’Tis finally almost the season. I wandered into the grocery store yesterday, hunting and gathering some cheap white wine for dinner, when I realized that my casual consumering was probably slowing down the serious shoppers. This was a Wednesday, a full 15 days before Thanksgiving, and there was full bore, intense provisioning happening. A dozen shopping carts were piled high with frozen turkeys, aluminum roasting pans, boxes of Stove Top Stuffing and clinking cans of Ocean Spray cranberry jelly. The lines stretched far away from the registers, snaking down a couple of aisles. I caught up with my queue near the top of the Bottled Water/Sports Drinks aisle, feeling like old Mr. Gower, the disgraced pharmacist from It’s A Wonderful Life, with my Chardonnay, a bottle of Tabasco sauce, and a bag of tortilla chips. I could feel the scorn of the other shoppers, who were balancing their weighty bags of potatoes, awkwardly wrapped hams, and tubes of crescent roll dough. It’s time to get serious.

Consequently, we had the first conference call with family members last night about our Thanksgiving meal: T minus 15 days, and counting. We will plan it for the next two weeks, spend countless hours weighing the shopping and cooking options before actually cooking, or eating, the meal. The clean up always takes more time than eating the meal. All aspects of the ritual are what we really relish, the meal is merely the catalyst for our small family gathering. We will make construction paper turkeys and faux-feather headdresses in the morning, string the beans, stew cranberries, baste the turkey, warm the ham, set the table, light the candles, carve the bird, talk fondly of the folks who couldn’t join us, clear the table, wash the dishes, wrap the leftovers, finish the wine and totter off to bed. It should be fun.

In our sophisticated twenty-first century world we are offered choices our mothers certainly never imagined. The grocery store in 2022 offers many kind of local and imported foods. We try to be responsible, and think of our carbon footprints, and supporting our neighbors. Sometimes the new and exotic are hard to resist. It’s tempting to suggest a change of ingredient, or ritual. I am mulling over the all-important potato conundrum: should I try this new-fangled concept of roasting the potatoes instead of boiling them as generations have done? Should I make them ahead of time and re-heat just before we sit down? I still haven’t lived down the shame of the Thanksgiving I forgot to prepare, or serve, the green beans – and that was our very first Thanksgiving, before the children were even glimmers in our eyes. This family never forgets, and they honor humiliations endlessly. If I mess up the potatoes, I will never hear the end of it.

That said, it might be worth giving this recipe a whirl: https://www.tastingtable.com/885589/next-time-you-make-mashed-potatoes-try-roasting-them-first/

Food52, always our most reliable source, has mashed potato non-recipes with several variations: https://food52.com/blog/11703-how-to-make-mashed-potatoes-without-a-recipe

If you are a sweet potato family, the sophisticates at Food52 know what you’ll enjoy: https://food52.com/recipes/2561-mashed-sweet-potatoes-with-creme-fraiche-and-herbs

Mark Bittman has a compendium of potato solutions, many of which you can employ for Thanksgiving and its leftover aftermath: https://markbittman.com/recipes-1/potatoes-12-ways

If you need to tailor your meal for dietary reasons, you can substitute butter and cream with chicken or vegetable broth. We still like to remind one family member of the time they came home from college newly vegetarian, and proceeded to drown the vegetarian mashed potatoes in fresh, lump-free turkey gravy. Ah, memories. https://cookeatlivelove.com/substitutes-milk-mashed-potatoes/

Which brings us back around to the kind of potatoes to use for mashing: https://www.bonappetit.com/story/best-potatoes-for-mashing

You can also consider what the grocery stores do to sell us those seductive and luscious potatoes, how we are being manipulated: https://www.producebusiness.com/9-ways-to-sell-more-spuds-year-round/

We are renting a house by a small lake this year for Thanksgiving, so I don’t know what to expect in the way of kitchen equipment. We have had some interesting Thanksgivings where we have had to improvise, which can add both to the hilarity of the situation, and to the holiday tension. Ina Garten said, “If you think about a Thanksgiving dinner, it’s really like making a large chicken.” Being in a strange kitchen and not noticing the dearth of potholders until meal prep is underway can be daunting. There was one year in a rental house that we were spatchcocking a 24-pound turkey, for the first time. Ever. Six college degrees were deemed useless as we grappled with the enormous carcass. This year I am making a couple of dishes ahead of time and will be packing them in the cooler for ease of use and peace of mind. Mashed potatoes are at the head of my list: https://www.onceuponachef.com/recipes/creamy-make-ahead-mashed-potatoes.html

