365 Days of Food

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…

The fundamental problem with mashed potatoes seems to be that they only get more delicious if you add more butter and cream. So when I followed the Cook’s Illustrated recipe for cooking diced potatoes in butter and milk, they ended up appropriately soft and silken, but it did not feel virtuous to eat them as…

Butternut squash takes on different tastes and textures depending on how you cook it, so it can be mixed with nearly anything and still add structure and wholeness to a dish. We had a quick breakfast before I spent the day helping run a phone bank: Scrambled eggs with sage, and pastries from the Korean…

Everything was going well until we learned the election may not be as straightforward as we had thought. I had a pumpkin cupcake for dinner, two of them, the old-fashioned kind from the grocery store where the diminutive body is an accessory to the orange frosting. (Photo: Appalachian Trail near Leesburg, Virginia.) >> October 29…

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…