365 Days of Food

Veggie sausages with spaghetti and tomato sauce. The sausages, from Whole Foods, are a healthy alternative to chorizo and taste much the same. (Photo: Public library, Rockville, Maryland.) >> May 18 << May 16

Cinnamon puff muffins. The statement introducing them in the The King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion, which I disagree with, reads as follows: “In clothes, in design, and in baking: Simple and classic go hand in hand.” But surely it isn’t all that simple to bake an old-fashioned savory pie? For these muffins, which are certainly…

I mixed romaine lettuce and ramp leaves and put them in a bowl under some vermicelli noodles. On top of that I put ribeye steak cubes that had been marinated in nước mắm and chili pepper flakes, creating a hot and peppery version of bún. In the garden I planted Thai basil and beefsteak tomatoes….

Seitan stir fry with ramps and spring onions. I cooked it in a mole amarillo sauce, which is quite simple to make compared to the mole coloradito I made earlier. In this version of an amarillo, you roast two ancho chiles and one guajillo chile and soak them in hot water. Then char vegetables under…

Half and half cookies. My cookbook says they’re a “New York City bakery staple,” but I wouldn’t know. They are white cookies made by mixing a stick of butter with shortening, lemon zest, and sugar, then combining with dry ingredients and sour cream. The cookies come out very soft and taste puffed up like they’re…

Spring onions and asparagus stir-fried with chicken marinated in soy sauce, which makes it pleasantly sour. (Photo: Basil plants, May.) >> May 13 << May 11

Tacos. There’s a District Taco down the street from my new office, which probably makes it my fate that I’ll be eating there at least once a week. It used to be a food truck and now it’s a local taco empire, and since there was very little Mexican food in D.C. until recently (most…

Asparagus with lime juice and cold salmon. Viet made toasted baguette slices to carry the food, putting them in the oven only for a couple of minutes and cooking them on the oven rack, not in a pan. In this way they end up crisp as if they’re almost ready to become crackers, unlike the…

Butterhead lettuce alongside salmon prepared at Costco with pesto and dill sauce, on toasted slices of sourdough bread. You can add wasabi sauce (made with horseradish, modified food starch, and sucrose fatty acid esters) from a tube that’s the shape of a small shampoo bottle. (Photo: Sweet pepper, May.) >> May 10 << May 8

Butterhead lettuce with red wine vinaigrette. That was all I needed for dinner after we celebrated Mother’s Day lunch at Outback Steakhouse. It only took walking into that restaurant to put me in the mood for the juices of a hamburger patty mingled with the vegetable sweetness of ketchup. Viet’s mom pulled several cuttings of…

Breakfast tacos. The rain stopped, briefly, and the wisteria blossoms are out. I looked over the garden and most, though not all, of the sprouting lettuce leaves had been spared the ravages of two weeks of storms which shifted mulch from one side of the garden to cover the fragile seeds. The beans are also…

Arepas. At Nellie’s, which for a long time has been a favorite of ours as a low-key gay sports bar, but which recently seems to have turned into more of a girl’s night out destination and general late-night funhouse on weekends, you wouldn’t think they’d put a lot of thought into the food, but they…