There is wind, drying brown leaves blowing, that kind of bright yellow sunshine that only comes on the chilly perfect days of autumn.  I could and should be outside for hours every day.  Instead we are all on Facebook and Huffington Post and 538.com.  Last days.  For the moment, reality-based democracy seems to have it in the bag, but we are looking for constant confirmation.  And what about the Senate?  And the House?  I found myself calmed somewhat yesterday-- oddly-- by politely conversing a while with someone who holds diametrically-opposed opinions to mine.  We were civil.  The world did not come to an end.  Let's not let this Trump campaign be the end of civility.

Emotionally, too, I've been blown by gusty winds this week: full of grievances and questioning the motives of everyone.  Food, as always, is my touchstone.  This week in recipes:

Mridula Baljekar:

• Spicy Grilled Chicken, served with Saffron Rice and salad.  As always, I am having trouble finding links to Baljekar's dishes online.  "Spicy Grilled Chicken" is a terribly generic name and there are a million kinds of saffron rice and Baljekar seems to have published several different versions of all her dishes in various cookbooks which all bear similar names.  The one I own (Best-Ever Curry Cookbook) seems to be one of the less common ones.  So, I shall describe these dishes to you.  The Spicy Grilled Chicken consisted of chicken thighs marinated in lemon, ginger, garlic, chilis, sugar and honey, treated with cilantro and more chilis, and then broiled, or in my case baked at a high temperature, because my broiler is unusable.  It was perfectly fine-- flavorful enough chicken pieces, without sauce, but that was OK because a) the chicken was thighs and wouldn't dry out, and b) the saffron rice had its own flavor.  The saffron rice, which was simple basmati rice cooked with cardamom, cloves, and saffron, and a little milk, was also fine.  I felt that it had more saffron than it needed (1/2 tsp.), and would have been fine with less, which is an important point given that saffron is sometimes said to be more expensive than gold (my research suggests that this is not currently true.  But still).  I am a much bigger fan of Baljekar's cookbook now than I was a month ago, but-- while both of these dishes were solid enough-- neither one was anything special.

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Madhur Jaffrey:

• Peas with Ginger and Sesame Oil, served with bulgogi-and-sweet-potato omelets and toast.  Because it is October, and because it is difficult to find shelled fresh peas in any season, I used frozen peas for this recipe and the next.  These peas were extremely simple: basically stir-fried with ginger, sugar, sesame oil, and toasted sesame seeds.  I felt that the result, given recipe instructions, was too heavy: too much salt, too much ginger, too much sesame.  You don't normally hear me complain about "too much ginger."  An easy but not particularly well-balanced recipe.

The week in cooking featured a series of uninspiring vegetable dishes, one utilitarian but oh-so-necessary french chocolate cake, and a kick-ass delicious Indian meal from Mridula Baljekar, who is swiftly redeeming herself.

​Mridula Baljekar:

​Chicken in Green Masala Sauce, with Nut Pulao (also from the same cookbook, but no link available).  Gradually I am becoming sold on Mridula Baljekar.  These were both amazing recipes, and I'd be happy to make them again and again.  (In fact, I have already made a pared-down version of the Nut Pulao again this week.)  The sauce for the chicken, made from blended yogurt, ricotta, spring onions, coriander, mint, green chilis, garlic, ginger, and (surprisingly) green apple, was both easy and incredibly flavorful.  Then the chicken was basically just cooked in the sauce, no weird parboiling necessary.  The rice for the pulao was fried with onion, carrot, and garlic, and then cooked with vegetable broth and spices.  Walnuts and cashews were added at the end.  It was sweet and fragrant and delicious, although I felt it stood on its own so well that it did not need to be swamped in green masala sauce.  In the future I'd make the chicken with plain white rice, and the pulao with something simpler.  I'd make both for company, happily.

