinary Institute of America, a former chef at the Chez Panisse Cafe, sees root vegetable reluctance firsthand, in students.

"I think often they get a bad rap. With my students, when they come into the culinary institute, I will say, Eat a beet. You cant even imagine what it takes (to get them) to eat a beet," says Felder, whose specialty is

"farm to table seasonal foods." She and other lovers of the fall harvest think people,

especially young people, arent as accustomed to these foods as they once were because of the entrenched move toward fast dining. For the most part, these vegetables just cant be made fast.

"They take longer to cook and people dont necessarily know how to cook them," Felder says. "And so they dont have them in their repertoire of flavor."

But she adds, "I also see were having a backlash to that, with consumers being more interested in food thats grown in a healthy way, and seasonal."

Growers get mixed reactions when they unveil the array of roots this time of year.

"The autumn palate is just spectacular," Felder says. "Its like a tsunami. There are these really big waves of produce: Peppers, eggplants ... Youve got all the herbs, cucumbers. Its all there. And then you have the fall crops. Youve got the autumn fennel, youve got the apples, the squash.

"It stimulates a certain kind of creativity. Its just a phenomenal time to be cooking. I just go into turbo overdrive."

She stops to consider that there are people who arent quite sure what to do with a squash or a rutabaga.

"A big, honking squash - thats never been a problem for me," she says. "My hunch is that if people do avoid produce, its that they arent familiar with it.

The only thing to do is surrender, she thinks.

"My answer would be, Get thee to a farmers market! And the reason is that I think that theres a seduction there. I think if you walk around a farmers market and you look at the produce as the farmer has proudly arranged it, its hard not to be seduced."

She adds, "Allow yourself to fall in love."

Felder says root vegetables bring a depth and earthiness to dishes that seems just right this time of year.

"If you think about what your body wants in a season - in the summer, tomatoes, mozzarella, things that are light are what your body wants," Felder says.

"In the winter, you want hearty. The depth of flavor that fall vegetables adds is exactly what you physically want."

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