In the annals of putting fried eggs on top of things, this breakfast came very close to perfection. Here’s how to make it.

Take one Dungeness crab, cooked and cleaned.

Pick the meat out and set aside. Put the shell into a saucepan, cover with water, and simmer for about 10-15 minutes. Strain and keep warm.

Make risotto. A little onion in the base is nice, with a splash of white wine. Use the crab stock you just made, and stir in plenty of butter at the end. No cheese.

Stir in the crab at the very end.

Roast some asparagus with olive oil and salt. Not for too long, just until done but still crispy.

Serve the risotto and asparagus for dinner, with a good sprinkle of fresh chives.

The next morning, melt a little butter in a nonstick skillet and scrape the leftover risotto into it (you do have leftovers, don’t you?), chop up the leftover asparagus and press it into the risotto. Cook until you get a good golden crust.

Fry an egg, keeping the yolk good and runny, and serve over the crusty risotto with a sprinkle of coarse salt. Feel happy.

Think about buying another crab.

I wasn’t sure there was any higher calling for alder-smoked salmon than a bagel and cream cheese, but this risotto may have changed my mind.

Some friends brought this salmon to a party at our house (very good friends, indeed). It was from Pure Food in the Pike Place Market, according to the bag, and it was the best smoked salmon I have ever eaten, juicy and tender with just the right amount of smoke and sweet. I was trying to think of some way to use a bunch of it at once, and Jon said, “What about in that risotto we’re having on Thursday?” Hmmm.

I’d never used smoked salmon in a risotto before, so I kept it simple. Shallots cooked in butter, then the Arborio, then white wine, then light homemade chicken stock until the rice was almost done. I stirred in a bowlful of frozen peas, then added the shredded salmon at the very end with some cream and parmigiano. A green salad on the side. Perfect.

And the leftovers, fried until crusty, with an egg on the side. You could make this specifically for breakfast, for a brunch party. I think it would be a hit.

Now what shall we do with the rest of the salmon?

I had assumed that we would be eating all kinds of leftovers for days after our end-of-summer party. We did have huevos rancheros for breakfast (with drunken pinto beans and cotija cheese), and chips and guacamole for lunch, but then I realized there wasn’t really much else left except for a large pile of poblano and jalapeño chiles that somehow never got used, plus some leftover grilled corn. I really didn’t want to go to the store again, so I needed to think of something for dinner based on what was on hand. In a fit of fusiony madness, I came up with a sort of Tex-Mex risotto.

I chopped two poblanos and sauteed them in salted butter (I should have added onions, which would have given even more sweetness and depth), then added Arborio rice, followed by a glassful of white wine. I brought a quart of garlic-scented chicken stock to a boil and began adding it to the rice.

Near the end of the cooking time I took several pieces of cooked corn, cut the kernels off the cob and stirred them into the risotto, along with a pile of grated Parmesan.

To top the risotto for dinner, I roughly chopped a few cloves of garlic and sauteed them in olive oil with a handful of peeled shrimp (which I quick-thawed under running water), and seasoned it with salt, cumin and paprika. The garlicky shrimp juices were just what the risotto needed to perk it up. We drank a chardonnay-albariño blend that had a nice amount of both body and acidity.

The leftover risotto was wonderful for lunch the next day, reheated in a nonstick pan until lightly browned. And no, I did NOT top it with a fried egg! I don’t always do that. This time I used a poached egg.

The fish guy at the supermarket had arctic char (one of our very favorite fishes) a couple of weeks ago, but we had other plans for dinner that night. I asked him if he thought it would keep until Friday if I bought some that day, and he gave me a firm “nope.” Sigh.

But char doesn’t come around every day. Feeling uncharacteristically optimistic, I bought a filet anyway and stuck it directly into the freezer when I got home. The following week, I thawed it out and improvised a meal to go with it. And it worked, hurrah!

The char behaved perfectly, I’m happy to say, just panfried with a knob of butter and drizzled with a bit of pesto from the freezer. Then I made a very simple risotto with lots of fresh leeks, which I expected to be the star of the evening. It was, in fact, extremely nice, but then I hadn’t thought to be so taken by the roasted parsnips.

I don’t normally buy parsnips, since Jon doesn’t care for them much, but I had just read the Parsnips for Epiphany recipe in A Platter of Figs and then I saw the most gorgeous, huge pile of parsnips at Haggen. It seemed fated, and I bought a few roots.

I cooked them as David Tanis recommends, cut into long quarters, cored and tossed with plenty of olive oil and salt, then roasted a good long time. The result was astounding: the parsnips were ethereally crisp on the outside, especially the tips, but the innards were buttery and sweet. Jon willingly ate a couple, but I inhaled the rest of the pan all by myself.

It almost makes me sad that parsnip season is nearly over. Almost.

A holiday that we like to celebrate in this household is the festival of Brigid, otherwise known as Imbolc, Candlemas or Groundhog Day. To us, it marks the break between the dark days of winter and the rise of spring, as the days get longer and the garden begins to bloom again. Even though we know it’s going to keep raining until July, just the fact of being able to walk home in daylight is pretty exciting.

Earlier in the day, I celebrated by going out and doing battle with blackberry vines and cutting back the hellebore leaves. We have hellebore flowers coming up, as well as the first glimpses of snowdrops and violets. Hurray, flowers!

Afterwards, we had a little cocktail hour. Jon has been trying to recreate a drink he had in Seattle a while back, the Dragon’s Toe – a mix of bourbon, cucumber, ginger juice and ginger ale. This batch came a little closer, I think. We finished off the last of our Mount Townsend Trailhead cheese – that stuff is good.