​The Internet:​

Valerie's French Chocolate Cake, from Smitten Kitchen.  I made this on Wednesday night, so that we could eat it while we watched the third presidential debate.  The idea is to ward off evil influences per Lupin's wise advice.  To this end, while I only made a single layer of this rather simple cake-- full of butter and chocolate but with a mere 1/3 c. flour-- I also made a great deal of chocolate whipped cream (who knew you could make chocolate whipped cream?  A revelation) and dolloped it heavily on top of our plain bittersweet cake slices.  The dementors certainly did their best, but we and Hillary Clinton prevailed.  How was the cake?  Fine.  Nothing special.  My kid, who had bizarrely decided to drink a double espresso at 5:30 that evening, was not able to fall asleep after the debate until 1 am, and so spent the next day shoveling slices of chocolate cake into their mouth to try and keep their energy up.  So it served its medicinal purpose twice.
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Bon Appetit:

• Cauliflower with Pumpkin Seeds, Brown Butter, and Lime, served with marinated grilled tofu, plain quinoa, and cooked turnips.  I like roasted cauliflower, as I like most roasted vegetables.  Did I find roasted cauliflower to be markedly superior when dressed with pumpkin seeds, red pepper flakes, cilantro, and lime juice?  Not really.  Enough said.  The turnips were better and I just cooked them with salt, pepper, and butter.

Like everybody else, I need wholesome distractions from the fascinating, disgusting, outrageous, wanton nonstop train wreck that is Donald Trump.  Cooking is one of them.  Others include mystery novels and going to my day job.  Also, like Hillary Clinton, I spend a lot of time watching cats (in my case, I have one in the house who does very well).  This week in cooking:

The Internet

• Sunken Apple and Honey Cake (Smitten Kitchen).  When I find a really simple, delicious, visually-amazing dessert that comes out perfectly, I immediately begin to fantasize about making it for company.  Deb Perelman's Sunken Apple and Honey Cake is company cake.  (Or, it could be company breakfast cake, served with brunch.)  The crumb is somehow dense and light at the same time, while the apples and honey syrup give it a beautiful moistness.  I found some tiny Lady apples at the Whole Foods, and these were ideal to quarter (the apples were too small to core whole and then halve, as per the recipe instructions) and slice thin into the decorative apple fans you see in the photos.  They also had great flavor.  We ate two slices of cake each upon its debut, leaving only a quarter of the cake for lunchboxes the next day.  It was so, so good.  If you want to dress it up for company, I bet a bit of whipped cream wouldn't go amiss.

​Bon Appetit

• Classic Potato Gratin (Nov. 2015).  This was a time-consuming recipe-- between making the garlicky sauce, slicing 4 lbs. of potatoes very thinly, and a long baking time-- that was not really worth the result.  (I did not use a mandolin to slice the potatoes, as history suggests I will merely slice the end of my finger off and any time "saved" will be squandered in bandaging.)  The flavor of the potatoes was good-- garlic, butter, thyme, cream, cheese!-- but, even with a longer browning time than called for, they were only barely crispy on top, and quite mushy on the inside.  I could make creamy garlic potatoes a lot more easily by, say, mashing them.  If you do make this recipe, I would recommend removing the foil from the pan earlier in the baking process, in order to let the potatoes dry out and crisp better.  We ate them with brussels sprouts and salmon filet (my kid) or sausages (my husband) or both (me).

​Madhur Jaffrey:

• Fried Okra with Fresh Curry or Basil Leaves, served on the side with slices of parmesan-covered toast, pears and raspberries.  A strange recipe: the okra (I bought fresh this time) was sliced very thin, fried without breading in a lot of oil along with basil leaves, and then blotted, spiced and salted.  It did not become crunchy, although it seemed to me that would have been the only point of such a procedure.  Instead, the okra darkened, shrunk to a tiny wizened size, and tasted salty/spicy.  Once it had shrunk, there was not a lot of it left, rather like cooking a bunch of spinach.  It was not bad, neither was it good.  As a treatment of okra, it left me somewhat mystified.
• Okra with Tomatoes, served over toast with scrambled eggs on top (my kid had cooked mustard and turnip greens in place of okra).  This was basically cooked okra with some tomatoes, garlic and spices added.  A good shot of lime juice gave it a pleasant bite as well.  While not earth-shattering, this was a more logical way to serve okra than the above method.  I would skip the eggs and toast next time and simply serve it as a regular vegetable side dish.

