When I phoned home last month after a week when the mercury hit 35 below (that's Celsius), I told my parents, "Well, at least January's almost over."

And they asked if I thought January was the worst month.

"No," I said: "It's February."

So February's almost over. I think it's probably the worst month, and in celebration I went ahead and made some caramel sauce, and then I put it in some hot chocolate. Besides, you know what they say about March, right? (In like a lion--)

Actually, I made the caramel sauce just to see if I could, and then I put it in hot chocolate because I didn't know what else to do with it. The hot chocolate was a bit too rich and sweet for me; I think my whole family knows that peppermint hot chocolate is my favorite, and hot chocolate with cinnamon in it is a close second place. This didn't quite oust those, but the caramel sauce is good, and I think I'll eat it with apples or maybe ice cream (neither of which is particularly wintry). Or maybe I'll try the hot chocolate thing again, and add cinnamon.

Here are the recipes: caramel sauce from here (and here's a word on caramelizing sugar) and hot chocolate recipe, well, it's fairly straightforward. I looked at a few recipes and then decided just to reduce the sugar and add caramel to my usual.

This is how I make hot chocolate with a microwave (as opposed to one a stove). It is also how containers of cocoa powder everywhere tell you how to make hot chocolate, if you would ever listen: I microwave a mug of milk for 2 minutes, and while that happens I stir together 2 tablespoons of sugar and 4 teaspoons of cocoa powder with a fork. Then I add a little milk, and stir that together until it's blended, and I add that mixture to the microwaved milk when it's done. This is the way they tell you do it on the containers for most cocoas, as far as I can tell, and seems to help dissolve the cocoa powder smoothly, so you don't get gross, powdery chunks.

So, caramel hot chocolate: I reduced the amount of sugar by half, to 1 tablespoon, but I think you could eliminate it entirely. I added the caramel sauce (about three tablespoons--I tried for two, but the caramel flavor didn't come through in the hot chocolate) to the sugar/cocoa/milk mixture, and poured that into the milk as usual.

There you go. Long post about hot chocolate. But February's the worst month, right? And it's a day longer this year. So you--we--deserve it. Or something.

In my memories, the summer of 2008--the first summer I was living and cooking on my own, away from home and without the college safeguard of a dining hall--is marked by my mother repeatedly asking what I was eating. It was a question that came out of some mixture of concern and curiosity: I had declared myself a vegetarian somewhere in there, and although I ostensibly knew how to cook the real question was whether I could cook for myself, day in and day out. Did I have the wherewithal? Grocery shopping only once every two weeks, would I be able to gauge what I needed, and how much? Or would I end up anemic, or otherwise malnourished?

The good news: I made it through that summer, and more after, with little to no significant changes in health. But the question still manifests itself occasionally, though: what are you eating? What am I eating?

Soup, mostly. And other things, but I like food that I can toss in one big pot and store in one big tupperware, so if it's not soup it's something that's true to the spirit: a pot of black beans jumbled with sauteed vegetables and maybe some cheddar cheese, served on top of rice, or shepherd's pie with lentils replacing the ground beef. Right now, though, at this precise moment: I'm eating pho.

I'm mentioning this because making my own pho is something that's new to me, and it's been an inroad into making my own vegetable stock, which I'd never done before. That in and of itself is kind of strange, because most of my soups use water in place of stock, and so I'm effectively making a stock over the course of making a soup. But these broths are, for lack of a better word, thin--the broth doesn't carry the soup.

Pho is traditionally a beef noodle soup, and the first time I tried to make a vegetarian version the lack was pretty apparent: it was just noodles and broth, and while the broth was good it wasn't good enough--it needed a lot of salt, and I ate giant bowls of it because it wasn't particularly filling. It's probably my own fault for not liking tofu particularly, but here we are, second time around.

I used this recipe as a base and expounded from there. Start with a pot of decent size: add onion (1, quartered with skin), shallots (2, halved with skin), garlic (8 cloves, halved), ginger (~1 inch piece, sliced), star anise (2 pods), cinnamon (2 sticks) and carrots (chopped). Dry roast until vegetables begin to char, and then add white mushrooms (~10, coarsely chopped), and celery (2 stalks, coarsely chopped). I used some rice wine vinegar here to help get the brown bits off the bottom, and then add water (10 cups) and soy sauce (3 tablespoons).

