I normally wouldn’t bother to write about a side salad. But this was quite possibly the most sublime salad I’ve had in a good long while.

For dinner, we had some manicotti that my mother-in-law had brought over for us. A pint of tomato sauce in the fridge meant essentially a no-cook night for me, and I figured a salad would be a good accompaniment. I had on hand some roasted beets, a package of mixed baby greens, and my pantry staples — olive oil and a very good balsamic vinegar.

So the salad was composed thusly: I tossed the greens with some olive oil and vinegar and divided it onto a couple of salad plates. On top of that, cubed roasted beets that had been lightly dressed with the same olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Sprinkled a few pine nuts on top, and the real kicker — I sprinkled this very lightly with some fleur de sel.

Like I said — best. Salad. Ever.

For the roasted beets:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Trim the ends of the beets and wash them well. Put them on a piece of foil large enough to enclose them. Drizzle them with a bit of olive oil, and bake them for 45 minutes to an hour depending on size. When they’re cool enough to handle, peel the skin off them and cut them into cubes. These can be dressed with a vinaigrette. They taste like the earth — dark, substantive, and mysterious. They are beautiful.

That’s my pronouncement for the week.

Last year, after reading a ringing endorsement of this pan on Cook’s Illustrated, I ventured to Wal-Mart and bought one of these 6.5 quart Tramontina enameled cast iron Dutch ovens. My winters are full of soups, stews, and other things that call for slow cooking, sometimes on top of the stove, sometimes in the oven, and I wanted a pot that would serve me well. The truly amazing thing is how well this Dutch oven performs, and how (relatively) inexpensive it was — this year, Wal-Mart’s website lists it at $45 (still a bargain), but I think I might have paid $40 for mine.

The enamel coating on this pan is great because it allows you to brown things very nicely — you end up with a nice fond on the pan bottom which will serve your dish well if you deglaze the pan with some wine or broth. I like to make giant batches of tomato sauce with meat in this, and it’s also great to make chicken in a pot. I brown the chicken on top of the stove, remove the chicken, add some aromatic vegetables to the pan to brown them up a bit, return the chicken to the pot, add a little wine or stock, and stick the whole thing in the oven for an hour and a half. I also trot this baby out when it’s time to make a pot of kielbasa and sauerkraut, or corned beef.

It’s easy to clean, too — the enameled interior cleans up almost like a nonstick coating, and on those few occasions when you’ve got something really stuck, you just need to put some water in the pot and soak for a couple of hours and it’s good to go.

The one drawback? It’s heavy. It’s really heavy. It’s so heavy that once you put a few pounds of ingredients into it, you don’t want to pick it up if you don’t have to. It’s heavy enough that when you wash it out you’re very careful not to drop it. Not in the sink (it’d probably chip the porcelain off your sink), not on your foot. Other than that, it’s a relatively inexpensive workhorse, and it looks pretty on the stove.

Almost as soon as I returned from Las Vegas it was time to pack a suitcase again, this time to drive up to Danvers, MA for a three-day class in geodatabase administration. Yeah, I realize that only sounds interesting to about two other people, but that’s my life.

What a truly weird hotel experience I had. I had booked myself into the Sheraton Ferncroft, mainly because it was across the parking lot from the office park where I needed to go for the class. Since driving in that neck of the woods can be less than pleasant (oh people of Connecticut, think of metro Boston next time you’re tempted to complain about traffic), it was nice not to have to go anywhere. The Sheraton gets props for the things you really want in a hotel: the room was nice (and spotlessly clean), and the staff (what there was of it) was friendly and helpful.

On the other hand, located as it is in MA’s tech corridor, the Sheraton seems to be suffering as much from the economic turndown as everything else around here. How did this manifest itself? Well, the main hotel restaurant was mostly closed. It opened for breakfast in the morning, closed at 10:00 am, and that was it. Similarly, the Starbucks in the lobby (how nice, I thought, a Starbucks in the lobby!) opened in the morning, and closed its doors before noon. Coffee in the afternoon? Sorry, traveler, you’re screwed.

A sign outside the restaurant directed would-be diners to the lounge for lunch and dinner. So for the first two nights of my stay, I ate in the bar. On Sunday night, it was just me and the bartender, who was friendly but sensitive enough to leave me to my book (I always bring a book when I dine alone in a restaurant at night — because really, what else is there to do?). Surprisingly, the food was very good. I had pan-seared salmon, grilled asparagus, and fingerling potatoes. I washed that down with a Harpoon IPA, which was one of the select group of very good beers they had on tap.