For easy breakfasts I will also be making and packing Paula Deen’s Sausage Balls, because this year I refuse to travel with the KitchenAid stand mixer again: https://www.pauladeen.com/recipe/sausage-balls/

Good luck with your planning. T minus 13 days…

“In the end, I always want potatoes. Mashed potatoes. Nothing like mashed potatoes when you’re feeling blue…The problem with mashed potatoes, though, is that they require almost as much hard work as crisp potatoes, and when you’re feeling blue the last thing you feel like is hard work. Of course, you can always get someone to make the mashed potatoes for you, but let’s face it: the reason you’re blue is that there isn’t anyone to make them for you. As a result, most people do not have nearly enough mashed potatoes in their lives, and when they do, it’s almost always at the wrong time.”
― Nora Ephron

It’s hard to admit to having grown up. Peter Pan not withstanding, we all lurch forward every day, imperceptibly changing. One minute we are children, excitedly anticipating Halloween and our costumes, and roving the neighborhood at night in bands of fellow kids, collecting candy, sharing intelligence on what to expect from that big house on the corner, the one with all the decorations. And the next minute, we are standing in the grocery store, weighing the merits of various candies, trying to figure out what to buy. Snickers or Milky Ways? Poof!

Post trick-or-treating I remember sitting on my bedroom floor with my sophisticated older brother, discussing the merits of the candy we had amassed. We organized our stacks of tiny M&M boxes, miniature Mr. Goodbars, mini Junior Mints, wee Dots, singleton Tootsie Pops and precious, diminutive Milky Ways. Sometimes there were cellophane packaged wax teeth, or candy necklaces. And it being the Good Olde Days, handfuls of loose candy corn and apples. He could go farther afield in the neighborhood, since he moved fast and had three more years of Halloween experience than I did. His pile was always bigger.

When my children were growing up our street was shunned by the merry bands of children. We lacked the joie de vivre and the Halloween spirit of a neighborhood a few blocks away, where there was quality, full-sized candy to be had, and a couple of over-the-top haunted houses. One of the houses, where Scary Mary lived, had enormous gargoyles sitting on its stone wall, year ’round. Halloween was Scary Mary’s favorite holiday. I don’t think there were children in that house, which made her enthusiasm for All Hallow’s Eve a bit puzzling.

Our Halloween decorations were humble: about-to-rot kid-carved jack-o-lanterns, a few lighted plastic pumpkins, flamingo skeletons, and sometimes little white fabric ghosts dangling and twirling in the trees in the front yard. Scary Mary not only had the giant cement gargoyles, the tall gothic house, and lighted, animatronic skeletons on the widow’s walk, but also organ music, dry ice mist, goblins opening her creaky front door, scary lights and loud chain saw recordings playing as the children stumbled inside to thrust their hands in bowls of spaghetti guts and squishy eyeballs. Terrorized children shrieked with terror and pure enjoyment, while the adults stood watching in the street, pulling the red wagons that would whisk overly-exhausted children home. There was no competing with Scary Mary.

There must be a Scary Mary quota for every community. In my next-door neighbor’s front yard there is a 10-foot tall skeleton posing with a large, winged dragon skeleton, with a display of half a dozen life-sized skeletons shimmying up a rope of colored lights to the top of the chimney. There are several garish neon-colored, lighted plastic pumpkins. Another neighbor has a melon garden in her front yard, and she has painted the melons orange, to look like a pumpkin patch. You couldn’t pay me enough to go ring those doorbells, but I bet there will be kids galore who do.

When I was little I remember fretting that it might be cold enough to have to wear a coat over my homemade costume. (It is hard to look like a splendid, glittering fairy if your wings are covered up with a winter coat.) In Florida we had to worry if it was going to be too hot, and that the chocolate candy would melt. This year there is a 60% chance of rain on Monday. I hope it is a perfect, cool and exciting evening. Our street has few children, and the past COVID-affected years have brought just a couple of straggling trick-or-treaters to our front door. I have hauled out the flamingo skeletons, and the lighted pumpkins. I will try to enjoy the night as a grown-up, burnishing my neighborhood reputation by passing out full-size candy bars. I hope it doesn’t rain.

