We met my grandmother, Hiroe, at Ikina Sushi in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, down the street from an antique store where they had rescued one of the famous Donald Trump statues and put it next to their statue of Bigfoot. I had a rice bowl with fish, and the sauce from the eel enriched the…

I had a chocolate donut at the Seattle airport to get rid of jet lag before we dodged through the rain to find lunch. There is a Vietnamese restaurant near Pioneer Square where I tried an avocado smoothie; they made a mistake and included tapioca pearls, and their texture felt alien in the context of…

We were packing for a trip to Seattle and didn’t have time for anything, so I had a salmon sandwich at a pub. The last time I was in the Pacific Northwest, I remember having so many salmon burgers and salmon steaks that I almost got tired of them. (Photo: Lake Superior, Duluth, Minnesota.) >>…

Blueberry soup. Either I was preoccupied in mid-July or fresh blueberries were very scarce this year. I bought a couple of pints of them to freeze in storage, and they weren’t local, but blueberries are blueberries. One of my cookbooks has a recipe for blueberry gazpacho that calls for tellicherry peppercorns, vanilla beans, and I…

The amount of basil I have in the garden is formidable; every year I start out worrying that we won’t have enough and then end up with a forest. I knew it was time to make headway on harvesting the plants, so I pulled off enough leaves to make a double batch of pesto. I…

Mexican ratatouille. Lately I’ve found it challenging to make simple preparations stand out, and this at a time of year when it should be easy to just add a little salt or vinegar to fresh fruits and vegetables, with no other improvement needed. A lot of what I try seems to fall flat, or the…