Every autumn season, other than looking forward to the wide variety of fall apples (Honeycrisp!!) and autumn and winter squash, I also get excited about seeing canned butternut squash and pumpkin available everywhere, which means it’s pumpkin-themed baking time, whether that means pumpkin bread, pumpkin pancakes, butternut squash soup; it gets me really excited and wanting to spend even more time in the kitchen than I already do.

Today for the first time this season, I made pumpkin bread with a new recipe and tweaked it quite a bit. I swapped some of the white sugar for brown sugar, added vanilla extract, and also used coconut oil to increase moistness over regular oil or butter. I also topped the loaf before baking with a cinnamon sugar topping, and wow, this bread really blew me away. Not trying to brag, but this pumpkin bread is, by far, the moistest, richest, most satisfying pumpkin bread I’ve made, and I’ve made a lot of these loaves since college. The spices just sing in it. This recipe is most definitely a keeper. And it will be on the vlog soon!

The sky was black at around 4pm today. I’d never seen people in my office trickle out so quickly. It was as though we were all under the same depressed spell, and by 5pm, nearly every single person was out of the office. When I left at around 5:15, it was as though I was the one who “stayed late.”

Even when people tell you they love autumn and winter (and I do, too, for all the cooking, baking, holidays, autumn foliage, etc.), as much as they love it, they just want to get the heck home and away from the office much earlier than they normally do.

After seeing a matinee show this afternoon and running some errands, we decided to walk up to the heart of the Upper West Side and have dinner at a local French spot where we’ve previously gone for a quick drink. The restaurant is small and cozy, with just a handful of tables and a small bar. The menu is also small but with a decent-sized wine list at relatively higher price points. This is to be expected with French food in New York, but to be fair, the prices could easily be higher given that we are in New York City, and anytime you reference anything “French,” the dollar signs tend to go up.

We had a glass of wine each, shared a charcuterie platter of mixed cheeses and meats, and had two mains. After tax and tip, the bill ended up being just shy of $150. The majority of the food was quite good, and the quality of the wines were expected given that they were about $14/glass. But it made me think about all the delicious French food we had in Paris that exceeded the quality we had tonight, and it was always a fraction of the cost. It’s bothersome that you have to pay at minimum this much to eat French food in the city. It’s a big reason we rarely even eat French food unless we’re in France. Americans have this obsession with all things French and are willing to pay that much more for French food. But while I enjoy and can appreciate French food, I do not believe these prices are warranted when the same people complain about overpriced Chinese or Vietnamese food.

With autumn in full swing with its dipping temperatures and splashes of oranges, yellows, reds, and golds across the city trees, we can also expect that indoor heating, particularly in our office, will begin to turn on. Chris and I are lucky to live in a building where we have full control over our heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems by room, so we can always adjust it as we see fit. In our Flatiron office, though, where the building is quite old, we do not have this luxury. Instead, the building decides whether and when to turn on air conditioning or heat, and they also decide the temperature to set it to. We have zero control over this. What this inevitably has led to is some rooms being scorchingly hot, while others are cold and frigid. It’s a constant complaint during the colder months, but there’s nothing we can do about it other than have a backup hoodie at our desk or strip off extra layers of clothes. Gotta love New York City heating and air conditioning.

Chris and I have stopped dressing up, but given that we have Halloween trick-or-treat sign ups, we have participated in this every year where we allow trick-or-treaters to ring our doorbell to ask for candy from us. This has become a tradition since moving into this building. The other tradition that Chris personally has is that of the assorted candy bag we buy, whether it’s from Costco or Target, he will pre-pick out all his favorites (Kit Kats, usually, or peanut M&Ms) and set them aside… for himself. It’s as though they never existed for the children. And what do the children know — they have no idea what our assortment was like!

I’m not fully in favor of this approach, but I figure that if there are only seven or eight Kit Kats in an entire 15-pound bag of candy, then it’s not the end of the world. We’re not really being selfish. And this year, we actually received far more trick-or-treaters than we normally get, so it was even more fun to see all the little kids dress up (even grown adults trying to get free candy).

The chill is really setting in today. Winter is around the corner, and autumn is steadily warning us about this with the temperatures that continue to creep down on us, along with what felt like a very sudden change in the colors of the leaves today. Even along our street, I noticed that all the leaves had changed colors, ranging from burnt orange to greenish-yellow. Autumn sweeps over the city and it feels as though yesterday was never summer.

I also felt the impending dread of Daylight Savings Time ending. I hate the darkness at 4pm each day when I’m at the office and all the street lights are already on. I hate not being able to see light outside my window at a time that is supposed to be late afternoon. I just want warmth and light. I had that in Florida the last two days, probably more of it than I’d wanted given how humid and muggy it was, but it felt so much better than today in New York.

The default food I end up eating on work trips is salads: they tend to be relatively healthy, not too expensive, and they don’t make a mess. They also don’t take too much time to eat. When I’m in Boston or other major cities, I usually look for a Sweetgreen because I know what to expect, and I know that the ingredients will always be fresh. When I’m in cities I am less familiar like Orlando, I will just default to a nearby salad spot or the hotel restaurant. Today, I had a grilled shrimp pumpkin seed salad for lunch, and it was massive and filling.

Work travel can invite the temptation to eat poorly, to eat less fresh fruits and vegetables, and to eat quick fast food that is usually greasy, fried, and just bad for you. Salads can help balance this out (assuming you don’t pick a salad with fried chicken or “popcorn shrimp”).

I edited and uploaded my 14th video to my YouTube channel tonight. This one was about my 5-minute Instant Pot Indian chicken curry, and after spending the last three videos working on travel in Newfoundland & Labrador, I realized that this one was far less fun, with less things to be creative about. Granted, the areas where cooking videos can get creative are when you are speeding up long tasks, slowing down others, etc., but with the Instant Pot-themed video, there really aren’t that many opportunities to do that. So even though I was satisfied with what I’d created in the end, I was feeling lukewarm about it and not very excited.

This is probably just the ebbs and flows of video editing different content. You’ll love some, like others, and hate the remaining. It’s just a work in progress to see what works and what doesn’t.

Tonight, we went with some friends to the annual New York City Food Film Fest, a festival where while you watch films about food, you also get served the food that you see on the big screen. While I liked some of the short films more than others, I will say that you certainly get what you pay for, as there is certainly no shortage of food or drink (alcoholic and not!). Without even realizing it, I feel like I’d only had a few small bites (it’s all small bites, for that matter), and immediately started getting much fuller much faster than I had anticipated. Some of the food was inevitably cold, which was a bit frustrating, but other food, such as the ribs, were actually decent at room-temperature. It’s hard to make good food at scale that is also hot.

While I enjoyed the experience, I’ll be honest and say that I am probably not in a rush to go back. We subsequently found out that a number of these films were on YouTube, and a few of them were quite passable to me.