Monday night was just a tad better. There was at least one other woman in the lounge (seemingly also traveling on business), and a couple of guys sitting at the bar for their dinner. I had a very good pasta dish with grilled chicken, roasted red peppers, and artichoke hearts in a white wine sauce, a glass of Chardonnay, and molten chocolate cake for dessert.

On my last night there, I drove down to Brookline (there’s that traffic again) and dined at Legal Sea Foods in Chestnut Hills with Bryan and Caitlin. The food was delicious and the company was good. It was nice not having to eat with my face in a book.

Finally, I got to drive home after class on Wednesday night. Between the traffic and the rain, it took me three and a half hours. When I got home, Jim made me a meatball sandwich and served that with a glass of red wine. Quite possibly the best meal of the whole trip.

In this day of declining print advertising revenues, it comes as no surprise when another publication closes its doors. This week, Condé Nast announced that Gourmet, the grande dame of food magazines, will cease publication with its November issue. The 68-year-old glossy has long been in the vanguard of magazines devoted to the pleasures of the table, achieving its reputation long before there were celebrity chefs on The Food Network to tell us what to eat. Its current editor-in-chief is renowned food writer Ruth Reichl, who left her post as restaurant critic at the New York Times in 1999 to take the position.

When I was a young woman just venturing into the world of cooking, Gourmet and Bon Appétit were the two “serious” food magazines on the market, and for a while I had subscriptions to both. Sure, there were recipes galore to be found in women’s magazines, the kind my mother would often pick up at the grocery store checkout, but that was everyday food aimed at the everyday cook who needed to get a reasonably tasty dinner on the table in a hurry. Gourmet and Bon Appétit were marketed toward upscale readers — women who entertained frequently and who had food budgets that allowed them to purchase only the finest of ingredients, and schedules that permitted them to hunt those same ingredients down. (As I look back at myself in my mid-20s, when I neither entertained nor had much of a food budget, it’s clear that my reach exceeded my grasp in more ways than one.) Bon Appétit (which is also published by Condé Nast and seems to be surviving in this current economic climate), with its more down-to-earth recipes and slightly less elite tone, was always my favorite of the two.

Of course the world has changed a great deal since then, and a good many home cooks, serious and otherwise, have found their way online. In spite of a bookcase full of cookbooks (which I sometimes like to read the way other people like to curl up with a mystery novel), I find myself opening my laptop more often than not when I’m looking for meal ideas.

You can hardly swing a spatula without hitting a food-related site, regardless of whether you’re looking to get restaurant recommendations from the hometown crowd, argue about what really goes into a proper minestrone, or settle on what kind of cookware to buy. As with everything else online, readers need to assess for themselves whether any given site is a good fit for their particular interests. Here are a few places I visit regularly:

Epicurious is Condé Nast’s digital presence in the world of food. It collects, as their press page says, “more than 25,000 professionally tested recipes from the premier brands in food journalism, 50,000 member-submitted recipes, and web-exclusive original content from Epicurious.com editors and leading food authorities around the world.” Free registration gives you the opportunity to save recipes in your own recipe box, annotate recipes (only you can see the notes), and participate in the online community. I probably grab a recipe or at least an idea from this site on an average of once a week.

Chow is a good place to catch up on news and trends and has a nice selection of recipes and entertaining ideas. Free registration allows you to contribute to their online community Chowhound, where you can swap ideas and recipes and get restaurant recommendations from locals no matter where you’re traveling.

Cook’s Illustrated is the Consumer Reports of the food world and is the only — yes, only — web content I pay for. And I pay for it gladly. The site is free of advertising (just like their print publication), which allows them to offer readers unbiased reviews of products ranging from canned tomatoes to cookware sets, from microwaves to olive oil, and everything in between. Run by Christopher Kimball, who is the anti-celebrity chef host of PBS’s America’s Test Kitchen, the site is heavily oriented toward testing and data analysis, which appeals to the empiricist in me. When the folks at Cooks want to make a beef stew, they make 50 beef stews and then tell you exactly what combination of ingredients and cooking techniques makes it perfect. Their recipes are clearly explained, unfailingly successful, and even an experienced cook like me can pick up tips here. Their search engine leaves a great deal to be desired, but that’s one minor quibble in a sea of goodness. A yearly subscription currently costs $34.95, and I consider it to be money well spent.

