North American winter food runs on a calendar that nobody ever wrote down. Pumpkin everything shows up in October, a very large bird takes over the last week of November, cookies multiply in Dec…

Everyone has a Trader Joe's cart routine. You walk in for oat milk and walk out with two bags of frozen things you did not know you needed, a seasonal snack, and the lingering feeling that d…

Western folklore keeps its monster defenses in the spice rack: garlic for vampires, salt for the stubbornly haunted, maybe a bowl of milk on the porch if you are being polite. Korea has its own …

Picture the weekend before Thanksgiving, the one where somebody's kitchen turns into a production line. There is a pile of vegetables, a loud radio, three relatives arguing about the right w…

Winter in a North American city comes with its own small economy of warm things: the hot pretzel cart, the roasted nuts, the paper cup that exists mainly to give your fingers something to hold. …

Unscrew a jar of orange marmalade and you get orange. Unscrew a jar of honey lemon syrup and you get lemon, maybe with a faint whiff of cough drop. Unscrew a jar of yuja cheong, the Korean citru…