“Halloween shadows played upon the walls of the houses. In the sky the Halloween moon raced in and out of the clouds. The Halloween wind was blowing, not a blasting of wind but a right-sized swelling, falling, and gushing of wind. It was a lovely and exciting night, exactly the kind of night Halloween should be.”
― Eleanor Estes

And should not enough children visit your haunted house, here are ideas for what to do with the leftover candy: https://www.bonappetit.com/recipes/article/what-to-do-with-leftover-halloween-candy

The Spy Test Kitchens have been enjoying a breath of fresh fall air. The days have been beautiful with bright azure skies, brisk zephyrs, and a touch of frost on the windshield in the morning. It is a good time for walks with Luke the wonder dog, who was heartily tired of the hot summer. The brown, fallen leaves make poking his nose in every bush smell even more intriguing from his point of view, while more annoying to my end of the leash. Though I do enjoy trailing a curious, buoyant dog, happily trotting ahead of me, than the pokey puppy I was hauling around the neighborhood all summer long.

Luke is also fond of taking car rides. He likes going along on short excursions to the farm stand for various seasonal purchases. In the past few weeks we’ve taken trips to buy chrysanthemum plants for the front porch, pumpkins that we will never carve, and the most recent visit was to acquire more than enough apple cider to make a batch of apple cider doughnuts. There is nothing more tempting than a clutch of home-made doughnuts over a weekend. We have no steely resolve in this house as we prepare for our annual doughnut nosh.

At least we aren’t frying the doughnuts, so we can enjoy the first tastes of fall without worrying about fats and all of the cardiac dangers associated with fried foods. I love the silicone doughnut molds we have, which are bright Lego colors. That way we don’t have added temptation of orphan doughnut holes, sitting sadly on the kitchen counter, singing their alluring siren songs. I love the genius of reducing the cider on top of the stove to concentrate its flavor. This is why we like to read recipes, to gather in the vast and varied experiences of the home cooks who have cooked before! These doughnuts taste like a visit to the farm stand, without all the car windows wide open to give Luke the cheap breezy thrills of a car ride to the country: https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/baked-apple-cider-donuts/

If you do want the experience of frying doughnuts, à la Homer Price (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_Price), please take a look at Mark Bittman’s recipe for fried apple cider doughnuts. I haven’t tried this recipe, but I bet it is deelish: https://markbittman.com/recipes-1/apple-cider-doughnuts

Apple cider doughnuts only require about a cup and a half of cider. Whatever should we do with the rest of the half gallon? We are concerned about food waste, and apple cider is so delicious! Naturally our thoughts first turn to cocktails:

Apple Cider Smash: https://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/apple-cider-smash/

Spiked Hot Apple Cider Punch: https://www.joyfulhealthyeats.com/easy-hot-spiked-mulled-apple-cider-recipe/

And you can kill many trendy birds with this stone: https://www.delish.com/cooking/recipe-ideas/a41312899/apple-cider-spritz-recipe/

But life is not a big cocktail party, sadly. We do need to eat dinner and be civilized for the greater part of the day. This is an ingenious way to use up some cider, and do something different with sausage: https://food52.com/recipes/73115-sausage-and-apple-pie

And here is a handy dandy list of recipes, for when you are tired of apple cider, but don’t want to waste a drop: https://www.foodnetwork.com/fn-dish/recipes/2016/09/10-recipes-to-make-with-apple-cider

It is a good time for change. It’s nice to wear sweaters again. Socks! What a novelty! I even had to pull on gloves for this morning’s trot through the neighborhood. I know in November that a 36°F morning will seem balmy, but today I watched mist rising from the grass where the sun was burning off the frost, and it felt good to bundle up a little bit. It will be divine to sink our teeth into warm, sweet apple cider doughnuts, too. Welcome, fall!

“Two sounds of autumn are unmistakable…the hurrying rustle of crisp leaves blown along the street…by a gusty wind, and the gabble of a flock of migrating geese.”
― Hal Borland

The Spy Test Kitchens strive to be au courant and topical. We read food columns, pour over cook books, watch trends, and avidly consume restaurant reviews. Because the writing can be delicious and clever, we get all sorts of ideas of what is new and innovative, and what to cook next. By the time a novelty food is featured as a gag on “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” I think it is safe to assume the train has left the station, the novelty has worn out, or it just wasn’t a really great idea to begin with. It is passé. I point you to NyQuil Chicken, as an extremely bad cooking idea. Less dangerous, but no less odd, are butter boards.