​Mridula Baljekar:

• Chicken Saag, served with packaged naan and topped with plain yogurt and chili powder.  A mixed review for the Chicken Saag.  It tasted wonderful and my husband loved it.  But, as may be seen from the photos, my sauce ended up as thin as a soup, not the thick spinachy paste pictured in the cookbook or familiar from Indian restaurants.  Now, in retrospect, this is not surprising, since 8 oz. of spinach, 4 tomatoes, and 1 cup of water (plus seasonings and chicken), cooked with the cover on as directed for about 30 minutes, are unlikely to produce a thick sauce.  Why all that water?  Is that an error?  But we ate it anyway, enthusiastically, with spoons to consume all the tasty broth and naan for dipping.  The leftovers were even better the next day.  Even now that all the chicken is gone, I still have about 2 cups of leftover sauce in the refrigerator.  I guess we'll just have it as a soup.

Maybe it's something about fall.  There is so much pleasure in stocking one pantry and refrigerator, looking over the stores of apples and onions and sweet potatoes and jars of grain, the cheeses and eggs in their dozens.  I want abundance and then I want to use those things so neatly and sparingly, feeding us delicious food now but yet also preserving that sense of abundance for the colder weeks ahead.  Such a squirrel instinct.  

​Madhur Jaffrey:

• Okra with Potatoes, served with whole urad beans and white rice.  I am the only person in my household who likes okra, and we have three weeks' worth of okra recipes from Jaffrey ahead.  More for me!  But it turned out my husband consented to try this dish, a heavily-spiced Indian stewed version of okra which was highly flavorful, except that I forgot to add the salt until the last minute and so it did not have a chance to infiltrate the potatoes.  I also used frozen okra, but, surprisingly, this seemed to work out fine.  Recommended-- if you like okra.
• Okra Cooked in an Australian Manner (how's that for a recipe title?), served atop quinoa in a bowl which also included cooked sweet potato, with a dish of Sweet-and-Spicy Mixed Nuts (see below) on the side.  This okra is basically stir-fried with chile, garlic, soy sauce and sesame oil; my handwritten cookbook note reads "Okra cooked in a boring manner."  I mean, who needs a recipe for that, right?  All the same, as I single-handedly consumed the rest of this okra over the next few days, it grew on me each time.  The slices of gently-cooked garlic that still retained lots of garlic flavor were the best part.  Once again, I used frozen okra, and once again it was fine.  Easy, albeit intuitive, preparation.

Bon Appetit:

• Sweet-and-Spicy Mixed Nuts, served with the meal described above.  I kept having to stop myself from referring to the flavor combinations in this recipe as "nuts."  Maple syrup, rosemary, red pepper flakes, and smoked paprika?  Really?  And you know what?  The first nut or two struck me as "weird."  After that I was totally hooked.  These are so, so addictive, sweet and savory and spicy and beautifully glazed so that sometimes they even form delicious  crunchy clusters (!).  You should make these for your family, or maybe for holiday gifts.  Wait, I should make these for holiday gifts.

​Mridula Baljekar:

• Chicken Tikka (this recipe is almost but not quite identical), served with lettuce, raw rings of onion, lime, cilantro, and white rice.  Next time I would serve it with naan instead, as the chunks of chicken are flavorful enough to make an excellent sort of sandwich, but not very saucy.  This recipe is obviously a cousin to last week's Chicken Tikka Masala, but did not call for a "boughten" (as my Midwest relatives say) spice packet.  It still came out good.  That's two winners in a row for this cookbook, after several initial failures.  I am heartened, though in a way also disappointed that I can't just write it off and move on-- I have so many cookbooks and my life is, optimistically-speaking, about half over!  I won't get to them all!

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• Mushrooms with Coriander and Cumin , served with pita bread, cheese, and spinach salad. My family loves mushrooms, and these were both easy and flavorful.  I used white mushrooms.  As usual with Indian vegetable recipes, there is no skimping on the aromatics and spices.  A very satisfying meal.

