a list for the changing weather

Some things I thought you might enjoy. [RECIPES]

Wear good socks and you will have a better day.

It happened on cue, like an actor hitting their mark:

Labor Day arrived in America this weekend, and, as she has done for the last twenty or so years, our neighbor Sherry threw a party: hamburgers, hot dogs, kids, a water balloon toss, a Yankee swap that inevitably gets very bawdy, swimming if it’s warm (which it was not this year). Years ago, when she first started doing this, it ended with a campfire, guitars, ghost stories, and the neighborhood kids setting up tents in the yard and sleeping over with an assigned parent. Breakfast the next morning: hangovers, eggs, bacon, a lot of coffee. And almost always, the morning after the party was chilly — the first chilly morning of the season, as though some great cosmic hand had planned the necessity of wearing hooded sweatshirts after a long, hot summer which was, suddenly and precipitously over, just like that.

Those neighborhood kids are now nearing twenty-five. Some have moved away, married, and now have their own littles. Some of our neighbors have divorced; some have fought off and survived dreadful illnesses. Many no longer drink or drink far, far less. Our parents, if they are still with us, are getting a lot older. As I write this, my mother is in rehab where she’s learning to walk again after breaking her femur. And yet, we still manage to come together with our weird camping chairs and platters of deviled eggs, lemon tarts and chocolate biscuits, and trays of macaroni and cheese ostensibly made for the children (sure). This time, I looked around at us in our aforementioned weird camping chairs and could finally see it: we all actually look older. This, it seems, is also what September does.

And yet: I love this month, and I always have.

I love it more than any other month of the year. I love it, although it has always been the month of profound change for me, and, like any good Cancerian, I wouldn't exactly say I like change: my parents married on September 9th, 1962, and separated on September 23rd, 1978. I love it because of the memories I have of my grandmother, Clara, setting our table with a starched white tablecloth and her mother’s silver candlesticks (which are now sitting in my guestroom), and teaching me how to dip apples into honey, and because we were not religious it wasn’t about the prayers but about the ritual; it was almost always September. I love September even though I was in my car driving back to Connecticut from Manhattan where I’d stayed overnight with my mother after attending a friend’s memorial service, and heard an NPR story about a private plane flying into the North Tower, and twenty minutes later, life as we knew it had changed forever, and my creative director’s husband Kenny didn’t come home.

My father, September 1958.

September is my father, with his beautiful tenor voice, singing this song, below, while driving somewhere in the car, and never being able to sing it again after the attacks. September is The September Issue; September is saying goodbye to the past season and starting over. September is the academic calendar to which most of us subconsciously hew, out of ingrained habit. I live in New England, and September is hysterical color and leaf-clogged gutters and leaf mold and bears showing up on the deck because the weather is changing and they’re hungry.

For me, this is September 2025:

I am trying to return to the kitchen after a year of admitted cooking dysregulation. This year, I have often found myself to be far too jittery to do much more than boil water. I’ve been too undone, my nervous system shot to pieces over the state of the world, our getting older, my mother getting much older, our financial state battered by the machinations of the geniuses currently in power. I have incinerated roast chicken on the regular, overcooked the salmon, and eaten unheated leftovers for dinner while standing up in the kitchen. I have often not eaten until mid-afternoon because why bother. Susan has rescued us repeatedly and made sure that during the weeks when I’m teaching four out of five nights, we’re not eating cold pizza on the verge of becoming penicillin. Often, it is just a bowl of doctored chicken broth infused with star anise and a little bit of soy, some scallions, and a handful of dumplings unearthed from the back of the freezer. Or ersatz tortellini in brodo. This year, for the first time in many years, I am a bit disconnected from the season’s arrival of new cookbooks — there has just been too much going on — but I looked up at the calendar today, and realized how very much I have been waiting for these to arrive:

My dear friend Diana Henry, whose food/words/general presence continue to rescue me, has a new book of essays coming out in October: Around the Table: 52 Essays on Food and Life. Anything by Diana is a cause for celebration, but if you have not. yet read her essays, you will be gobsmacked. Diana and I will be in a virtual conversation about Around the Table at The Book Larder on November 4th. Stay tuned for more information, and in the meantime, please preorder this wonderful collection.

Tomorrow is release day for

Mark Diacono

‘s Abundance, a beautiful collection of seasonal recipes and writings that grew out of his extraordinary Substack of the same name; Abundance was written live, in weekly installments. If you’re in the UK, here is his tour schedule: please go see him! Also, he and Diana will be leading an immersive food writing weekend at Otter Farm in Devon, and I’m so jealous I could scream. If you’re serious about food writing, sign up here. (I would carry their bags if I could.)

A good breakfast recipe:

I am not a sweets-for-breakfast person; I’d always rather have something savoury and even spicy, and this (above) is one of my go-tos in the cooler weather: a simple olive oil-fried egg drizzled with red wine vinegar, on Brazen Baking spelt toast with local ham and arugula. Also, this massive mix of greens and eggs on toast stopped me in my tracks as a great dish to make for a brunch in which a hungry crowd has converged on your kitchen. Watch the amazing Jeremy Lee of Quo Vadis cook this here.

