There are endless lessons in the cycles of plants but fall brings one of the hardest and most necessary: reckoning with what to hold and what to release. If spring and summer are about growth, function, and purpose, fall is the culmination of everything that came before, an expression of what time, experience, and change have made possible. This collection draws on the tension of this liminal season, caught between shedding and holding, a woman in her own season of change, and a world that seems to be coming undone. It is both a study and a flavor exploration of what remains, what is changing, and what gains a different kind of potency with time.

As the herb garden sheds what it no longer needs and holds what will carry it into dormancy, I find myself doing the same. After a summer of upheaval, abruptly uprooting from the mold house, and at 53, adjusting to a changing body and a new stage of womanhood, I am in the midst of reconsidering what to hold and what to release.

This collection, made once again in my refuge of Bolinas, CA, is the epitome of letting go as it pares down from my normal eight offerings to only four. Some elements are new, others return with repeat perfection, all reflecting the evolving flavors of what was and what is becoming.

At the center, tousled throughout the entirety is my endless infatuation with the spent blooms of cinnamon basil. Past its vigorous, sleek summer growth, basil becomes softer and droopier, yet sultrier, its warmth deepening into a sweet potency its youthful self could never offer.

Perhaps it takes growing older, and growing alongside a plant, to recognize what youth might overlook: that the leaves, stems, spent blooms, and even seeds hold possibilities beyond the plant’s normal intended purpose, flavors waiting for a more experienced kind of imagination to be released. Age is its own kind of shapeshifting, not simply a loss of what was, but an emergence of what could not have existed before. This is the underlying essence of the collection: the creative perception to see beyond the flavor of sharp youth and recognize the multitudes in what time transforms.

Quintessential, venerable, hardy fall herbs like rosemary, marjoram, thyme, sage, and bay leaves are dappled generously throughout. They represent the boldness of perennial status, with more complexity of flavor when harvested in the fall season: extra camphor and resin. They are not soft-flavored as they are in their tender spring-shoot form; they are balanced and robust, and here a pleasant leader.

They are tamed by the softer annuals in their more withering, older form: basils, mints, shiso, licorice. Numinous specialty herbs that, frankly, more people should grow, like lemon leaf, lavender and caraway thyme, and myrtle comingle with bitter wormwood and pungent purple sage, plus  gobs and gobs of spent blooms of all kinds, all popping in and out, dancing with perfumed varied and unfamiliar expressions: robust, enjoyably “scratchy,” and sultry like an old jazz record. Wild fennel, plucked from the cliff in my front yard is a bright concentrated bridge between pollen and full potent seed, it reads like sweet maturity, but not done.

A plentitude of spices is entangled into the herbs, cradled in a community of flavors. Smoke and grit from black garlic, mora chipotle, smoked alder salt, smoked black cardamom, and wild mesquite meet the delicate adornment of vanilla, almond, mace, burnt orange zest, and tart desert hibiscus. Breadcrumbs, crispy fried shallots, mezcal cranberry sauce, miso, almond extract, and fresh items like apples are situated ubiquitously throughout the salts, a reflection of the creative freedom cultivated through a lifetime of global travel, where the commons of shared food cultures have made intuitive, on-the-fly innovation second nature.

My combinations may seem tousled to food neophytes, even contradictory, but each is deliberate. They reflect a confidence that maturity brings, born of learning to trust who I am in the world and feeling held enough by it to take creative risks. Toughness makes room for tenderness, sour accents sweetness, and ingredients find new purpose in unexpected company. This is the gift of natural refinement that comes with letting go.

Toughness deepens tenderness, sour sharpens sweetness, and unexpected pairings reveal new dimensions in familiar ingredients, opening the mind to new possibilities. This is the gift of real refinement, finding balance between what we hold and what we let go of.

My now-infamous Cinnamon Basil Vanilla Pie Spice is back, a non-salt offering that has become a fall staple in my own cooking repertoire and will remain a fixture in all collections to come. A traditional pie spice at its core, it is extraordinarily more herbaceous, earthy, sultry, and Middle Eastern in character, with the toasted depth that defines nearly all my cinnamon-forward spice mixtures. It was also my first technical discovery back in MO days, when I decided to toast and grind spent cinnamon basil blooms and seeds that most people would compost. A magical, rich, peppery, floral cinnamon warmth emerged, one that no jar of pumpkin pie spice from then on could ever replace. Layered with vanilla, almond, toasted cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, ginger, and the deeper, fresh herbaceous notes of fall, this is not just pure spice; it’s an herb-loaded spice mixture—a masterpiece, a magnum opus. It is the purest, most potent expression of this collection: a sultry, complex reminder that what appears spent can hold an entirely unexpected depth of flavor.

This collection proved what is spent is not depleted. This is the art of the spent bloom.

Use generously and creatively.

 

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