Good morning. How are you doing? I’m compelled to ask. These are not easy days we’re marking. The news is relentless and largely grim, and it’s sometimes difficult to imagine a way forward, toward happiness and grace. You’re not alone, if that’s your state of mind. You’re one of many, and the best thing you…
Banana bread is, of course, a treat any time of year. But something about fall makes it feel like peak banana bread season. Maybe it’s because, after a summer of nectarines and peaches and cherries, we turn our attention to the steadfast banana. Maybe it’s because it’s finally cool enough to have the oven running.…
It’s not fall for Alicia Maher until she smells the warm spices from her slow-cooked squash dessert at her home in Los Angeles. As she sets up her ofrenda, an altar to honor her ancestors, she thinks about her childhood in El Salvador, where her aunts and grandmother took her to Tonacatepeque, a municipality of…
Good morning. A number of years ago, on a sunny afternoon in Melbourne, Australia, I ate a pork gyro, a species of gyro I had never encountered before. I’d grown up eating lamb gyros at Mr. Souvlaki on Montague Street in Brooklyn, but never pork ones. Maybe beef ones, too, occasionally. But mostly lamb: the…
The last time I went to the Peking Duck House on Mott Street, I drank a lot of good wine. This has nothing to do with the restaurant’s own list and everything to do with its longstanding policy of letting diners bring in wine, free of corkage fees. One of my friends came with a…
In the 1970s and ’80s, when Rainer Judd was growing up at 101 Spring Street in New York’s SoHo with her father, the artist Donald Judd, she’d sit in the building’s open windows, “because no one told me not to,” she said, and because back then, SoHo was a “creaky, dirty, lovely place.” In 1971,…
My flight to Lagos arrives at dusk, and I slide out to an airport buzzing with activity, commerce and community. For me, it’s also a confusion of crowds after the stillness of a 13-hour flight. Once I am in the car, driving to my parents’ house, I can see shadows along the roadside, forms emerging…
Pumpkin spice latte season, cuffing season, 12-foot Home Depot skeleton season — October has many an alias. But in my house, it’s borscht season. Growing up, my enjoyment of borscht was reserved to one day a year — Christmas, when my mom made a batch fit to feed a football team using the largest pot…
The pickers began to arrive at 7 a.m. at the home of Greg and Emily Ernst in Geyserville, Calif., to help harvest their half-acre zinfandel vineyard before the October day reached its 95-degree high. These are not professionals. They are family and friends for whom helping the Ernsts is an annual social highlight. The Ernsts,…
There isn’t too much we can add to the happy conversations swirling around this fire chicken, a recipe by Maangchi adapted by Sam Sifton. Her YouTube video for cheese buldak has been viewed over nine million times, and Sam’s adaptation on New York Times Cooking boasts over 3,000 reviews and has five stars. It’s a…