NyQuil Chicken, also reported by NPR, was a bad joke popularized on TikTok, which is a popular site for young cooks to get new and groovy cooking hints. I like chicken, and once a year I like having a cold that demands a nighttime drug experience with NyQuil – I would never combine the two. I have seen photos of cooked NyQuil chicken: it looks sky-blue, not a color that is any way appetizing. In this NPR report, which details the dangers of poaching food in chemicals, it is green, and not in a healthy, leafy green vegetable way. DO NOT COOK NyQuil Chicken. https://www.npr.org/2022/09/22/1124252556/nyquil-chicken-challenge-fda-warning

Butter boards are extremely photogenic food and greatly popular on TikTok as well. (I first heard about them on “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell me”, the NPR news quiz, which easily explains my demographic.) Butter boards are the natural progression of charcuterie boards, which seem to have outlived their usefulness as a novelty. The thrill of rolling up bits of deli meats have given way to schmearing cutting boards with pounds of softened butter (which is costly now, and in some markets, hard to find).

The butter is then covered with artfully tossed bunches of edible flowers, fresh herbs, handfuls of artisanal salts and peppers, and jewel-like baby vegetables, over which your guests then fawn, while spewing fresh post-COVID germs over each other. Your guests are supposed to twirl crusty slices of freshly baked peasant breads through these careful arrangements, scooping up butter and toppings, which in turn help to sop up the wine your friends are inhaling.

Add figs, add nasturtiums, add pomegranate seeds, add hot pepper jelly. You can clean your fridge out of all the fancy little glass jars of preserves, relishes and spreads that you own. But don’t make the cheese board an entire dinner. Maybe assemble a modest butter board for an appetizer while you are frantically shredding a Costco rotisserie chicken in the kitchen, attempting to make everything you serve look homemade.

You can pair a butter board with a cheese board, a crudité board, and a charcuterie board and put them out on the sideboard. So 1950s cocktail party. Peg Bracken would approve. Be sure to have lots of wine.

There is nothing that I like better (food-wise) than a glass of nice red wine, with a piece of crusty, warm and yeasty bread, with good butter. I tend to stop after one piece, though. I have a doctor’s appointment this afternoon, and I imagine she will look askance if I told her I was consuming mass quantities of butter for my dinner tonight. https://www.tiktok.com/@food52/video/7146324658722180394?

Go be trendy. Enjoy modern life. If you can find good, affordable butter, and want to share it with your friends, make a butter board. It’s easy, it’s pretty, and it’s tasty. And the holidays are upon us: https://cookthestory.com/holiday-butter-board/ Just no experimenting with NyQuil Chicken, please.

“‘Two days wrong!’ sighed the Hatter. ‘I told you butter wouldn’t suit the works!’ he added, looking angrily at the March Hare.
‘It was the best butter,’ the March Hare meekly replied.
‘Yes, but some crumbs must have got in as well,’ the Hatter grumbled: ‘you shouldn’t have put it in with the bread-knife.’
The March Hare took the watch and looked at it gloomily: then he dipped it into his cup of tea, and looked at it again: but he could think of nothing better to say than his first remark, ‘It was the best butter, you know.’”
-Lewis Carroll

This is a column from last year – I am gadding about on a field trip out of town. Have a great weekend. Go pick apples!

We almost always have a big bowl of green apples sitting on the kitchen counter. I tend to buy green apples, and that is the way I think of them, “green apples,”  when I should be thinking “Granny Smith.” Granny Smith apples are popular for eating raw and also for baking in pies. Which is about the extent of my apple repertoire.

The smart folks at Saveur magazine have a more novel approach, apples for every dinner course; “An All-Apple Dinner.”
http://www.saveur.com/article/Menu/An-All-Apple-Dinner

Apples are the harbinger of autumn and of school lunches and snacks gnawed after school while sitting at the kitchen table. I remember lolling the summers away in a neighbor’s back yard, where blowsy hydrangea blossoms wavered and the grass was covered with fragrant, rotting crabapples. That crabapple tree was a good height for climbing, too, always an added kid bonus. And there were grapevines, with lip-puckering green grapes. Eventually the grapes ripened into sweet purple orbs, which were perfect for spitting.

Apples remind me of brown-bagged lunches, with warm, wax paper-wrapped cheese sandwiches. They were an intrinsic part of the lunchroom smell: apples, old bananas, sour milk, vomit and the green sawdust the janitors used for sweeping up the floors.

Apples make me think of Jo March, scribbling in her cold New England attic, her inky fingers clutching apples as she nibbled away, scrawling her latest lurid tale. Apples bring knowledge and comfort, and at this time of year, and in these perilous times, there are plenty of reasons to eat them often.

