Gatherings growing up were anchored by the plastic clamshell veggie tray, with compartments of broccoli florets, carrots, cauliflower, and beans surrounding a plastic tub of ‘veggie dip.’ Like a lot of what I ate growing, I have a pretentious and dumb instinct to dismiss and belittle the food. But this is crazy and wrong –– those veggie trays rocked, even with the far-flung year-round produce pinched between all that plastic.

One way I’m clinging to to each micro-season is by taking a jar or two of the best vegetable of the moment and lacto-fermenting it. Lacto-fermentation is likely the earliest method of preservation humans developed, essentially letting the lactobacillus bacteria already on the produce convert sugars into acids which in turn repel any other spoiling microbes.

Our CEO is a hunter with a side hobby starting successful tech companies. He’s spent his quarantine in the fields and trees of Brandenburg dropping wild boar and buck, and shared a 2.5 kg venison leg this week, conveniently timed as Berlin lifts more of its restrictions (and just before I enter a self quarantine before traveling back to the US).

It hit 90° in Berlin today so I am officially only drinking water, cold brew, and pink sparkling boozy drinks for the foreseeable future. We also gave ourselves the gift of a freezer after 14 months living without (it wasn’t that bad!), allowing me at long last to start shaking and swirling fun (and mostly good) cocktails on a whim.

Tourists come to Berlin to queue. And I have fond memories from my first trip here chasing down and waiting for the best-reviewed döner, Berlin’s signature sandwich of a triangle of flatbread grilled for a shattering crust, stuffed with a dollop of sauces, salad, and meat roasted on a vertical Spieß (occasionally mixed with other fried vegetables). But it took months of living here to realize: Berlin’s urban geography is defined by its döner shops. There’s only one Brandenburg Gate and one Berghain, but there are three döner shops between me and the nearest grocery store (a perilous path when shopping hungry), with over 1,000 of Germany’s 1,600 Dönerbuden in Berlin.

One of my favorite food rants (usually a few drinks deep) used to be a diatribe against pasta, damning it as a character-less, lazy backdrop for a sauce. These hazy memories are a good lesson in humility, as having since seen the light and turned away from my pasta-less past.

There’s nothing as tactile and satisfying as making your own pasta. It’s Play-Doh for grownups that ends with dinner. But is it worth the effort? This answer isn’t that it’s for when you’re feeling rustic and in need of a de-stresser. Fresh and dried pasta are fundamentally different, with distinct methods, ingredients, texture, flavor, and even the sauces that work best.

While the world remains stuck at home, we all find ourselves both cooking more, entertaining less, and (hopefully) trying to limit the number of trips we’re making to the store. This has created a bit of a pileup in my produce drawer, with no dinner party salads to offload the odd bunch of scallion or mint left from another dish. We’re all also a bit extra sensitive to sanitation these days, with the dry hyper-washed knuckles to prove it. So as we have fewer opportunities to share, less money to spend, and more time to handle our ingredients, it is a great time to walk through a few practices to extend the shelf life of all the green things gracing your kitchen.

No matter who or where you are, nothing is at home on your plate quite like a potato. These carby lumps define stereotypes from Idaho to Ireland and compose signature dishes ranging from Canadian Poutine to Indian (or African) Samosa. Even the simple idea of cutting them up and frying has meaningful, regional flair the world around. Belgian frites, English chips, thin American fries might seem interchangeable, but their exact methods, temperatures, textures, and accompaniments are more resilient than scores of fading cultural rituals around food.

As a kid, I passed on the cliche dream jobs of astronauts and Green Bay Packers, stating for years that I’d become a chef and open up a restaurant called Sam’s Eggs. Not yet out of the cards entirely, my culinary pursuits are usually playing chef in my tiny kitchen in Berlin, fantasizing that my mini fridge and leaky sink are the walk-in, deep-bottomed variants the pros use.

Or, what’s worth buying at IKEA! I live to cook and orient my social life, home, and thoughts entirely around cooking. As such, I don’t hesitate to treat myself to the occasional new tool, but generally, I try to run a lean ship due to space and cost pressures. While I have bins of kitchen stuff collecting dust in a Minnesota basement, moving abroad has helped me really assess what’s most vital in a kitchen, and I have some tips for others outfitting their small, far-from-luxury stations for relaxed and effective cooking.

I know nearly nothing about baking bread. I’ve made fewer than 50 batches of sourdough, and it’s never quite right. In the time it takes me to produce a mediocre loaf (boule, if I may be so bouled), I could easily walk a few blocks to a nearby bakery and bring home something far, far better than what I burn my fingers trying to flip out of a dutch oven. And yet I continue to orient my life around a few jars of yeasty sludge, stopping just shy of giving it a name and its own instagram handle.

I encountered this dish at Berlin’s Golvet, a Michelin-starred tasting menu restaurant with a globetrotting pallet and edgy service. While most everything else on the menu boasts nouvelle cuisine’s inaccessibility of foams and slimes and beautiful bursts of long-extracted flavor, this starter was a perfect, simple beginning to a marathon meal. The deep caramel flavor isn’t as sweet as you might think.