Last but not least, Wednesday always brings a smile to my face in the form of the New York Times’ Dining & Wine section. There’s always at least one recipe worth trying, regular contributor Mark Bittman is always well worth reading, and the pictures are nice, too.

I don’t think I’m going to be missing those magazines at all.

There’s a little bit of a chill in the air today. It’s not jacket weather yet by any stretch, but it’s just cool enough that you can sense the change of seasons, feel it on your skin and smell it when the breeze blows. We’ve been seeing lots of geese flying overhead, and here and there a few maples are starting to turn orange. It gets dark much earlier in the evening so that lights are necessary almost immediately upon returning home from work.

We’re winding up the vegetable garden — the peppers are racing the first frost to the finish line, and I picked our first eggplant this past weekend. There’s one more about ready for picking, and if we’re lucky, we’ll have a few more zucchini before that plant, too, gives up the ghost. The tomatoes have been over and done with for a couple of weeks now, the last harvest being green ones we picked before the blight got them.

Inevitably, the end of summer and the first scent of crisp air makes me think of cold weather cooking. Instead of a quick pasta dish, I’m thinking of a pot of beautiful butternut squash soup. Instead of tossing a steak on the grill, I’m thinking of a slow-roasted chicken, perhaps accompanied by some equally slow-roasted root vegetables. I’m thinking pot roast instead of hamburgers, stews instead of salads. As the days get shorter, the pleasures of the kitchen and the dinner table beckon us indoors.

If I haven’t mentioned it before, I’ll mention it now: October is my favorite month of the year. One of the pleasures of living in New England is the change in pace wrought by each passing season. I can’t wait to switch gears.

Sometimes the best meals are the ones you’re not expecting.

Jim and I had lunch downtown today with friends we haven’t seen in a while. We ate at Anna Liffey’s, an Irish pub in a dim downstairs room with a good selection on tap and a dart board. We all had fairly substantial lunch fare — I enjoyed an open-face steak sandwich with some fine onion rings, washed down with a pint of Smithwick’s.

Since we’re accustomed to very light (and beerless) lunches, dinner on those rare occasions when we lunch out is usually a pretty meager affair. And right around the time we were wondering what we might be in the mood for, I decided I had a hankering for breakfast. I asked Jim if he felt like cooking, and blueberry pancakes were not out of the question.

We just finished mopping up our plates — they were good and just the right thing. It’s a rainy night, there’s some good TV on, and I have a tequila sunrise to finish.

Here’s to brinner. And to Friday.

As I feared they would, the tomatoes are beginning to ripen all at once. I’ve already got some beautiful, ripe plum tomatoes waiting in the kitchen, and I just came in from the garden with a colander full of Romas, a couple of regular-style tomatoes (the vines are so entangled amongst themselves right now I have no idea what’s coming from what plant, except for the heirlooms, which have a distinctive look but haven’t ripened enough to pick yet), and two more flawless zucchini.

This morning I made two loaves of zucchini bread (from the Morning Glory Farm cookbook — their breads are just heavenly) from one of our big, gorgeous squash, and the Romas are likely going into a good pasta and fresh mozzarella salad for lunches next week.

I spent the last couple of weeks straying from my plan to chart my weekly menus out ahead of time, and I regretted it for the most part. Having a plan is better than not having a plan, and I like to be flexible with my plans, but I still like having some kind of a guideline. Last week I found myself running out of food (and therefore hitting the store more often than I would have liked) and feeling at loose ends when I came home from work.

Here’s this week’s game plan:

Sunday

• Grilled Vegetable Antipasto
• Rigatoni with Sunday Sauce - Braciole and Sausage
• Bread

Monday

• Breaded Chicken Cutlets
• Zucchini and Tomato Casserole

Tuesday

• Pasta with Leftover Sauce from Sunday’s Dinner

Wednesday

• Pork Tenderloin with Banana-Date Chutney
• Green Beans with Garlic and Ginger
• Naan

Thursday

• White Chicken Chili
• Salad with Jicama and Oranges
• Spicy Jalapeno-Cheddar Cornbread

Friday

• Maybe we’ll have fish. Maybe we’ll eat out. We’ll see.

There. I feel better just for having written it all down.