There seem to be an equal number of apple dishes we can prepare as there are varieties of apples: apple sauce, apple butter, apple cake, apple pie, apple tart, apple cider, apple crisp, apple brown betty, caramel apples, apple turnovers, apple pancakes, apples and cheddar cheese… (Here are 80 apple recipes, all in one place: https://www.delish.com/cooking/g1968/easy-apple-recipes/ ) We discovered last night that Luke the wonder dog likes green apples. (He also likes iceberg lettuce, fresh asparagus, Roma tomatoes, green peppers and the sound of plastic-wrapped slices of American cheese.)

It’s a little early for the strolls through crunchy leaves, but the autumnal yen of eating crunchy apples can be indulged right now. You need to travel to your favorite farmers’ markets this weekend, and stock up on freshly picked treasures. Of course, it is always gilding the lily to do anything to an apple except wash it and take a bite. Even pies seem unnecessarily vulgar. Does an apple really need brown sugar, cinnamon and dabs of butter to taste better? Of course not! But any iteration of an apple is a good thing.

This Apple Crumble is easy peasy.

6 Golden Delicious or Braeburn apples, peeled, sliced into 1 inch pieces
4 tablespoons sugar
2/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoon lemon juice
Grated zest of one orange
2/3 cup melted butter
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup uncooked oats

Preheat oven to 375°F

Mix apples, sugar, lemon juice and orange zest. In another bowl combine flour, oats, brown sugar, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg. Toss with butter. Combine with apple mixture in a buttered baking dish.

Bake for 30 to 40 minutes. Cool 10 minutes before serving. Serve with a scoop of vanilla ice cream or a nice big wodge of whipped cream. Yumsters. All of the taste of apple pie with no fragile or temperamental pie crust to contend with.

The Farmers’ Almanac has a handy-dandy chart for which apples are best suited to various dishes: sauces, cider, pie and baking. http://www.almanac.com/content/best-apples-baking

“And there never was an apple, in Adam’s opinion, that wasn’t worth the trouble you got into for eating it.”
Neil Gaiman

Storm Ian will be paying us all a call this weekend. After it tore through Florida and then meandered its way up the coast, it’s going to be here in time for the weekend. I think it is safe to say that autumn has arrived.

It’s still too early to pull out all of the casserole dishes and stew pots and the slow cooker, but it seems like a little comfort food should be in order. There is nothing I like better than a nice roasted chicken, with a side of fluffy, buttery rice, but if I cook yet another simple, roasted chicken, Mr. Sanders is likely to keel over with boredom. I like monotony. I like predictable. I like routine. I like the fact that I can finally roast a chicken well. He would say that I like bland, white foods. He might have a point.

It has taken me a while to cotton onto the beauty of cooking in a cast iron skillet. They always seemed too heavy and unwieldy, and difficult to clean. It seemed like something we would bring camping, not use for home cooking. Now that I have been using this pan for about five years it isn’t intimidating any more. I can appreciate its versatility. I can admire its heft. Not only can I roast a chicken, I can make great personal pizzas, Dutch babies, corn bread, pork chops and even chili. And so I adored mastering Mark Bittman’s roast chicken recipe. https://markbittman.com/recipes-1/simplest-roast-chicken-8-ways

Much of my cooking is for just the two of us. Even if I think roasted chicken and rice is about the best possible home cooked meal, I need to respect my dinner companion’s tastes. And so, in consideration of our marriage, I upped the game ever so slightly recently, and I made lemon-strewn Chicken Française for dinner, with a side of fancy, cheesy risotto. There is nothing like a little continental flair to make dinner seem special. And the lemons were very pretty.

Chicken Française

(I halved this recipe. In fact, I used just one boneless chicken breast, slicing it to get 2 thin pieces, which I then flattened it with a rolling pin to get truly wafer-thin portions.)

