I don’t know if anyone’s ever written an ode to spaghetti. It deserves an ode. Noodles are the only kind of food that you don’t just chew, but actually let slide through your mouth, and Italian noodles are the only kind that really pick up the flavor and substance of the other ingredients, so that…

Global temperatures in February were higher than average by a difference of 1.15 to 1.4 degrees Celsius. That makes February 2016 the warmest month above average ever recorded. Here in the Washington region, it has been mild and mellow. The atmosphere in D.C. can almost always be described as mild, whether you’re talking about the…

Store-bought clam chowder. In The Mad Feast by Matthew Gavin Frank, a book of freewheeling essays on the signature dishes of all 50 states, clam chowder is associated with two states, not one: Connecticut and Rhode Island. And that’s if you don’t count New Hampshire, where corn chowder is the meal of choice. In Rhode…

This was the first time I ever cooked duck. I was expecting to fail, bearing in mind the rule of thumb that you should try the duck at any restaurant to find out if the cooks really know what they’re doing. So it was a pleasant surprise when I didn’t have any problem. I brined…

Chicken with pineapples and fish sauce. I worked from a Vietnamese recipe that tells you to stir-fry the chicken with onions and a chopped-up pineapple, adding garlic and four tablespoons of nước mắm. I threw in thyme from my garden and dried Vietnamese basil, yet in the end, the pineapple flavor drowned out everything else….

Today’s unpleasant surprise was when I realized I’d taken home a bad loaf of bread. Not that it was stale, but it tasted like someone put too much salt in the baguette. A few bites later, I was unreasonably thirsty. (And I bought it from Safeway, where the baking is normally fine.) Swapping the bread…

It’s the time of the year when I start to hear owls in my neighborhood when I walk to work in the morning. And today, after I left the office at night it was warm and dry, not even all that cloudy, when all of a sudden lightning struck. The thunder was simultaneous and I…