am not someone who makes pasta—or even craves it— very often. But every time I go to our favorite local grocer, I’m lured in by the pretty packages of over-the-top pasta shapes: Long, leggy noodles, big, chunky Tufoli, and lace-edged riginette or tripoline. Usually, I buy a package of some dreamy, only in Italy feeling shape, and then store it in little bit of empty space above the fridge (there’s never room in my pantry) dreaming and scheming for weeks about what it will become before I ever crack into it.

Such is the case for these extra fat Rigatoni, which yes, would make an excellent homemade mac-and-cheese, but for me, were calling: SOUP! A minestrone was in order. Chunky, warming, nutritious.

I have a lot of favorite recipes in my most recent book, Every Day is Saturday, too many to name in a little intro like this, but if I had to give you one—just one—to start with, I might suggest starting here: an easy, please-all cake that can be fancied up with the help of a sturdy bundt pan

Bundt cakes are like modern miracles. They can transform the simplest cake into a pastry-shop-centerpiece, as long as you butter and flour them well. I love a bundt so much that when my friend Josh recently took a vintage kitchen haul off the street in his brooklyn neighborhood, I had to volley his wife, Doris (and my dear friend) for who would get to bake in her new //old beat up bundt pan, first.

But back to our bundt. The idea for this spot-on cake came from Sarah Kieffer’s (wonderful) Vanilla Bean Baking Book. I made it a half dozen times within the month the book arrived—a few years ago now—making my own tweaks for our mostly gluten-free, low-sugar household: adding almond flour, dropping the total sugar and using bitters instead of Grand Marnier. The result is still so crazy delicious, and leans just left of decadent—enough that you don’t feel so bad serving your kids leftover slices for breakfast the day after friends have come to call. You know the kind…

I made soup: it’s NOT squash. This not-squash soup is my new cold weather favorite: creamy cauliflower soup topped with crispy chickpeas and radishes and per my usual, all the herbs and oil.

I absolutely love squash soup. I make it at least once a week, and it’s still something I’m likely to order from a restaurant menu on any given fall night. But sometimes we need to branch out, and when we do, this soup is here for you.

Right now, my husband and children are sound asleep in a tent 50 feet from our kitchen door, where the air is cool and crisp. I wrapped myself around them, whispered (harmless) ghost stories and watched the fire crackle against the peaked, nylon ceiling before their eyes shuttered, releasing me to slink away... to put life back in order, to wash dishes, and set some dough to proof for the morning. Sometimes I envy the freedom of childhood, the sweetness of slumber not wrought with a list of to-dos, but more so I love my role as the magic maker—the one burning the midnight oil for tomorrow’s gain. Because it’s all moving fast: their childhood, this fall—already. I think that’s why I love cooking so much, it’s the only thing I can grasp to slow things down—to put a meal in front of them, to sit across the table from a girl who’s lost all signs of “early childhood”, from a boy who’s legs spring out from his pant legs again and again, inching us from babyhood to boyhood, ever quicker.

What has any of this to do with this soup? My dough is proofing and the bonfire is still flickering so here I sit, writing this recipe up for you as I promised I would, because all I know from where I stand is that maybe, just maybe, the right pot of soup can stop time for all of us—if only for a moment.