Don't quite understand "featured content"

I'm very sorry, but I don't really understand the "featured content" aspect of the Everest theme. Don't get me wrong, I really love it! I'm just unclear on how exactly to use it. It looks like the only place I can alter what shows up there is in the Theme Options panel in the Homepage Settings. This seems a little awkward to me, but perhaps that's just because I don't know how to use it. I just know I'd much rather populate this section with posts, but when I disable the "featured content" all I get is a list of posts (and the full content of the posts - not a snippet). Is there any way to populate those three featured content elements with my posts?