I came home to find some boiled tortellini and a Honda Civic. Happiness is the smell of a new car, as Don Draper said, and even if we aren’t perfectly happy a major purchase should help get us there. It is our right as consumers to protect ourselves from the outside world as best we…

My husband made me tacos with beef and onions and lettuce, seasoned with berbere. I fell asleep watching a show about wolves hidden on a southern Indian plain where the grasslands had been replaced by farms and the wolves had to be camouflaged in the dust and eat bananas and berries to survive. They were…

It was the familiar rhythm of preparing food that I needed, like cutting up the broccoli, which always feels like such a precarious act, like you’re ripping apart tree branches and letting their pollen scatter over the counter; and cooking it with tofu in Albariño wine, which was really too sweet for the dinner we…

Someone brought carrot cake to work and I had it for breakfast. It was a clear and welcoming fall day that made us feel optimistic that the worst was behind us. I want to remember this day so I know what it felt like before everything changed; or rather, before we understood the change that…

It is possible to hate-eat something, just like you can hate-watch something on television when you feel so upset (for reasons which might be unrelated to the TV show itself) that you want to get it over with at the same time that you’re enjoying it. I had no complaints about our food, and the…

In the basement kitchen at somebody’s home where we had set up a phone bank, there were sprawling bags of leftover Halloween candy and oreos, as well as some very tasty chicken that a volunteer had brought in a tinfoil pan, drumsticks with skin that easily pulled off the bone. We worked all day and…

We took ourselves to Dino’s Grotto so we could have a few moments to feel civilized, and the pasta with sausage and the unpronounceable Italian red wine was exactly what I needed. They marinated slices of pear in some kind of wine reduction and placed them in a pie crust with spiced up greek yogurt…

For lunch, I got Korean tacos and sat on the roof with a couple coworkers and talked about the election; and after work we went to a new place down the street where there’s a row of about eight sports bar TVs on each wall and the booths are arranged to give you a sense…

I picked up some Vietnamese on the way home from work and surprised myself by pronouncing bún thịt nướng well enough for them to understand me. It seems I will have to get past an accordion of deadlines and election-year commitments before I have time to cook again. (Photo: Millennium Park, Chicago.) >> November 4…

I think I’ve figured out the secret to a McDonald’s hamburger. We weren’t there, we were at the neighborhood sports bar watching the Cubs win the World Series, but their burger reminded me of fast food. The secret is in the cheddar cheese: Use enough of it and you’re there for the dairy, and you…

Peas and rice with a glass of Malbec after I spent nearly all day inside, working from home and amusing myself with conference calls, and watching mist creep up and smudge out the view from the window. (Photo: Potomac Overlook Regional Park, Arlington, Virginia.) >> November 2 << October 31

Pumpkin cookies. A pumpkin is really a savory fruit that we’ve mischaracterized as a dessert food, and I blame our confusion on the fact that Halloween and Thanksgiving are fall harvest festivals which in the modern era have turned into kid-friendly parties with a lot of emphasis on pies and candy. The truth is that pumpkins…