seasonal cooking-fall

As autumn approaches our menu shifts. Pies replace both ice cream and grilled meals. slow simmering soups and sauces (including homemade apple sauce and apple butter) replace quick fried hot dishes and cold salads. Even if it's warm inside, the chill from outside seems to linger in the bones and heat from the stove becomes a welcome pleasure instead of tolerated annoyance. We also start to use more spices, which warm both the nose and the blood and heat us from the inside. Long baking lasagna replaces quick pastas with saute'd vegetables and wine sauce. It's a great time for playing with recipes, many of which can be varied in fascinating ways just by a change from cool Italian herbs to the warm and hot spices of curry or Chinese cooking, leaving the rest of the ingredients in place. Lots of new fruits and vegetables come into season in the fall, too, and vegetables in new forms--canned, pickled, and dried, offer variety as well with shifted and concentrated flavors in place of the delicate complexity of fresh.

Cooks challenge; Take your favorite Italian dish. Replace the pasta with rice, and replace the green herbs with turmeric, cumin, allspice, coreander.