White bread with a crust of olive oil and herbs. For me, over the years, making yeast bread has been an exercise in learning how to fail, but the elemental comfort of baking bread is too alluring to give up, so I tried again with the simplest recipe I could find, adding the herb crust…

The eggplant in my garden had been pulled up from the roots and was about to collapse on top of the lettuce, so I rescued the last fruit, an eggplant the size of a shoe. (A book published in 1597, The Herball, or, Generall Historie of Plantes, spoke of an eggplant that “came to bear…

Ground beef cooked in kibbeh (Ethiopian butter), flavored with berbere, cardamom, and cloves, putting it in taco shells in the place of injera. This is a good choice for a night when you just want to eat, not think. (Photo: Residential trees, Silver Spring, Maryland.) >> October 26 << October 24

There was, quite remarkably, a little tomato that survived on my withered vine, and next to it a couple of poblano peppers that turned red. I fried them with some onions to make a mirepoix of sorts, added broccoli, then chopped up some apple veggie sausages and threw them in. (Photo: Brookside gardens, autumn.) >>…

There’s a slight chill, perfect for long-distance running, and yellow is appearing in the tulip tree forests. The dinner I made was like an October Thanksgiving, with squash and red onion garnished with lemon and za’atar. I also made a cauliflower salad, from Ottolenghi and Tamimi, with roasted hazelnuts. I am not much a hazelnut…

We had cups of chex mix with candy pumpkins at a birthday party for a one-year-old, and our host brought out a bottle of sparkling red wine from somewhere in New Jersey. It tasted sugary, like a picnic wine, and not something you’d want alongside a main dish, but I’m in favor of respecting the…

There are some restaurants in D.C., the best ones, where people go to have spirited conversations and work out the finer points in life, and I think Baan Thai is one of those places. Their vermicelli with chicken is a combination of spicy, sweet, and the unique and unclassifiable flavor of peanut butter, and with…

It is 10 or 20 degrees more than it should be outside and if it were the middle of spring it would feel pleasant, yet now the low angle of sunlight combined with the mild atmosphere and calm winds produces an ongoing sense of unease. I put ground pork on the stove and used the…

Viet brought home Popeye’s chicken and it tasted good, especially if you like eating a whole stick of butter. Actually what I’m thinking of is butter dipped in breadcrumbs, or really it’s the fried butter on a stick that you can buy at the State Fair. The Popeye’s biscuits are soft and warm enough to…

Pasta stew with chicken and tomatoes. This was a less ambitious version of a Catalan dish (fideus a la cassola) in which the noodles are cooked like a risotto with a combination of sausages, chicken pieces, tomatoes, peas, onions, and chicken broth. The full recipe would be good for waking up the senses on a…

Apple strudel. There was a recipe in Cook’s Illustrated that promised to make it easy to bake for “the rest of us,” and this was the kind of step-by-step guide I needed to overcome my unacknowledged fear of baking pastries. I was intimidated by the process of buying and handling phyllo dough, and nervous that…

In the end, the twisting and turnings of the squash plant in my garden produced one medium-sized butternut squash and a small one, enough for one meal. Next year I may decide that squash isn’t worth the investment in space, or alternatively I can make a commitment to devote much of the yard to a…