Dinner: A Love Story

Greetings friends! Hope you had a lovely weekend. I spent mine eagerly tracking the new family of Barn Owls that have taken up residence on the Upper West Side just off the Park, their strange heart-shaped faces captivating anyone starving for delightful distraction.

For me, the answer appears to be 23 A few weeks ago, a popular food writer sat at my dining room table and stared at the stacks of new cookbooks that were piling up in the kitchen, threatening to wall in my laptop.

Greetings friends. Well, it appears we’ve reached that time of year when New York officially starts showing off in earnest. The energy in the city right now reminds me of being on a college campus after everyone has returned from summer break but before the hard work really kicks in. Farmer’s markets are exploding with dahlias and pumpkins, Italian plums and Jonagolds. Central Park is packed with swag-draped marathon-trainers and sweater-clad walkers in awe of the marathon trainers (me).

Greetings friends! Hope you are having an excellent week. I can’t complain about mine so far, considering it has included Lox and Eggs with Adam Roberts at Barney Greengrass, bingeing Sterling Point with a bowl of fiery hot spaghetti, and enjoying quality time with John Green’s first novel in nine years, Hollywood, Ending.

Greetings friends on this chilly fall Friday. It’s been exactly a week since I told you I wasn’t quite ready to turn the page from tomatoes and corn to squash and apples, and somehow in those quick seven days I’ve transitioned from iced coffee to hot coffee, from Birk sandals to Birk clogs, from a vase of hydrangeas spilling forth on the kitchen table to a little decorative pumpkin display that will keep evolving through Halloween and into November.

Greetings friends, hope you had a nice weekend. The highlight of mine was what you are looking at above, the vegan, batter-fried oyster mushrooms at ABCV on a bed of corn polenta, and I’m sorry but no one is going to convince me that it’s not fried chicken with grits. What on earth!? I will never not be amazed by this place.

I had a whole fall-themed recipe round-up prepared for you today, but this morning I walked the dog in a T-shirt and sandals and returned home dripping — I mean glistening — with sweat. It’s 82 degrees in New York, and though the next few days look a tiny bit cooler, I’m not sure I’m ready to bust out the squash and the apples, the stews and pot pies just yet.

Greetings, friends. Hope you had a nice weekend. I spent a good part of mine watching tennis and plotting my fall reading line-up.

Twenty-five years ago today, I took a subway from my apartment in Brooklyn to the Time-Life Building in Rockefeller Center, where I worked as an editor at Real Simple magazine. I was nervous because it was going to be the day I told my boss I was three months pregnant. I had only been hired a few months earlier and was somehow convinced she’d be angry about this.

Greetings, friends and happy back-to-the-grind! And I do mean “happy.” No matter how old I am, no matter how old my children are, I will never not feel a little bit excited when the calendar flips to September, when things feel more structured, when I sit down with my laptop and coffee and get that rush (er, delusion) of feeling in control while I start planning things.