What We Cooked Up October 2026

01 October 2026

Welcome, October

Back to the ordinary things we almost forgot were extraordinary

We came back from our September summer holiday only a little while ago, and somehow October is already here. Autumn has started appearing around us in small ways. Grey light in the mornings. Leaves beginning to gather on the ground. Darker walks to the station. That first feeling that summer has finally stepped slightly backwards.

But strangely, this year we are not noticing autumn most through pumpkins, soup, scarves or dramatic orange trees. We are noticing it through something much quieter. Ordinary life has started settling around us again. Work. Trains. Early alarms. Coffee in the dark. Dinner after a long day. Bread cooling on the kitchen rack. A few minutes on the sofa. Articles waiting to be written. Plans scribbled somewhere between one shift and another. And perhaps that is exactly where we want October to begin. Not with a promise to make every day extraordinary. With a promise to notice the ordinary ones properly.

Because September reminded us of something. A holiday naturally asks for attention. You look around more. You photograph more. You remember details. You notice breakfast, a ferry arriving, a road turning towards the sea, a host saying something funny, the shape of the light over a village. Then you come home. And suddenly the same attention can disappear.

Dinner becomes just dinner. A train becomes just transport. A supermarket trip becomes something to get through. A workday becomes something to finish before life starts again.

We do not want to live like that. Life does not happen only on islands.

So this October, we are coming back to the kitchen. Our little Three Ways to Love… series has started moving again, beginning with a very ordinary can of tuna that somehow became sushi-ish layer bites, tasting notes, failed homemade mayonnaise, lemon mayo, extra nori and a recipe we genuinely want to keep working on.

Bobiță is coming back into regular life too. Not necessarily every week. Not under pressure. But often enough that we start learning him again properly, feeding him, testing flour, writing down what works instead of assuming we will remember six months later Our latest bread experiment already reminded us why. After years of good sourdough, we managed to produce a Pleashca. It happens. It will be eaten. It will become toast, tuna melts, salad bread, croutons, whatever job it finds next. And we will try again. That belongs here too.

We also want to write more often about the little things happening around work. The strange canteen desserts. The warm autumn mornings. The ridiculous 4 a.m. wake-ups. The delayed trains. The tiny conversations that happen before a shift. The moments that would disappear completely if we did not stop and say: Wait. That was part of our life too.

Somewhere in October, we would also like one proper celebration day. Ideally dry. Ideally with enough light for photography. A day away from work and away from the flat, simply because ordinary life also needs moments where we deliberately step outside it and look around together. Nothing enormous. Just us, somewhere, paying attention.

October does not need to become a themed month of pumpkins, orange food and compulsory soup. It can simply be a month where we try to stay awake inside our own life. Because extraordinary moments are wonderful. We will always love them. But most of a life is made from ordinary ones. And ordinary does not have to mean invisible. Sometimes all it needs is enough attention to become a story.

Food will probably appear here often, because cooking is one of the easiest ways for us to turn an ordinary evening into something we can share, test and remember. But this little corner of ours has never been only a kitchen. We travel, photograph, write, sit at our Lemon Newsroom desk, pencil-dream places before we ever reach them, notice strange things on trains and streets, plan celebration days and occasionally lose ridiculous battles with puzzle books. Cooking is one room in the house, not the whole house.

So welcome, October. We are here. Let’s see what we notice.