365 Days of Food

We took the bus with Hiroe to a shopping center in Renton, the town where the Boeing factory is, and went to a Korean all-you-can-eat buffet where you enter at a check-in desk that looks like you’re going to a hotel or a spa. From the giant cafeteria I tried selections of sushi, a mango…

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…

During my first job as a reporter in D.C., I remember calling up a source once and saying: “Are you sure you have time to talk to me now? It’s Friday afternoon.” To which he replied with not a little self-importance: “It’s Friday in Washington.” Over the years, I have lived through many, many of…

Lemon-zucchini muffins (I had five or six zucchinis stored in the fridge and I’m not even growing them myself). For these muffins, you leave the zucchini unpeeled so the muffin tops will look like they’re sprinkled with green confetti (and I’m beginning to think there’s never a good reason to peel zucchini anyway). Combine a…

They were doing salsa lessons at the neighborhood sports bar, and in a strange way the row of dancers in front of a guy with a microphone reminded me of the line dancing I used to see through the window at Remington’s, the country-themed gay bar down the street from my old apartment. I ordered…

We had tomatoes on slices of toast with ground beef. I’ve been forced to pick my tomatoes when they’re still unripe and a little green, because once I’ve allowed them to fully ripen they’ve already been discovered by the squirrels.  A bit of research tells me I’m probably waiting too long to harvest them anyway,…

I woke up early and planted some autumn vegetables, having concluded it’s more efficient to buy the plants instead of bothering to grow them from seeds. I cleared the side of my garden that used to be spring lettuce and replaced it with clean, symmetrical rows of broccoli, leeks, and brussels sprouts. The other half…