(reprise from above)

Is it strange to love one’s socks? I’m guessing that the answer to this question is Yes. This is a seasonal thing for me: I’m a sandal-wearer until the first frost, or at least I was back before my days of saying things like Is it cold in here or is it me. I used to think of socks the way I thought about supermarket white bread: as a vehicle for something else, or, to quote my dad, like the Garden State Parkway: a garden-free road that connects New York to Washington DC. (Please, before you yell at me: I love a lot of New Jersey, but my dad did like to poke fun.) Socks are the conduit between your pants and your shoes, and even when you can’t see them, it’s important to know that you love them. If you can see them — your pants are rolled up a little, for example — they’d better be good. Favorites for the cool but not freezing season: blue and white striped socks from J.Crew, cornea-burning orange socks from Finisterre, these red cashmere socks (bougie I know). Is it odd to say that my mood lifts when I’m wearing cool socks? Probably. But then it REALLY lifts when the temperature drops even more and I get to wear these shoes, which my mother bought me in 1988 when I was working in food and on my feet all day, and I STILL HAVE THEM AND THEY ARE PERFECT with outrageous socks and dark jeans. My mother, however, says that when I wear them I look like Dame May Whitty walking on the moors. So: socks. It’s getting chilly: go buy some good socks that you love.

If you haven’t been following the new music coming from banjo dynamos Alison Brown and Steve Martin (that Steve Martin), you’re missing out. Alison and I were playing music in the same places in Boston and Cambridge in the early 80s, and her early Harvard-based band, Alison Brown and the Crimson Bluegrass, was fabulous. This video featuring Alison, Steve, Jackson Browne, and my friend Jeff Hanna, is uplifting at a time when we need uplifting. (And still, I cried like a baby.)

An excellent September soup:

The very best minestrone I have eaten comes from the wonderful Australian-Japanese Tuscany-based food writer Emiko Davies, whose work I have been following, and loving, for years. There are a lot of very good minestrone recipes out there—my Italian friends would laugh at me for saying minestrone and recipe in the same sentence—but I believe that Emiko’s is by far the best. The only tweak we ever make comes from soaking and preparing our beans — always Steve Sando’s — which yields a flavorful bean liquid; we use it for at least three-quarters of the broth base, and it is remarkable. If you have leftovers the next day, you could freeze them (the soup freezes very well) or better still, you can cook what remains down to a thick ribollita, which is the porridgy panade of my dreams. The recipe, which was first published in Food52, is below.

Emiko says: This recipe is inspired by the minestrone recipe in Artusi's cookbook, Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well (1891), in which Artusi himself instructs is adaptable to your own tastes and what you find in the vegetable patch. More than a recipe, Artusi's is a description of what to put in it. He actually calls for "a little " tomato passata (or paste) but doesn't say how much. I do love that about old cookbooks, though—how recipes are really just guidelines.

The idea here is to take advantage of fresh, seasonal ingredients rather than looking at this as an opportunity to clear out the sad-looking scraps at the bottom of the crisper drawer in the fridge. This is a soup that you can make beautiful no matter what the season: If the greens aren't in season, use other vegetables such as fresh peas in spring or more root vegetables in winter.

If you want to make this more substantial, use beef stock as the base rather than vegetable stock. A little trick to add some flavor to a vegetable soup is also to throw in the thick rind of Parmesan cheese when you can no longer grate anything else from it: It adds lovely flavor and when it’s softened in the warm soup, you can eat it, too (strict vegetarians, just be aware that real Parmesan cheese is made with real animal rennet). If you want something lighter, stick to vegetable stock and you can also leave out the beans and the pasta, rice, or farro.

Serves 4 to 6

1 handful of parsley, both stalk and leaves, chopped finely

3 slices of pancetta or prosciutto, chopped

1 clove of garlic, chopped finely

1 small onion, diced

¹/₂ stalk of celery, chopped

1 medium carrot, chopped

2 bay leaves

1 small potato, peeled and sliced or diced

1 small zucchini, diced

2 big handfuls of greens (cabbage, spinach, chard, or a mixture), rinsed and roughly chopped

one 14-ounce (400-gram) tin borlotti beans, drained (or a handful of fresh borlotti beans, simmered until tender)

Half of a 14-ounce (400-gram) tin of whole, peeled tomatoes, roughly chopped (or 2 or 3 fresh Roma tomatoes)

¹/₄ cup rice, farro, or small pasta such as risoni, stelline

4 cups (1 liter) vegetable stock

salt and pepper

grated Parmesan cheese, for serving (optional)

toasted slices of bread for each bowl, for serving (optional)

extra-virgin olive oil

1. Gently sauté the chopped parsley, pancetta, and garlic in 2 to 3 tablespoons of olive oil in a large soup pot for 1 minute. Add the onion, celery, carrot, and bay leaves and continue cooking until the onion begins to become translucent.

2. Add the rest of the vegetables, beans, tomato, and rice (or farro or pasta). Season with salt and pepper. Cover with stock, bring to the boil and place a lid on top and cook until the vegetables are tender. Check for seasoning.

3. Serve the minestrone with a piece of toasted bread in the bottom or on the side of the bowl, and sprinkle over grated Parmesan cheese and a drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil. Artusi likes to put the Parmesan directly into the pot at the end rather than serve it on top.

Listen to the music, buy the socks, make the soup, buy the books. The days are getting shorter.

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UPCOMING APPEARANCES

September 6 - Hudson Valley Books for Humanity, 4 PM - In conversation with Hyeseung Song for her glorious memoir, Docile

September 16 - Zibby Books, Santa Monica - In conversation with Annabeth Gish for Permission

September 18 - Book Passage, Corte Madera - A conversation about Permission, story ownership, and who gets to write our stories.

October 9th - Barnswallow Books, Rockport Maine - A conversation about Permission with Elissa and a special guest…..

November 4th - Book Larder, Seattle (Virtual event) - In conversation with Diana Henry in celebration of her new book, Around the Table

March 2026 - Permission and the Story You Must Tell: A Weekend at Kripalu. Sign-up to come!

For paid subscribers: Join The Permission Workbook, a twice-monthly craft series about memoir, story ownership, and how writers and art makers move beyond the strictures of shame.