4 large skinless boneless chicken breast halves (2 pounds total)
1/2 cup olive oil
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
3 large eggs
1/2 stick (1/4 cup) unsalted butter
1/2 cup dry white wine
1/2 cup low-sodium chicken broth
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice plus 1 whole lemon, thinly sliced
1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley

Step 1
Place chicken breasts between 2 sheets of plastic wrap and gently pound chicken with flat side of a meat pounder or with a rolling pin until 1/4 inch thick.
Step 2
Heat oil in a 12-inch heavy skillet over moderate heat until hot but not smoking.
Step 3
While oil is heating, stir together flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 teaspoon pepper in a shallow bowl. Dredge chicken, 1 piece at a time, in flour mixture, shaking off excess. Lightly beat eggs in another shallow bowl. When oil is hot, dip floured chicken into beaten eggs to coat, letting excess drip off, then fry, turning over once, until golden brown and just cooked through, about 4 minutes total. Transfer to a plate lined with paper towels and keep warm, loosely covered with foil. Fry remaining chicken in same manner.
Step 4
Pour off and discard oil, then wipe skillet clean and heat butter over low heat until foam subsides. Add wine, broth, and lemon juice and boil, uncovered, stirring occasionally, until sauce is reduced to about 1/2 cup, for about 6 minutes. Spoon sauce over chicken and top with lemon slices and parsley.

https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/chicken-francaise-108667

The risotto, since the truth must be told, came from a box. But I did make salad dressing from scratch, and for once I ironed the napkins. And there was candlelight and music, thank you, Alexa.

Mark Bittman thinks that risotto is a meal unto itself: https://www.bittmanproject.com/p/371308_mb-risotto-5-8- And I promise I will cook it his way one day, since he did not lead me astray with his roasted chicken, for this meal I took the easy way out.

This was a dinner that could not be beat, and it was fancy enough for a Sunday dinner, and familiar enough to satisfy my yearning comfort. And it was pretty.

Be careful with the tidal surges this weekend.

“Ordinary folk prefer familiar tastes – they’d sooner eat the same things all the time – but a gourmet would sample a fried park bench just to know how it tastes.”
― Walter Moers

“If we have less time alive than the time we have lived, shouldn’t it all be comfort food?”
― Terrance Hayes

We were entertaining grand delusions this past weekend. It was almost the end of summer, and the leaves were streaming down in the back yard. The light seemed to be changing angles, and there were new birds lining up at the bird baths. Surely fall must be right around the corner, so let’s start cooking for colder weather.

“Ha,” I say. “Ha, ha, ha!” It was 75 degrees this morning when Luke the wonder dog and I did our morning rounds. It’s going to 92 degrees this afternoon. Shorts are the order of the day, or naps in the cool, air conditioned shade under the drawing table if you happen to be of the canine persuasion. What were we thinking on Saturday when we started on the long and elaborate steps for making a short ribs ragu?

One of my favorite cold weather occupations is sitting at the kitchen island watching Mr. Sanders leisurely putter while preparing a spaghetti sauce. He opens many cans of fancy imported tomatoes. He rolls out perfect meatball orbs. He browns pounds of sausage links in his deliberate, messy way. He will use many pans and pots. There will be splatters of tomato sauce found in the strangest, most far-flung places. Luke is on constant patrol for any deliciousness that happens to fall off the cutting board. It is obviously why people love to go to open-kitchen restaurants: food is theatre. It explains The Food Channel.

I took up my station on top of my favorite stool on Saturday, watching the Byzantine process, as we were lulled by the calendar into thinking that fall is just around the corner. It’s going to be time to cuddle up inside, and keep each other warm, and entertained, and well-fed. In the meantime, I can watch the painstaking process of making the gremolata:

• 1 large garlic clove, minced
• Grated zest of 1 large lemon
• 1/4 cup finely chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon olive oil

Watching the washing, peeling, mincing, chopping, grating become mesmerizing. My suggestion of using the food processor for this stage of food prep was met with a withering look. How dare I? His slow, dextrous, manual labor is a part of the creation; the process.

On Sunday night, once the ragu had aged in the fridge overnight, we went full tilt with salad, garlic bread, red wine, candles, and short rib ragu served on a bed of Pappardelle pasta. Then we waddled into the living room to watch 60 Minutes. Just like our parents did. We managed a little time travel while we were deep in denial about the current weather conditions. Welcome to our delusions!

