Down in the cottage

You know why I like different seasons? Well, lots of reasons, but one of them is because different seasons call for different food.

In the summer, probably 80% of my evening meals are salads of one sort or another. Spinach, Niçoise, Greek… That’s one of the reasons why I’ve got an entire cupboard shelf of vinegars and oils.

This year I added grilled asparagus and steak salad, with mango on a bed of cress and a hoisin vinaigrette, courtesy of Danger Girl. Dear God, that sucker is wonderfully good, and because I live in California, I’ve got access to some wonderful produce. A couple of months ago, a farm market in Sunnyvale had the most amazingly luscious mangos for $0.79 apiece. You could smell their ripeness from across the parking lot.

(Okay, you can see that I went a little wild with the mangos on this particular salad. But I admit it—I’m a complete mango whore. I love them much more than is natural.)

But Autumn signals to me that it’s time to make cottage pie.

You can stuff your meatloaf—even if you put anchovies in it, or ground veal or whatever. And don’t even get me started on mac and cheese—the very thought of it makes me gag. (And that’s not hyperbole.)

No—my comfort food is cottage pie. That’s shepherd’s pie, only with ground beef instead of ground lamb, which is hard to come by in the Valley they call Silicon. And expensive when you do.

Cottage pie has the ground meat (or “mince”, as they call it in the UK), sautéed onion, carrots and peas; and it’s topped off by a nice layer of mashed potatoes. All your cold-weather go-tos in a single dish. You bake it until the potatoes are all crispy-brown at the edges, and then break through the crust with your fork to let all the steamy goodness out.

Just don’t try to eat it too fast, because you’ll burn your tongue. Every time. Just like I do.