Bring that to a boil, then reduce it to a simmer and cook for an hour at least. I tasted the broth along the way until I thought the flavor was strong enough--there may have been a compromise here because I was hungry, but when it was done it had a nice rich color and was fairly flavorful. Then I removed the aromatics, onions, etc. but left some of the mushrooms and carrots in and added vermicelli rice noodles (200g--though you could use less, mine basically took over the pot, which rice noodles tend to do), and some fish sauce. This where it starts to veer a little from traditional pho (if you didn't guess it would when I left some vegetables in the broth): I also added an entire head of chopped bok choy, the juice of one lime, and cilantro and basil (a loose half a cup of each). The last three are normally added to the bowl at the table; this way I can store all my pho in the fridge and reheat without worrying about lime wedges and herb garnishes (though I did add the srichacha by the bowl, because I always go overboard with that stuff at least once).

There you go, then: what I'm eating.

Last summer I made a post about making apple butter; it was my first foray into canning, and I would go on to make and can another batch of apple butter, huckleberry jam, blackberry jam, cranberry sauce and tomato sauce (that was before I was warned about the dangers of botulism when canning tomato sauce; I didn't have a problem, but I probably won't be doing that in the future). I lugged the jars with me cross-country and doled them out as gifts; as my stockpile slowly dwindled away I didn't quite forget about canning, but I didn't feel compelled to can anything--mom made dilly beans and strawberry jam, and I wished we had picked enough wild blueberries for jam, but that was about it.

Then summer started winding down. Then I found a recipe for peach butter, which I made (peaches were on sale for a dollar a pound), which reminded me how good apple butter had been in oatmeal and on bread. And I finished the jar of dilly beans I brought from home and got  the idea of zucchini dill pickles stuck in my head, so it was like if-you-give-a-moose-a-muffin on several levels. The short version, here, is that I've been canning: two quarts of pickles, three pints of apple butter, about the same of peach butter. I'm wondering about adding bread-and-butter pickles and pickled beets to the store as well; it's hard to explain how satisfying it is to have things in jars, to know that I can keep this indefinitely. Those apples that were spilling out of my backpack when I got home from the farmers' market yesterday will now stay with me over winter, no worries. I have strawberry jam from home as well, made from berries mom and I picked in the Berkshire hills, and it tastes like summer. I'm glad I'll be able to keep summer around for the long Saskatchewan winter, which maybe explains why I'm suddenly stockpiling like a squirrel. I think Greg Brown has a song about this. (And The Gourds have a song about pickles.)

So yesterday after work I stopped by a stump on the property and picked up some mushrooms. Picked some mushrooms, actually--Chicken of the Woods, which I ate for dinner. Sauteed to a crisp in a pan with garlic, it did taste a lot like chicken.

As you can see in the picture below, I also cooked an egg. I sliced it up and put it in the bowl with the mushrooms, actually.

(A caveat, for my parents and potential mushroom hunters: Chicken of the Woods is one of the easiest edible mushrooms to identify, and this was my first time collecting them, but someone had confirmed the identity of these particular mushrooms for me already. Also, I washed the mushrooms and threw the attendant beetles out the window, and so far I seem to be fine.)

I've made a playlist each month for the past sixth months. Here's December's, abridged slightly because some of the tracks on it couldn't be uploaded. And because I'm about to go microwave leftovers for dinner, here's a couple winter recipes. Enjoy.
(Ironically, my last eats post was also a music post with an 8tracks playlist--evidently music and food go hand-in-hand in my mind, regardless of season.)

Yesterday at the farm we were encouraged to collect the early apples that had fallen off their apple tree--little bitter green ones, but Ralph (the farmer) told us they were good for pie. I figured apple butter is just like pie without the crust, looked up some recipes, and ended up using this one, though I used my hand blender because I don't have a food mill, replaced about half the sugar with honey, and made a half-batch (I ended up with 2 pints of butter, I'm not sure how much apple I had because I never weighed them). This was my first experiment with canning, and I'd say it's a success (the cans have sealed!).

