Coming back to work after a holiday in the first week of September feels like you should bring a new pencil case and some sharpened pencils along. The modern equivalent is clearing out the email inbox, and getting back to taking 10k steps a day (the goose above was seen on one of the walks contributing to this target). I may buy some new stationery anyway to celebrate the start of autumn. And the combination of darkening skies, ripening apples and leaves that are just starting to fall means it really does feel like autumn has drawn a curtain across, abruptly closing off any option of warm sunny days until the spring. So it feels appropriate that the slow cooker has been on this week, and black beans, meatballs and lasagne have been the anchors for our eating.

Recipes:

• Meatballs – from Food52 Genius Recipes using lots of breadcrumbs and water. Unlikely, but successful – little E ate three *huge* ones! Eaten with Marcella Hazan tomato sauce from the same book.
• Vegetable curry – with coconut milk, from this collection of curry recipes
• Slow cooker ragu – from Slow Cooked
• Cuban black beans – from Slow Cooked

Without a recipe:

• Ham hock – in the slow cooker for about 6 hours with a few vegetables
• Lasagne made with the slow cooker ragu
• The black beans made into burrito-style wraps with a little of the ham, some red onion and tomatoes.
• Beef stir-fry, with stir-fried veg in Dirt Candy herb sauce

Reading:

• I’ve been really impressed with the cooking.nytimes.com site, which results in me bookmarking lots of their recipes. Now they’ve added the ability to bookmark recipes from other sites, and to sync with Evernote, which is making it my preferred place to store all sorts of recipes to make.
• The Bon Appetit foodcast spoke to Sam Kass, personal chef to the Obamas, amongst other things – a very interesting guy.
• I caught only the second half of Jamie Oliver’s Sugar Rush programme, but as always, I was incredibly impressed with his energy and commitment. If you want to support his call to introduce a 10% tax on fizzy drinks, there’s a petition here.
• Hang on to summer with these BLT bowls – bacon, cucumber, tomato and croutons.
• If #GBBO has encouraged you to bake with honey (note: honey is still sugar), Dan Lepard has mini honey pistachio cardamom biscuits.