365 Days of Food

On the beach, the day started out in a haze that obscured the horizon and cut off the top of the big hotels. Later the fog cleared, or rather the sun poked out through holes and made it hot enough that jumping into the ice water became a welcome diversion. A couple next to us…

The bed and breakfast we usually stay at in Rehoboth has the same breakfast, or similar variations on it, prepared every morning on the front porch: there is either coffee cake, sometimes the color of coffee and other times the color of raspberries, or else a kind of filled french toast; also there’s quiche cut…

We drove to Rehoboth for the weekend, arriving late at night before we ended up at a restaurant called the Iguana Grill. They had the curious idea to adopt the decor and general appearance of a Mexican restaurant without actually serving Mexican food. The menu was heavy with meat, fish, and pasta. Bread, pasta, and…

The lettuce I planted has grown from seedlings to sprouts to baby lettuce. On a warm summer night, I went out and thinned the baby collards, baby mustard greens, baby romaine, and baby butterhead, ending up with a small handful of greens. The only trouble was that I don’t find raw mustard greens particularly appealing…

We were finishing our two-day-old Malbec and it had turned into an off-sweet imitation of a cheap dessert wine, but it was still a lot more pleasant to drink than whatever the house red was at the Irish pub where we’d gone for trivia the night before. I don’t mind drinking low-end red wine at…

A colleague took us out to lunch at the World Bank, and after a 15-minute underground security procedure, we emerged into a self-contained environment with its own cafes and fountains and art galleries, and even its own bank; really, its own economy. The cafeteria had several international food stands, but notably quite a few American…

Malbec has been a default wine for us for a long time, because it goes easily with the basic red meat dishes we often end up eating. Even when, like today, we just have veggie sausages with spaghetti sauce, it’s a simple way to forget the sausages are only pretend. (Photo: Bon Air Park, Arlington,…

Tres leches cake: There’s only one layer but it’s a process that involves many steps. The cake is made with a lot of egg whites and a little bit of flour, with vanilla and almond extract providing the dominant taste. Then, once you’ve baked the cake and cooled it to room temperature, you pour milk,…

Salmon cooked in lettuce. It’s a recipe from Asturias, the verdant and rainy part of northwestern Spain where the weather most resembles what we’ve experienced over the past month. I would be just fine if I lived in Asturias, or Ireland or Oregon or northern Minnesota, but since I didn’t actually sign up to live…

A lemon candy at the place where I get my haircut, which I swallowed in one gulp but managed to avoid choking on. This was a good way to end the week. We had Ethiopian at Lalibela and then tried to go home but had trouble flagging down a ride from a car sharing service,…

I usually have spicy food when I don’t have time to prepare anything complicated and I’m going to lean on a condiment to complete a meal. One example is my very hot mustard. I bought it accidentally without noticing the tiny label in a corner of the bottle that says “hot,” which seems like a…

When it was around 2007 I remember a coworker mentioning he hadn’t had “fresh” asparagus all spring. He’d eaten asparagus, but it was “from California, or wherever.” This was when the food trends we know today were just getting started and it was probably the first time I’d ever even thought about associating whether a…