Dinner was as springlike as I could manage. I wanted bright flavors and lots of green, so I roasted a chicken with lots of lemon and garlic and butter, then made a risotto with fresh asparagus tips (imported from Mexico, unfortunately, but I was desperate) and a big handful of chopped parsley. We lit all the candles we could find, opened a bottle of bright, fresh sauvignon blanc from Santa Cruz, and felt that spring might actually come.

After a successful food safari out on the Skagit Flats on Saturday (including a truly amazing brunch at the Rhody - I mean, seriously, potato pancakes with sausages, poached eggs and hollandaise sauce!?! Not to mention those little cranberry walnut things – yum) we came home prepared for a cozy November evening inside.

We brought home bread and strawberry jam from the Breadfarm (we bought fresh macaroons, too, but somehow they never made it home), fresh leeks, celeriac, broccoli, shelling beans and chioggia beets from Dunbar Gardens, and a nice bag of groceries from Slough Food: multicolored eggs from Osprey Hill Farm, farro from the Methow Valley, guanciale (cured pork jowl) from Salumi, Humboldt Fog and Petit Basque cheeses, and a bag of fresh chanterelles. Dinner almost cooked itself!

We started off with bread and cheese. We hadn’t had Petit Basque for ages, and I had forgotten how much I love its mild, nutty flavor. And Humboldt Fog is always amazing, especially if you can stand to let it warm up a bit and get runny around the edges. And a Bow Hill baguette to go with it? Beautiful.

Then, for dinner, I roasted a chicken (I had plans for the leftover meat – first chicken pot pie of the season!) and made a risotto. I cut up the guanciale into small dice – far more difficult than I had expected, that stuff is tough – and sauteed it with a sliced leek. Then I added all the chanterelles and let it all cook down, then put in the rice, a glass of Tamarack Cellars chardonnay, and plenty of chicken-leek stock. The guanciale gave the risotto a fascinating barnyardy pork edge, which I decided I liked.

We finished off with a couple of our homemade caramels and a glass of red wine. We live in a good place.

Yes, the weather has been nasty around here, windy, cold and wet. It snowed rather convincingly on Sunday morning but then settled back into a glum, clammy grayness. I wanted something warm, easy to eat and comforting for dinner, as you might imagine.

I had a little Arborio rice left, so I made risotto. I was going to do a plain mushroom risotto with a piece of salmon alongside, but wasn’t thrilled with our store’s fish selection (an unusual occurrence). So we went for one of our frequent emergency backups: kielbasa. It’s quick, easy and gives a great savoriness to anything you put it in. We use Hempler’s, a local brand.

The risotto started with some chopped shallot sauteed in my Le Creuset saucier, followed by a couple handfuls of sliced mushrooms.

Then the rice, stirred in and cooked until slightly translucent.

Then a good splash of vermouth, cooked down and followed by ladlefuls of the chicken broth that I had simmering on the back of the stove all afternoon. It was a good intense broth, giving the risotto a very noticeable chicken flavor. Once the rice was cooked through, I stirred in the sliced sausage and a bowlful of microplaned parmesan and let the risotto sit while I mixed the salad dressing.

We ate on the couch by the fire and drank a Côtes du Rhone.

We have an abundance of squash lying around our house right now. At least one is being saved for our annual Halloween soup (more on that later), but the others are up for grabs –  especially my favorites, the delicatas.

Cook’s Illustrated ran a recipe a couple of years back that we finally tried last winter, and it’s become a favorite - a butternut squash risotto with sage and onions. Delicatas aren’t quite like butternut, but they’re sweet and easy to peel, and work very well in this recipe. Here’s how it worked out on this particular occasion:

First, my wonderful spouse peeled and cut up the squash into 1/2 inch dice for me, reserving the stringy innards and seeds. I heated some olive oil in one of my favorite pans (a lime green Le Creuset saucier) and added the squash in a single layer, left it alone for a few minutes so it browned nicely, then stirred it up and let it cook until just tender. I scooped it into a bowl and set it aside. I then added the squash innards to the pan (it needed a bit more oil) and sauteed them briefly before transferring them to a saucepan and adding a couple cups of chicken broth and a cup of water. The squash-infused broth began simmering away as I started the rice.

At some point during this process it started to rain outside – the kind of rain that makes you wonder about grabbing a life jacket and a lot of towels. I alternated cooking and staring out the window at the deluge. After a while, the main storm passed (the gutters still fountaining water past the kitchen window) and the sun came out, creating a rainbow to the east and amazing light throughout the kitchen – I wanted to go gawk at the rainbow, but of course I was stirring risotto and couldn’t move. Sigh.

I heated up some more olive oil in the pan and was intending to add some chopped onion and garlic to it, but my brain stopped functioning (distracted by weather) and I added the cup of arborio rice to the pan instead. Whoops, too soon! I dumped the onion in on top of the rice and just fried it all up together, good enough. Then a half a cup or so of white wine, stirred in and cooked down, then I dumped in half the cooked squash cubes and started adding the broth through a strainer, a little at a time. It would probably have been easier to strain all the broth first, then just ladle it into the risotto, but why take the easy path?

Once I’d used up all the broth and the rice was just cooked, I added a bit of butter, some parmesan cheese, a tablespoon of chopped sage from the front garden, and the rest of the squash. We served it up with chicken thighs baked with salt and sage, and a Bogle pinot noir. Lovely for a wet fall evening.