Volunteering at the CSA and "eating in season" has, for me, meant figuring out how to use what I'm given instead of what I want. Produce needs to be dealt with before it goes bad, and I don't always want to make a pie (not to mention eat one) when I get fruit. Last week I made blackberry-mulberry cobbler, because it's easier than pie; lately I've been making a lot of soup with my vegetables (including radish soup...I don't recommend radish soup) because I don't want to throw them all in a salad and a little goes a long way with soup. I am also figuring out what produce I want enough to buy: lemons, mostly. Is this an unqualified success? No, not really; it doesn't feel like much, either, in terms of lessening my environmental impact. But maybe that's the way it should be, because the fact is this is starting to feel just like living, like part of my life, and isn't that what food should be? Once a week I help harvest the food I eat the rest of the week. There's some rightness to that, I think, regardless of whether it makes much of a difference on the large scale.

But back to canning: canned goods always make me think of Greg Brown and summer, probably because of his song "Canned Goods" and because the primary object of our canning at home was strawberries. What I'm trying to say is: this is the music I'm listening to this summer.
It's eclectic at best, and would include Greg Brown's "Summer Evening" but I couldn't upload it.

New recipe, new recipe. In an effort to use up some white mushrooms that were slowly going bad in my fridge, I made this very basic (and mild) mushroom soup:

Chop onions (2) and garlic (2 cloves). Saute in butter and/or olive oil (3 tablespoons) until onion is translucent and lightly browned. Add chopped white mushrooms (~1 pound) and saute until mushrooms release their juices. Stir in brown basmati rice (~1 cup) and rice wine vinegar (2 tablespoons). Add 4-5 cups of water, or enough to cover the mixture well. Salt generously. Bring to a boil, turn down the heat, and cook until the rice is tender. Remove from heat, and use a hand or regular blender to blend soup to desired texture, add pepper, and enjoy.

I am in love with using a hand blender to make soup.

And, to go with, a poem I read in high school.

Mushrooms

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.

-Sylvia Plath

This post is about two things: food and music. If I thought I was clever, I might say food for the body and food for the soul (instead I'll just make an oblique reference to the possibility that I think I'm clever). Or maybe it's just about three things I like.

The first: soup. I think I've perfected a warm, vegetable-full soup to rival chicken noodle in comfort. I call it beans & barley, partly because that's precisely what's in it and partly in homage to one of my favorite places in Milwaukee. So here's the recipe--or maybe just the formula (all amounts are approximate--use ingredients in whatever ratio you like):
Soak dry beans (3/4 cup) overnight (I use some heirloom cranberry beans I got at the farmers' market in Madison, which is not to imply any sort of foodie snobbiness. But they are really delicious.).
Chop onions (2), garlic (3 cloves), and ginger-root (1 tablespoon) and saute in butter or olive oil until the onions are translucent. Add chopped carrots (3/4 pound) and celery (about as much in volume as there is carrot), the beans, and some pearl barley (1/2 cup) and chopped cilantro (1 tablespoon), and six or seven cups of water. Salt generously. Bring to a boil, and then let simmer until the beans are cooked through and the barley is tender, about an hour. Add some more chopped cilantro, the juice of one lemon, and some freshly ground pepper, and you're home free. It's nice with bread (I recommend any recipe from the King Arthur Flour website).

Second thing: The not-supergroup Monsters of Folk, specifically, and ushering, in the abstract. Last night I ushered for the Monsters of Folk concert in Chicago, which means I got to see a great show (with pretty prime seats) totally free, in exchange for arriving an hour early, dressing in black and white, and showing people to their seats. On Monsters of Folk: their C.D. is pretty swell, but the show was really fun because they played songs from all the members' oeuvres--a highlight was Bright Eyes' "The Bottom of Everything" with each member of Monsters of Folk taking a verse. Also, the lights were really, really good.

