Pickled Cranberries Are The Shimmy in Your Jazz Hands Salad Dance.

Remember last week’s post about brown? Specifically about how we have now entered the Season of Brown, in food? Autumn goes out in a blaze of color; the polychromatic leaves, the crazy variations of pumpkin, featured now on every Brooklyn stoop, the day-after-halloween ticker tape debris of discarded candy wrappers, the living rainbow of runners that pours through all five boroughs of my hometown in the New York City Marathon. The marathon is held the first Sunday of every November and sweeps along with it the last of the brightness and daylight to the finish line. A massive final burst of color, and then, just like that, it’s November, and we turn the clocks back an hour, the sun sets at 5:30 and then much earlier, and that’s it. Cue the Season of Brown; the short days, the parsnips, celeriac, and potatoes, the winter menu of stews, braises and baking. See you in April, color.

The one and only time I ran the NYC Marathon, back in 2007, I took so long to finish (5:20, but nearly twenty minutes of that was waiting for a porta-potty mid-race) and started in such a late corral (they based your start time on your racing history, as you had to complete nine official races to qualify to enter back then, so I was well toward the back, with my twenty-four-inch inseam and all) that by the time I crossed the finish line in Central Park, found Adam, retrieved my backpack from bag check, hobbled to the subway and rode home, shivering and exhausted, it was already dark out. You do get an extra hour of sleep the night before the race, as it’s always the same first Sunday as Daylight Savings, but who can really sleep before they run their first marathon? It felt like midnight by the time I got home, showered and then went next door to the French bistro on our block where I ate a massive burger with foie gras and bleu cheese slathered on it, came home, went to sleep, and missed the first two hours of a mandatory faculty development day because I hurt too much to get out of bed the next morning. Who cares? I ran the goddamn New York City Marathon, two weeks before I turned forty. And I missed nothing, as usual, at the meeting.