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• Pork Sausage with Coconut-Chile Sauce and Lychees from Epicurious (although apparently this also derives from Bon Appetit, September 2014).  This dish was... interesting.  The recipe doesn't call for any kind of starch base, even though you'd think it might be served with rice, so I cooked some more of my fresh Korean noodles from the refrigerator to create a noodle bowl.  On top were spicy ground pork, fresh herbs from the Thai palette, roasted peanuts, onion, lime, and... canned lychee fruit?  All served with a really delicious spicy coconut sauce.  Oddly, like the reviewers on Epicurious, I found that I liked this dish but would not necessarily make it again.  The lychees in it were good, but strange.  The pork sausage was tasty, but did not seem to belong in the Thai-ish dish-- chicken or shrimp would have clashed less with the other flavors, I think.  I do love a noodle bowl, though.

​I cooked a small flurry of recipes over these few days, during which I also waitressed at the restaurant a lot, attended the wedding of an ex-waitress with a number of my current and former colleagues, and finally collapsed in a heap with a $5 download of Civilization V (2010). 

The nice thing about cooking is that it is a constant, a daily reference point even in a whirlwind of other business, work, events, errands, moods, and crises.  I may not always cook something elaborate, but I usually cook something.
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So.  Friday night, after a hard day at work, I made the Korean Barbecue from last November's Bon Appetit, using thinly sliced pork loin, lettuce leaves, and some store-bought kimchi, with brown rice and farm tomatoes on the side.  Neither of my other family members like kimchi, so I put out some sriracha too.   Oh, plus frozen crabcakes for my child who does not eat pork.  The food was fine, nothing to get excited about.  I eat better Korean marinated beef (though not pork) regularly at work.  That said, spicy pork in a lettuce wrap with kimchi and rice is just inherently nice.  An everyday-dinner idea to keep in mind.

Saturday night, the wedding, featuring some delicious catered barbecue (American-style this time).

Sunday night, Madhur Jaffrey's Spicy Kohlrabi with Corn, served over white rice, with fried eggs on top to provide some protein.  With fresh August sweet corn cut from the cob and ripe farm tomatoes, this spicy-sweet kohlrabi was really flavorful, and the rice balanced the spiciness nicely.  We inhaled this.  I also made a side salad of romaine lettuce, carrot, green pepper, and mango.  The mango was an inspired touch, with dressing made from the white balsamic vinegar left over from the strawberry cake.

​Monday, Mridula Baljekar's Karahi Chicken with Mint, served with brown rice and a side of roasted vegetables (cauliflower, eggplant, peppers, carrot, onion).  While the chicken dish had a really nice flavor-- lots of scallions and cilantro, mint, lemon, ginger, tomatoes, dried chiles-- the cooking instructions called for it to be boiled first in plain water-- for 10 minutes!-- before being stir-fried with the other ingredients.  This led to the chicken pieces themselves being dry and bland.  While I know that some cuisines do use this boil-then-fry technique more frequently, I was not a fan of the results in this case.  That's three recipes so far in this cookbook (Best-Ever Curry Cookbook) that I would consider unsuccessful.  I'll try two or three more, but if I don't hit a winner by then, I'm giving up on it..

Tuesday night, I took a break from recipes to use up some other supplies around the house.  We had corn on the cob, chocolate-cherry-coconut muffins (also featuring weird-tasting instant oatmeal packets left over from our hike!), and an egg scramble with cheese, cilantro, and jalapeno pepper.  The muffins were popular.  The corn is coming to the end of its useful life for this season, I think; it tasted old.  Alas.  Though I won't be sorry to see this hot, hot summer go.

Wednesday night, the second of Jaffrey's kohlrabi recipes, Spicy Kohlrabi Stew with Tomatoes.  This was sort of an odd dish, with large, 3-bite-sized chunks of kohlrabi boiled together with a lot of tomato and modest seasoning (it was distinctly less spicy than the Spicy Kohlrabi with Corn), becoming a bowl of big-veggies-sitting-in-broth that required both a spoon and a fork to eat.  The idea was to serve it with a lot of fresh flatbread and some store-bought hummus, but the flatbreads I bought that afternoon were already moldy inside (thanks, Community Food Co-op!  I would not call you out except that this happens all the time), so I had to improvise.  We had multigrain English muffins, hard-boiled eggs, and celery sticks, with some hummus to add to any or all of these.  It was a weird meal. 

