Fire and rain

You may have noticed that one thing I care a lot about when it comes to cooking is the time of the season. Every restaurant in the Bay Area pretty much does this to the point where it's a cliche (right now it's fig and pork belly salad season), but I think it's the single most important thing to consider when you're making food: if you think about what kind of food you want to eat based on what season it is, you'll be using the freshest, cheapest ingredients, and you'll also probably try some cooking methods more suited for the weather (say, pickling in summer and roasting in winter).

So it's been very confusing for me to have started this blog at this particular point in time because for the past two weeks we've been cycling back between summer and autumn every 36 hours. Yesterday it was 92 degrees in San Francisco! I can't complain too much, because that's rose wine weather and I will take any excuse to drink rose wine, but still, the most recent heat wave didn't quite jibe with the fall produce that I had bought the last time I was at Berkeley Bowl.

So I compromised and made butternut squash soup, which warmed me up on the cold fall evening that I made it but stayed refreshing when I had it cold for lunch the next summer day. There's not much to say about it except that I put in half a stick of butter because my roommate saw "butter" on my grocery list and bought three different kinds of butter from three different stores (my roommate is kind of awesome sometimes). Also I garnished it with some chopped thai-ish pickles: red peppers, hot peppers, ginger, shallots, and cilantro. It made pretty much no sense regionally, but perfect sense seasonally, which, if you were paying attention, was the point of this entry. Full throttle.