The air felt unclean and there was the threat of a wild storm all day that never bothered to coalesce. When I got home I made some express tacos, cutting up a ribeye steak and cooking it with jalapeños, with mint and sage for garnish. (Photo: Lake Ahquabi, Iowa.) >> July 26 << July 24

I threw salmon on the grill and paid little attention to it, so we ended up eating burned skin, and I finished eating it as quickly as I could because I was looking forward to dessert, which was the red velvet cake I found at Safeway. It’s a fact that red velvet is just disguised…

It’s 100 degrees! I put leftover chicken on the grill with veggie burgers and an onion, and served them next to a pile of herbs. For dessert, I made s’mores by wrapping a completed graham cracker sandwich in foil and grilling the whole thing. This was a way of doing it that I don’t think…

Grabbed some pizza at an in-office happy hour which included a cover song with personalized lyrics, and in the heat, that was all I wanted. It was time to sleep. (Photo: Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado.) >> July 23 << July 21

Chocolate spoon cake. It may have once been a popular restaurant dessert, and on your own it’s an easy way to feel just a little bit more fancy. I adopted it from Dorie Greenspan’s Baking: From My Home to Yours, where it’s referred to as “warm gooey chocolate cake.” It is baked in ramekins which…

Pasta with tomatoes, mint, and ground lamb. The event unfolding on TV doesn’t seem in any way real, more like a barely choreographed circus scene in a movie about hubris in the digital age. I try to ignore it and try to forget that the madness could insert itself into the real world a few…

I picked the beans from my garden and cooked them with almonds, which had a similar texture to the beans inside the pods. It made for a good contrast with the tomato slices cooked with vinegar and basil, and the veggie hot dogs with paprika ketchup. (Photo: First Nations Garden, Montreal Botanical Garden.) >> July…

I have always felt a little confused about zucchini bread. I think of it as comfort food, certainly going back to early childhood when I’d have it late at night instead of cookies and milk, but then I also have trouble remembering how it’s supposed to taste different from banana bread. Perhaps due to the…

I undressed the first seasonal tomatoes by plunging them in hot water to remove the skins, and cooked them with eggplant to have with pasta. I’ve forgotten how to cook eggplant without making it taste like water, and I wonder if the best approach is to drown it in sauce. This time it helped a…

It’s midsummer back on the East Coast and the black-eyed susans are in bloom. I found a chihuahua which I thought had escaped from my neighbor’s backyard and I lured it back in and closed the fence, only to learn later that it was a different chihuahua entirely. I was afraid I’d set up some…

There was no complimentary food on the cross-country flight home, not even peanuts, though they did find the time to encourage us to apply for the airline credit card. I would have even been happy with the “Taste of Europe” biscotti wafers I’d received on an earlier flight. At the airport in Charlotte, North Carolina,…

There were several French restaurants in the neighborhood where I was staying, and it looked like it must been a historic center for French immigrants, so I had been well aware that Bastille Day was coming up all week. That evening, in spite of the news, there was a block party in celebration of the…