There are certain dishes that loom large in my mind as the real icons of the seasons — not the retail calendar of pumpkin spice and peppermint bark, but the meals that have, almost by accident, braided themselves into the memories of a particular stretch of time.

Pozole rojo is October: the bowl I ate on my first fall day back in Chicago as an adult, perched on a pleather barstool beneath the rattle of the Blue Line, wondering if I could ever feel at home in the place I was born. Its warmth was an answer of sorts, even if the city itself withheld one. Carolina Gelen’s beetroot focaccia is spring: shocking-pink dough rising on my counter, later freckled with crystalline shards of salt. I baked it for the first time in a tiny apartment where I tried to coax herbs from a stubborn little Juli

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