​And that is the story of our week in dinners.

​Finally, after a significant vacation and a lot of extra time spent at my restaurant job after my return, I have time to do some serious grocery shopping, and then actually make something from a recipe.  My first foray back into Real Cooking is the Strawberry, Balsamic & Olive Oil Breakfast Cake from Food52, posted 3+ years ago now.  I think it sounds delicious, but I talk to my mother on the phone while it is baking and she balks at the idea of balsamic vinegar in a cake.  Then she confesses that she balks at balsamic vinegar in general, which is obviously a giant error on her part, so I dismiss her opinion.  Has she ever had strawberries with balsamic vinegar, I ask her?  She hasn't. 

​The cake involves layering an entire pound of strawberries on the bottom of a round cake pan, pouring on a substantial quantity of balsamic reduction, and then layering the cake batter on top, batter which itself contains both buttermilk and more balsamic vinegar, for maximum tanginess.  Warning: bake this cake on top of a cookie sheet, because vinegary strawberry syrup will boil up and pour out the sides, and boy does that stuff smoke.

​Second warning: I don't really recommend baking this cake at all.  The quantity of strawberries on top is kind of excessive, and the amount of balsamic vinegar (3/4 cup in all) is really excessive.  The cake was quite moist, on the level of a pineapple upside-down cake, but most of that moisture consisted of a vinegar reduction: strange, sharp, and much more reminiscent of salad than a cake should be.  That said, my husband loved it.  Kid and I ate our slices-- it was not inedible, certainly-- but we lacked enthusiasm.  The bites with a lot of vinegary strawberries were especially difficult to get through.  If you do try this recipe, try halving the amount of berries and also-and-especially halving the balsamic syrup-- less topping might bring this cake into better balance.

Cake was for dessert, of course.   (Not breakfast.  It would be quite a... bracing... breakfast.)  Dinner was fresh corn-on-the-cob, little boiled potatoes from our CSA, and open-face egg salad sandwiches.

In the first half of August, kid and I went on a road trip through parts of the country where we have never before traveled.  We drove from the Washington, D.C. suburbs, where we live, down through Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, in order to visit friends in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  Then we drove on into east Texas to see my former foster son, now grown, and his girlfriend at their home in Santa Fe, near Galveston.  On the way back, we returned through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia.

It was, in some ways, a different world: not only more desperately hot and humid than I'd imagined, but full of American flag clothing, churches in obscure denominations, shiny white trucks, billboards advertising Jesus, and... surprisingly few Trump signs.  That last made me wonder.  My kid was at times uncomfortable, nervous that they would be singled out for disapproval or, worse, confrontation, on the basis of their purple hair and unconventional gender presentation.  Nothing like that ever happened, though. 

The food was different, too.

Things we ate included: at least 3 meals at a Waffle House.  McDonald's ice cream cones.  Burger King milkshakes.  Fried crawfish po-boys.  Lots of french fries.  Fried catfish.  Steamed shrimp and crab.  Seafood boudin balls.  Something that I ignorantly referred to as "gumbo" but which was actually called "sausage, okra, and shrimp."  Crawfish etouffee.  An amazing caprese salad at a fancy cheese shop in New Orleans, with real bufala mozzarella.  Beignets and cafe au lait at the Cafe du Monde.  Actual gumbo.  A sort of crawfish etouffee- Eggs Benedict.  Pulled pork and more fried seafood, potato salad, coleslaw, baked beans at a barbecue joint in Texas.  Caramel apples covered in additional things like chocolate, marshmallows, and nuts.  Fried shrimp po-boys.  More french fries.  Subway sandwiches (twice) and chips.  Chicken, fried fish, corn fritters, mac & cheese, mashed potatoes from a supermarket deli in Louisiana (eaten in the car with the air conditioning running).  Pineapple soda, Cokes.  Several beers. (On this trip my child learned to like both unsweetened coffee and Coke.  They were also offered beer at least three times-- they declined-- and made their peace with stopping regularly at McDonald's.)  A number of biscuits.  Gross bagels from a motel, sausage and egg sandwich from a motel, Holiday Inn omelets.  Hot chili and lime Takis.   A very nice sushi dinner on a balcony overlooking a river in South Carolina.  Endless cups of bad coffee, an occasional apple or handful of baby carrots or cheese stick or packet of almonds purchased in desperation for something wholesome.