Anyone who’s ever been to a Bruce Springsteen concert knows that the pre-show tailgate is a time-honored tradition. While this is difficult to do in urban venues that don’t have acres of parking lots, stadium and arena shows out in the ‘burbs are very amenable to this kind of fun. People sit around and eat and drink, some people dance, some people reminisce about shows past, and everyone has their own favorite Boss music blaring from their car stereo. It’s Springsteen Nation at its most communal. Think of it as a pre-football game tailgate party, but without having to endure the agony of watching a football game afterward.

Some people go all out for these things, toting along grills, massive coolers, and all manner of folding tables and beach chairs. We tend to keep ours way simpler — we pack a cooler with some food and some drink and eat out of the back of the van — you know, the tailgate. We haven’t done this in a while, actually — our last Hartford concert was at the XL Center, which is smack in the middle of the city and lacks those acres of parking (and this is something you can’t pull off in a parking garage).

But we’ve taken the afternoon off work today so that we can get pit lottery wristbands on time and so we’re going to do a little tailgating. And right now I’m contemplating what to bring for dinner. Given the heat, I’m leaning toward sandwiches, but what kind? I’ve made some very decent Italian subs with cold cuts, cheese, roasted peppers, and other good things. Or maybe we want something different, like roast beef. Or maybe I should just pick up a rotisserie chicken and some sides. Dessert has to be something very simple, like cookies. And since it’s hot, there will be plenty of something cold (and non-alcoholic) to drink.

Sometimes eating is more about the atmosphere than it is about the food. I’m excited to be going tonight.

I’ve talked before about the Lobster Shack in Branford, a little trailer-type place on the Branford River that makes the best lobster rolls on the shoreline. I’m not sure I’ve mentioned the Cupcake Truck here, so a few words of introduction are in order. The Cupcake Truck is an ingenious entrepreneurial enterprise run by an enthusiastic young couple who are apparently escapees from careers in business. Essentially a mobile cupcake bakery, the truck makes weekly rounds of several regular stops in the New Haven area, and on the weekends frequently heads out to special events and more suburban locations. It’s hard to describe how good these cupcakes are — freshly baked each day, they’re frosted when you order them and at $2 apiece constitute one of the most reasonable splurges around.

Anyway, yesterday the Cupcake Truck parked at the Lobster Shack. It was impossible to pass up this confluence of events, despite the fact that we’d had lobster rolls just last weekend, so we planned the morning accordingly. We both worked out in the morning, bypassed breakfast altogether, and had brunch by the river: we split a lobster roll, shared a dozen grilled clams, consumed two bottle of water, and then stood in line in the heat and humidity for an hour to grab a couple of cupcakes. By the time it was our turn, choices were limited: Jim got the very last red velvet cupcake (he likes his with the white chocolate/cream cheese frosting), and my chocolate cupcake, which was supposed to have chocolate frosting on it, instead had half chocolate/half peanut butter. Like everything else that comes off the truck, the peanut butter frosting is heavenly. The cupcake was indulgent and delicious, and the peanut butter frosting may well become a habit.

Honestly, the heat pretty much did us in for the rest of the day. But it was worth it to experience a perfect storm of perfect foods.

Life has conspired to keep me from updating for a while: we’ve had a hospitalized cat, we ran to NY on a work night for a concert (and paid for it the next day in lost sleep), and have been beset by other sundry details of living. My weekly menu planning has become slightly disorganized — we’re eating, and we’re eating well, just not as predictably. Nonetheless, we’ve managed to keep tabs on the garden, which is in its full-blown August fury of overgrowth and bounty.

Some of the week’s highlights include: eating the first tomatoes from the garden (delicious, in a light salad with fresh mozzarella, a sprinkling of olive oil, and the barest touch of salt and freshly ground pepper), we have harvested (but not yet eaten) four gorgeous zucchini (one more to come inside today), and the jalapenos look like they’ll be ready for picking within a few days. A week or so of hot, sunny weather has caused things to riot in the garden (although, sadly, still nothing that looks like an eggplant). Oh, and there are bell peppers beginning to grow, too.

When we were in NY on Monday, we stopped for dinner at P.D. O’Hurley’s, an Irish-type pub on the upper west side not far from the Beacon Theatre (our eventual destination). We’ve been there before and the food is decent and reasonably priced. Jim ordered a piece of banoffee pie for dessert. We had no idea what it was before he asked the waitress for details, and we thought it sounded good. Good doesn’t really begin to describe it. I’m making one today. Will report later. For now, there are two unopened cans of sweetened condenesed milk simmering in a pot of water on my stove top. That sounds crazy even to me.