Cool weather starts everyone thinking of soup. Squashes and greens lend themselves to endless permutations.

The season for fresh vegetables isn't over just because the blighted tomato plants in your backyard are dead. Now is the time for cool-weather greens — squashes, kale, chards and lettuces. Local farmers and gardeners are also harvesting the old standbys of acorn and butternut and the more interesting kabocha and kuri varieties. They'll soon pull up an array of root vegetables: potatoes, beets, carrots and turnips.

The good news doesn't end there. Area chefs are making the bounty sing.

Cool weather starts everyone thinking of soup. And squashes and greens lend themselves to endless permutations. In Fairfield, Sue Cadwell, chef and owner of Health in a Hurry, is making what she calls "exotic pumpkin soup," spiced with fennel seeds, cumin, cinnamon, clove, red pepper and garlic, finished with a touch of coconut milk.

Cadwell thinks fall holds a couple more warm days, which will be the perfect time to use the sorrel growing in her garden. "I might make sorrel soup on a warm day," she says of the tart lemony leaves.

As any holistic health counselor worth their low salt will tell you, raw vegetables are important to the diet. Cadwell jazzes up raw kale by dressing it with vinaigrette made from fresh orange juice, garlic and ginger. She sprinkles toasted pumpkin seeds on her kale salad for crunch and protein.

Claire's Corner Copia in New Haven blends butternut squash with white beans to create a soup that's creamy, yet contains no dairy. The vegetarian eatery also serves fall squash bisque with risotto croquettes and makes pesto with arugula.

Butternut squash with brown butter and sage is a classic, of course. At Market in Stamford, executive chef Al D'Onofrino uses kabocha, also known as Japanese pumpkin, and a sweet, smooth-textured squash in his rendition of the dish. At La Tavola Ristorante in Waterbury, chef/owner Nick Mancini fills ravioli with sweet pumpkin, sauces it with sage butter and sprinkles it with crumbled amaretto cookies and pumpkin seeds. He finishes the dish with a drizzle of pumpkin seed oil.

Another choice winter vegetable is the beet. D'Onofrino's roasted beet salad features red, golden and candy-striped beets, with beet chips for a contrasting crunch. Mancini tosses native red and golden beets with a salad of frisée, shaved fennel, apples from March Farms in Bethlehem and Maytag blue cheese. He dresses the salad with apple cider vinaigrette.

And let's not forget mushrooms. They too love moist, cool weather. Mancini gets locally grown pink, yellow and blue oyster mushrooms. They lose their color when cooked, but who cares? The woodsy, meaty flavor is perfect in risotto, which Mancini tops with seared diver scallops.

Cabbage isn't boring when Denise Appel, the co-owner/chef at Zinc in New Haven, ferments red cabbage into sauerkraut. On Zinc's new fall menu, it's served with pork and applesauce made from local Granny Smith apples. Appel also embellishes succotash by mixing corn kernels, haricot vert, edamame and tasso ham (spicy smoked pork shoulder).

She gets her vegetables from Urban Oaks in New Britain. They're not your standard organic vegetables. She chooses a variety of squashes — kabocha, Cinderella and red kuri. Appel uses squash instead of eggplant in caponata, the zesty caper-studded Italian appetizer. "I also get a large variety of potatoes," Appel says, "Kennebec, sweet potato fingerlings, French fingerlings and regular yukons."

Over at Sticks and Stones Farm in Newtown, John Betar, who tends the "century garden" (a name they came up with to describe the farm's organic, 100-square-foot plot), sells produce to places like Health in a Hurry and North Star Restaurant in Pound Ridge, N.Y. Betar says he's harvesting kale and cabbages, and will soon be pulling up beets, turnips, kohlrabi and salsify.

The Farm's in-house holistic health counselor Annie Stiefel lives on the Sticks and Stones farm half of the year and spends the other half at her farm in Hawaii. Although the programs at Sticks and Stones are winding down for the season, Stiefel is still cooking for family and friends. Any soup she makes is likely to get a last dash of minced greens like Swiss chard. She makes salads from arugula, mizuna and "really pretty romaines," she says. "Curries are also great this time of year," she adds.