Here is a handy list of the many different kinds of pasta. This should keep you busy until spring: https://www.tastingtable.com/764058/types-of-pasta-and-when-you-should-be-using-them/

Our friends at Food52 devised this version, but Mr. Sanders preferred to use the Pappardelle pasta – as he is trying to recreate a meal he had years ago at a very swishy London restaurant, of a wild boar ragu served with Pappardelle. He came pretty close this time. If only it had been raining and 50 degrees…
https://www.seriouseats.com/food52s-short-rib-ragu

This is a fussier version of Mr. Sanders’s Sunday Short Rib Ragu: https://www.williams-sonoma.com/recipe/short-rib-ragu-with-fresh-pappardelle.html No cinnamon sticks were to be had, sadly

This illustrates clearly the many steps required: https://www.sipandfeast.com/red-wine-braised-short-ribs/

We are not the only folks who are thinking ahead a bit prematurely. Yesterday, on the last full day of summer, Luke and I noticed that one house on our street has gone full-steam-ahead with their Halloween decorations. There are fluttering ghosts, wispy witches and a plethora of pumpkins. We are not the only folks getting a little bit ahead of ourselves. Keep cool!

“They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.”
― Tom Bodett

There is less than a week of summer to go – though judging by the current temperatures, we might have another couple of weeks of warm weather. If you have packed up your white shoes for the season already, you can join us for a cocktail on the back porch, and wait for the leaves to start falling. Fold up those sweaters. We can chat about some of our memorable summer meals.

In June Mr. Sanders finally ordered his dream Ooni pizza oven, which is supposed to revolutionize the way we make Friday Night Pizza. I am not sure if the quality of the pizza has improved – but the speed with which he makes a pie has certainly increased. And our carbon footprint might be lessening, too. When we make pizza the old fashioned way, in the house, we heat up the pizza stone in the gas oven for half an hour at 525°F. That’s a lot of gas. The Ooni, which resides on the back porch, is also gas-fueled, heats to the eyebrow-singeing 900° F in about 10 minutes, and then the pizza cooks in a flash: about 90 seconds. Amazing. There has been a steep learning curve, and we have found that the corn meal we like to put on the pizza peel for easy sliding of the pie into the oven doesn’t work well in the Ooni. It incinerates, practically upon contact with the Ooni pizza stone. One of our favorite home cooks advised us to switch to semolina flour, and that works like a charm.

We enjoyed al fresco dinners on the back porch during June and July, and then the summer visitors, the mosquitoes, arrived for their turn in the timeshare. Ah, well.

This was the summer of Old Bay Seasoned Goldfish! That was a joyous event. Sadly we have never been able to buy more than the initial couple of bags. But it gave grocery shopping a new sense of purpose and adventure to be hunting for Old Bay deliciousness.

Sweet juicy watermelon this summer was fantastic. And so were the peaches. Oooh, and icy radishes with good butter. And then we ventured out for dinner for the first time since COVID and had a lovely appetizer with slices of local tomatoes, peaches, basil and tiny little clots of a soft bleu cheese. We recreated it at home with cherry tomatoes, local peaches, arugula and soft, fresh mozzarella. That was a taste of summer we can never have in January with hot house tomatoes, imported peaches and refrigerated mozzarella.

Mr. Sanders travelled to Boston where he had a hot dog at a ball game at Fenway, which I am assured is an almost religious experience. It was enhanced with lashings of yellow mustard. And beer. I think that beating the Yankees helped give the hot dog some extra umami. He also had a lobster roll along the way, a taste of New England. Another New England friend had lobster, clams, oysters, crabs, shrimp, mussels and every other sort of seafood she could order at every possible opportunity. Everything tastes better with butter in the summer. https://food52.com/blog/13581-how-to-clambake-at-home-without-a-recipe

We ventured out for barbecue a couple of times, which isn’t necessarily a summer food, but the smell of the hickory wood smoke makes it a delightful temptation. Throw in some cole slaw, and I am happy.

The little girl across the street had a lemonade stand one day this summer. One glass of sickly sweet Wyler’s-powdered-lemonade-mix-lemonade is about all my fillings can stand a year. The home-baked, lopsided sugar cookie was also very sweet, but less chemically so.

We made strawberry shortcake a few times, with locally-grown strawberries. But we still haven’t had any Key Lime Pie. Shocking. I am going to bake one this weekend. Even though I get the juice from a bottle from the grocery store, it still tastes of summer. As if one ever needs an excuse to have whipped cream. We’ll say goodbye to summer with style. Maybe we can find a Red Sox game on TV, and have hot dogs, too. https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/nellie-and-joes-key-lime-pie Don’t even think about doing meringue, whipped cream is the way it is done in Key West.

And finally, marmalade sandwiches will never seem the same after this summer. Too sweet, too poignant. Thank you, Ma’am.

