Changing Seasons – September 2025

It’s officially autumn, friends! The other day I felt a cool breeze come through the window and I was reminded of how much I longed and dreamed for this weather. The days of sweating in the three minutes it took to hang my laundry in the veranda are over. Fall is here, all around us, and soon the leaves will start to change and fall. Time passes, seasons change and dreams do come true!

What I made and ate

This September was characterized by my concerted effort to make healthy meals at home. I lasted exactly three weeks of making all my meals, cutting out all added sugar and refined carbs. And then I went completely off the rails in week four and dove face first into carbs, sugar and fried delicacies, for reasons to be explored.

Early on, brimming with motivaton, I tried a miso-glaze on my baked salmon… and learned miso burns quickly and the effort to marinate fish wasn’t really worth it to me. I asked AI to make me a healthy brownie recipe with basically eggs, chia seeds and cacao powder, and ended up with this crepe-like cocoa omelette because apparently I didn’t mix the eggs enough. I learned my lesson and did fully blend the cottage cheese and eggs for the “viral” cottage cheese flatbread, which I turned into a cheese pizza. (It was fine, and it scratched the pizza itch.) Is cottage cheese easy to find in Korea, you ask? No, no it is not. But more on that later.

Why yes, that is a beef-stuffed bell pepper you see in the top left corner. It was pretty good, but again, not sure if it was worth the extra effort to blanch the pepper first before stuffing with ground beef and veg mixture and baking with cheese. Can you tell I bought a box of tomatoes around this time? I added this tomato-onion fry-up as a colorful pairing with cheesy eggs, and then used the rest to meal prep lots of tomato soup, which was delicious and froze well too.

Here I experimented with turning my breakfast yogurt parfaits into a sort of acai bowl, but with frozen blueberries and banana. It was fun to make, delicious to eat, and the addition of chia seeds, cashews, peanut butter balanced out all the fruit sugar with some protein and fat. I also improvised a zucchini loaf with Korean zucchini, but did not add any sugar (would not recommend). It was only made edible with a topping of cottage cheese.

As cottage cheese is not a thing here in Korea (yet), I made it myself! Twice! It was very easy: simmer milk til right before boiling, remove from heat and add a few spoons of vinegar and let curdle, strain over cheesecloth and add some salt. It doesn’t taste like the store-bought kind, but it was still good enough for my protein needs, and I felt like a veritable pioneer woman as I made. my. own. cheese!

Bits of cheese (pepper jack or HOMEMADE cottage) jazzed up my otherwise pretty bland meals. I definitely think my taste buds adjusted to minimal seasoning and learned to discern the actual flavor of the produce I eating.

In the past I’ve always been super disappointed with my attempts at making salad at home, but I feel I had a breakthrough this month. I realized I don’t really love leafy salads, but I do like hearty ones with lots of fixins. Honestly, I should have known. Even when I was a kid, I’d always pile my plate from the salad bar with all the toppings and minimal salad leaves. So I leaned into my preference and added lots of roasted and stir-fried vegetables, protein, and chopped the salad leaves up small so I could have a bit of everything in every bite. At this point I was also very satisfied with just olive oil, apple cider vinegar and salt as my dressing. Over this whole period, those three ingredients plus whole grain mustard were basically my only condiments (other than that miso glaze dalliance).

Then last week, I just went ham with eating out and sugar. Looking back, one of the biggest reasons I turned to outside food was exhaustion from cooking and washing up. By week four, even the thought of doing dishes just filled me with dread. I also remembered I can’t do moderation when it comes to sweets (cough sour bites cough), so best not to let myself have any at all.

In October, I’m going to be a little more lenient about refined carbs just to make this new diet experiment more sustainable. I’ll also intentionally let myself eat out more, but will stick to poke bowls or wraps, versus pizza, burgers or fries. The good news is after eating basically whatever I wanted for a week, I want to return to my simple, homemade meals again. Even as the sink stares back at me now, full dirty dishes, I think it’ll be worth it.

What I saw

Nothing as interesting as the Sugar gliders from last month, but I did spot a few interesting creatures in the park. The chickens were back again. (They’re not wild, a guy brings them around sometimes.)

I found the spot where all the carp hang out in this section of the stream. It was a little disconcerting actually, seeing them all jumbled together. I’m guessing someone used to feed them there, because there was a “no feeding the fish” sign right where I spotted them. Also learned that what I’ve been calling the “white cranes” are actually Little egrets, which is a species of small heron. I’m often biking along the water so no time for pictures, but cooler weather means more walks are possible, and hopefully more nature photography too.

The trees are still green, but now there are a few dead leaves on the ground. I love the cosmos flower, and these yellow ones are a pretty variety.

I’ve only been to this waterfall during the day, so this evening visit revealed they have colored lights at night. I’ll have to go back when it’s properly dark.

What I read

September was a good month for reading after what seemed like a stretch of unmemorable books. I had a free trial to Kindle Unlimited expiring this month which I hadn’t used at all. I recalled that Catherine Walsh’s books are often recommended in holiday romance lists, so I picked up Snowed In a few days before the trial ended. Quite liked it, and then proceeded to read all five of her books available on KU. I enjoyed them all fairly equally, except the romance in The Matchmaker felt a bit too insta-love and not as believable. As I told a friend, I haven’t really enjoyed romance or rom coms lately, but her books restored my faith and love for the genre.

I also finally read (listened to) Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. This one is a favorite of many, and I guess I had been saving it, in a way, until I wanted a “safe bet” good read. Well, the audio popped up in the skip-the-line on Libby and so I dove right in. Her prose and observations on the human condition were just lovely. I definitely would like to revisit the book, and read it this time so I can mark the passages I like.

Finally, a surprise five star read for me was Wild Reverence by Rebecca Ross. It’s set in the same world as the Letters of Enchantment duology of Divine Rivals and Ruthless Vows. I liked Divine Rivals well enough, I am, after all, a big softie for a hidden identity epistolary story, but I remember wishing that the magic system was better explained in the book. Wild Reverence is set hundreds (thousands?) of years before DR, and it is all about the gods in that world and their magic. The magic is explained more systematically and I really just enjoyed the story. I liked the constraints and conflicts between the worlds of gods and mortals, and between the female goddess and male mortal main characters. The romance and character development was done really well, and there were twists that kept the plot moving and pages turning. I stayed up way too late finishing the book, and I still found myself immediately wanting to reread it. It’s technically a stand alone, but I think there’s extra satisfaction in knowing the significance of certain characters and twists in the context of the duology.

Looking back, there was a lot to celebrate in September: home cooking, walks outside, and good books. Hoping for more of the same in October. Wishing you all a cozy and comfy start to fall!

This post was written as part of the Changing Seasons challenge. You can visit Ju-Lyn’s post to see how other creatives around the world spent their month.