October has this way of closing out hard. The leaves give up on being orange and go brown in a week, the kitchen gets legitimately cold in the mornings, and I find myself cooking more things in big pots than I did in September.
Monday was a soup - the Italian one with sausage, greens, potatoes, cream. I made the whole pot and we ate it for three nights without either of us complaining.
Tuesday: shrimp with orzo, lemon, feta, a whole bunch of parsley. That one wants to be a summer plate but fit neatly into a Tuesday in late October if you ate it with the window cracked.
Wednesday I made beef lo mein with green beans I’d bought meaning to make something else, and it turned out to be one of those dinners my husband specifically asked me to make again.
Thursday was stroganoff - wide egg noodles, a sauce that sneakily has a lot of sour cream in it, the obligatory piece of bread. This is my grandmother’s dinner, and I make it when the weather turns because it’s what she would have done.
Friday morning (because I’m including breakfast this once): yogurt with sliced plums and granola, in a bowl I photographed on the windowsill because the light was so pretty.
Saturday I did a pot roast. I know that’s a Sunday food. I did it Saturday anyway. It went on in the morning and came out in the late afternoon, shredded with a fork, folded back into its own juices with the potatoes and carrots that had been cooking alongside it the whole time. I plated it on a long platter because we had people coming by later. They said all the right things.
Sunday was the first of what turned out to be three salmon nights - a thick steak with seaweed salads in two tiny bowls, a teriyaki fillet with brussels on Monday, and another teriyaki with asparagus midweek. Three different pieces of fish, three different sides. I promised my husband we’d branch out after that. I kept the promise. Sort of.
Somewhere in there I also made a bowl of garlicky soy noodles with a fried egg on top and a scribble of sriracha - the kind of dinner I eat when I’m alone, when he’s gone to a thing and I want to sit on the couch and watch something I know he’d hate. That one isn’t in every week. But it was in this one.
