Stop your mind with dirty snow.
Jefferson Airplane, Ice Cream Phoenix, track 9 on Crown of Creation.
Early January, what should be the brutal time of winter here in Wisconsin, is a little weird this year. Yes, it’s been brutally cold, but only for the last few days: on Monday & Tuesday it was in the 40s and rainy and foggy. The temperature dropped Tuesday night, and since then it’s been highs in the single digits, and windchill in negative double digits. Meaning that Wednesday, I used not having any milk as an excuse to bus to Whole Foods to get some, and most important, walk home facing east, to get out of the wind. But there’s only grey, frozen, dirty snow, and oddly it feels like we haven’t really had winter yet. We’ve had a couple of snow storms, most significantly the one the night of the cookie party, but it’s also been in the 40s and rainy and smelling like spring outside. Under the snow, the grass is still green, and since the snow keeps melting, all that green grass keeps peeping out, even Friday on Bascom Hill at -5°.
I was using these dried out winter berries for my blog banner:
I tried to get a photo of the brighter ones I’m using now:
on Wednesday walking to work, but it was so cold my phone died before I could get the shot. Speaking of the phone, I was using those sad berries there, too, but I got something brighter for phone wallpaper too:
Most of the sweets are gone from the house. There’re 4 mini lemon meringue tarts and some fruitcake in the upstairs fridge and a few decorated ginger cookies and pressed shortbreads and Moravian ginger thins in the basement fridge, that I think I will use for a cookie crumb crust for some type of pie. Chocolate cream? Key Lime? or Cheesecake? Today I took the last few chocolate dipped apricots and dried cranberry clusters and peppermint bark to work (I kept the marzipan dates for me).
I think we’re all in suspended animation, waiting for what fresh hell ensues after inauguration day. Or cock a doodle doom ©, as P.S. Mueller says.
I’ve been trying to do some creative weeknight cooking – and then not ruin it all, like last night, by finishing off the white chocolate mint Hershey kisses that I bought for half price when I really wanted more of the Christmas mint M&Ms. We had pita bread pizza last night. I had three out-of-season tomatoes, two on-the-vine ones that Mark bought, and one Roma that I bought, and I diced them and tossed them with garlic oil and a little bit of this incredible balsamic vinegar that Jenny sent me. Then I brushed the pitas with more garlic oil and topped them with the tomatoes and mozzarella. And a little pepperoni on one.
pita bread pizzas
Monday I can’t remember. I’ll keep trying. Oh, yea – we had butternut squash chili, after I got home from prepping for the Goodman food pantry breakfast. The chili’s another leftover, from the freezer, with cornbread I made on New Year’s Day. I’ve been adapting this Melissa Clark recipe for brown butter maple cornbread, munging it together with one from her cookbook, In the kitchen with a good appetite. I think it still has too much butter (I used a whole stick for a slightly smaller batch because my skillet is smaller); it seemed sort of dense and congealed out of the fridge, although of course the solution, rather than reducing the butter, could be to eat it warm or room temp – then it wouldn’t be congealed.
Tuesday I roasted the last sweet potato from my Thanksgiving CSA box, and made (basically) Molly Wizenburg’s cabbage cooked in cream – I didn’t get the recipe out and now that I look at it I see I omitted the lemon juice. And I heated up the southern style collards we’d had with the Hoppin’ John on New Year’s Day.
Tonight I made the sweet potato chunks into a pie, with caramelized onions and sun dried tomato.
Winter Quiche