Food in the Dead of Winter

A simple meal brings such joy. Especially when hard work from earlier seasons makes for easy nights in the kitchen now.

Sunday, I roasted an acorn squash from my brother Jesse's garden and a pumpkin from Uncle Paul's Produce Market down on Hawthorne... On the stove top, I added coconut cream and red spice paste (that Spice Night last fall is still paying dividends!), simmered and blended with the roast squash...added a little water, and soup = done.

A recent lasagna held more edible treasures from earlier efforts...blanched, frozen spinach put up a while back, spicy tomato sauce from the end of summer, failproof ground beef from our 1/8 cow purchased last March...a quick trip for cheese and a raid of pasta noodles in the back of the pantry, and dinner = served. (And lunch the next day. And the next.) Repetition suits me when it's a quality repeat.

I'm amazed that the seed catalogs are already piling up again. This past string of seasons brought so much bounty, and here we are, on the cusp of another round. I noticed bulbs peeking through the soil. And the Edgeworthia is beginning its showstopping act in the hellstrip out front of the house. Promise is in the air...and, for a little longer, payoff is in the kitchen.

~Bethany