“The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year – the days when summer is changing into autumn – the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change.”
― E.B. White

We got out of town on Labor Day weekend – just for a day trip on Saturday. No trips to the beach, no mountain excursions, no lounging by a hotel pool. (Also no Luke the wonder dog, who spent the day frolicking with other dogs at the Spa.) We drove to the big city (Raleigh, NC) for some serious consumering. And we may have surpassed any previously established endurance record, even for us: three grocery stores and one farmers’ market in one day. We have skills.

We live in a small town, which has adequate grocery store choices, and a nice weekly farmers’ market, but sometimes we just want to be amazed. The North Carolina State Farmers Market is glorious to behold. It is open 365 days of the year. It is vast and sprawling. https://www.ncagr.gov/markets/facilities/markets/raleigh/ The market is 30,000 square feet of fresh produce and plants, with baked goods, crafts, and floral displays. It is enormous.

We parked the car under a shady tree and began to wander though the crowd with our NPR shopping totes grasped in our sweaty little paws. We pushed our way through the first building, looking at artful piles of peaches, tomatoes, okra, onions, and cabbages. There were also displays of potted garden plants, hand-tied bouquets of flowers, hand-made baskets, watermelons, sunflowers, burlap bags of peanuts, and an abundance of brightly-colored dahlias. It was difficult to know when to stop and make a decision. If we buy peaches from this farmer, what if the next farmer’s booth has prettier peaches? Suddenly we were confronted with our inability to make a single choice. Stendahl Syndrome had overwhelmed us in under half an hour. We were not in Florence, nor were we viewing magnificent paintings, but our senses were quickly overloaded with information, colors, options, babies in strollers, the rich and heady smell of fresh lilies, and noise. Luckily, sharing a freshly baked chocolate cookie seemed to revive us.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/shortcuts/2018/dec/18/stendhal-syndrome-botticelli-the-birth-of-venus

Nothing on earth could prepare you for the peppers display in one enormous and colorful booth. It was incredible. It was epic and grandiose. It was Homeric. Ronnie Moore’s Fruits & Veggies floored me. Listen to the varieties of hot peppers arranged on one side of the display: Thai Chilies, Tabasco, Scotch Bonnet, Jamaican Scotch Bonnet, Big Red Naga, Big Black Naga, Naga, White Ghost, and Habanero. You were invited to mix and match. There are more: Death Spiral, Bleeding Borg, Big Red Mama, Sugar Rush, Serrano, Hot Banana, Dragon’s Toe, Cayenne, Carolina Reaper, Holy Mary and Wicked Ass.

Holy smokes, literally. I grew up very bland food home. We had the occasional green bell pepper, sliced and tossed into an iceberg lettuce salad. I am so much more sophisticated and worldly now – I buy red, yellow and green bell peppers for our bagged spring greens and spinach salads. I use at least one jalapeño a week. I have a jars of cayenne powder and paprika tucked in with all my out-of-date dried spices. Ronnie Moore would laugh at the lack of pepper heat in our diets. There is a lot of living to be done outside our little town.

I bet the heat from all those peppers ranges from mild, fruity and sweet, to spicy and feeling a little heat, a bit of singe, to an intense, crazy burn. I don’t know if I have the genetic fortitude to tolerate the intense heat, since mere pickled jalepeños make me sweat.

Luckily, there have been brave folks who have done the research and invented the Scoville Scale which measure units of heat in peppers. Example: Carolina Reaper: 2,200,000 Scoville Heat Units, while a Scotch Bonnet has a mere 350,000 SHU. A Tabasco pepper has 50,000 SHU, while a Jalapeño has 10,000 SHU. A Bell pepper has 0 SHU, and a Chipolte has 8,000 SHU.

Here is a handy, dandy reference for you if you wander into a pepper display: https://pepperjoe.com/pages/hot-pepper-heat-scale

We came home from the Market with big bags of tomatoes and peaches, and a cardboard container of okra. We’re going to enjoy a couple more sweet tomato sandwiches, which taste like summer to me. I’ll wait until winter to try the warming heat of a Scotch Bonnet or a Dragon’s Toe. Go visit a farmers’ market this weekend, and be prepared to be amazed!

I love the warning that precedes this recipe – to wear gloves when handling the Scotch Bonnet peppers. I have gotten jalapeño juice in my eyes before, and it is painful. Scotch Bonnet juice must be truly alarming. https://www.savoringitaly.com/easy-pickled-scotch-bonnet-peppers/

“Pepper and salt are indispensable in a delicious meal but if they dominate other ingredients, the meal is ruined.”
― Vincent Okay Nwachukwu