​My kid said they really liked the food in the South, particularly in Louisiana.  I myself feel that I could now go without more fried seafood for at least six months.  And, honestly, I don't really enjoy the plain steamed stuff much.  We never go for crabs here in Maryland.  Maybe I was spoiled by New England lobster and now can't appreciate anything else.  And, while I love french fries, I had enough to satisfy me for a long, long time.  (I could eat more biscuits, though.  I could always eat more biscuits.)

Reading back through the list of things we ate-- now almost two months later-- it sounds sort of decadent and amazing.  At the time, it was just cloying, overwhelming, like swimming in a vat of fry oil.

It's fall now, as of this writing.  But I thought I'd share a couple of photos to give you some inkling of how delightful our farm boxes have been this summer.  Here is a particularly photogenic example:

​On a Friday night I cooked Madhur Jaffrey's Stir-Fried Kohlrabi, along with some stir-fried tofu and white rice.  This was a simple meal... perhaps too simple.  Next to the kohlrabi recipe in my cookbook, I wrote "Nothing to write home about.  Crunchy."  This pretty well sums it up.  I cut two enormous kohlrabi into strips, stir-fried them for a few minutes with a really modest amount of chile pepper, garlic,  salt and soy sauce, added some sesame oil and a tiny bit of scallion at the end, and that was it.  Crunchy.  A little salty.  Plain rice.  At least I seasoned the tofu.  I'm not entirely sure why the world needs recipes like this written down.

​The most exciting part of this dish was my quest to actually purchase some kohlrabi.  I had to go to three different stores in order to find any.  I ended up at the New Grand Mart, where I also purchased these really cool ice cream bars, Filipino-style red-bean-and-yam flavor.  They are purple.  I figured "red bean" was just a flavoring or perhaps a puree, but in fact there were whole cooked red beans in the ice cream bar, which tended to fall out and drop on the floor as you ate it.  Very different from anything I've had before.

**

On Sunday, my husband and I were in Adams Morgan buying a secondhand table, when we happened upon a comic book store.  Of course my husband wanted to check it out, so I went upstairs too.  And what do you think happened?  I instantly saw something I wanted to buy.  Me!  In a comic store!  It is a sort of graphic autobiography/cookbook by Robin Ha called Cook Korean!  Brand-new, a really fun concept, and immediately drew me in.  Recommend!

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Something radical happened this weekend.  To my surprise, my husband had mentioned a few weeks ago that he'd like to try learning to cook with me.  I'd love for him to be more comfortable in the kitchen, and cooking together can be fun, so I thought maybe there'd be time for it on Saturday or Sunday night.  It was a ragingly hot weekend, and our kitchen lacks air conditioning, so circumstances were not ideal for cooking lessons-- especially after a sweltering afternoon of shopping and furniture-moving-- but we still managed to pull off a minor meal.  Emphasis on the minor.  We investigated our resources, and found a lot of CSA vegetables that needed to be used up, plenty of eggs, a loaf of bread that was starting to go stale before hardly having been touched, and too many mandarin oranges.  My husband chopped tomato and onion; I chopped jalapeno pepper and zucchini.  We sauteed the onion, pepper, and zucchini, added eggs together with tomato and a tiny bit of feta cheese that had been sitting in the fridge a long time.  I scrambled these while my husband made herb bread toast.  We put out butter and oranges.  That was it.  Original plans had involved bacon and home fries also, but I cook both of these in the oven, not having a very good stovetop, and we just couldn't face turning the oven on that night.  That was okay.  We kept it simple, the food was good, and the cookin' was easy.  I think my husband was a little insulted.  He said, "I do know how to scramble eggs."  But I informed him that real culinary students, at least in legend, always start with learning to make the perfect omelette.