Third thing: The Life of the World To Come, the new album from The Mountain Goats. The songs are based on individual Bible verses, but they are neither religious nor not religious. What they are is real nice listening. My favorite is probably Deuteronomy 2:10, which is obscurely titled and about extinct animals.

p.s. Happy Halloween.

Not quite Edward Weston.

Since I've been here, I've made a rule about buying any fruit I don't recognize at the grocery store, that I have to. The red one is a tomarillo (not to be confused with a tomatillo), the green one is a feijoa. I don't really know how to describe what they taste like, but you eat both of them by cutting them open and scooping out the flesh (I had to google that).

Acquainted with the Night I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

-Robert Frost, 1928

I know I did Robert Frost already, but this is one of many Robert Frost poems that I have partially memorized, and the line "I have walked out in rain--and back in rain" kept coming into my head because of the weather here. Yesterday I woke up and the sky was blue without a cloud in sight, and I put some clothes out on the line because our dryer just seems to make things warm and keep them moist. When I got out of my lecture, the sky was uniformly grey and it was beginning to rain. Last night, the wind and rain were beating outside--and this morning, our front step was covered with a thin layer of grainy hale. 

The food I've been eating is obviously not in line with the food you want to eat in the Northern hemisphere right now, but here are some recipes anyway. The first one is my own; the second is adapted (heavily) from the one on the back of the cornmeal box, and muffins instead of bread because we have no sort of workable bread/brownie/cake pan (but three muffin tins). I'm pretty sure the chili is vegan, if you use oil instead of butter for the sauteing and don't put any cheese in it (which would be sad)--but that's probably not relevant, because I don't think I know any vegans. 

Beans & Rice Chili

Soak 1/3 cup dried black (turtle) beans for six hours in cold water; change the water (beans should be covered with 1-2 inches of water) and simmer 1-1 ½ hours, covered, until beans are soft. (You could probably just use a can of black beans with the liquid, but they don't sell canned black beans here.)
Heat butter or oil over medium heat in a saucepan. Add half an onion and 2 cloves garlic, minced; simmer until onion begins to soften and is becoming translucent.
Add three stalks chopped celery and 1 tablespoon chopped cilantro, stir and cook until cilantro is fragrent.
Add ½ cup long-grained brown rice, stir to coat. Add two chopped tomatoes, beans with cooking water, and 1-2 cups of water.
Bring to a boil, and add 2-3 teaspoons cumin, ½ teaspoon cocoa powder, ½ teaspoon cinnamon, 1 tablespoon brown suger, ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper (or to taste), and salt and pepper to taste. (This is really not spicy at all, so you may want to add chili powder and/or jalapenos).
Simmer, covered, 30 minutes or until rice is edible. Add a further tablespoon of chopped cilantro prior to serving.
Serves 2-3; serve with grated cheddar cheese and sour cream, or corn muffins.

Corn Muffins

Combine 2 teaspoon baking powder, 1 cup of fine yellow cornmeal, 1 teaspoon salt and 2 tablespoons sugar. 

Add ¼ cup of oil, a little less than 1/3 cup of heavy cream, 2 eggs and 1 ½ teaspoons lemon juice (mixture should be mealy, neither dry nor runny, a little stiff). Alternatively, substitute buttermilk or sour cream for lemon juice and cream.

Divide between 6 greased muffin cups; bake 15-18 minutes at 200ºC/392ºF.

from Our Bread

And in this frigid hour, when the earth

smells of human dust and is so sad,

I want to knock on every door

and beg forgiveness of I don't know whom, 

and bake bits of fresh bread for him

here, in the oven of my heart...! 

-Cesar Vallejo

I almost forgot it was Wednesday poem day. I'm working on a paper, and it's rainy and cold outside and time is hard to measure. Definitely a soup day, which is good because lately I've been making a lot of soup; today for lunch I finished off a chickpea and chard soup that has been my staple this week. Here's the recipe, which I adapted from something I found on the internet: 

Chickpea & Chard Soup

-Heat a large pot on the stove over medium heat, with enough olive oil to cover the bottom. Chop one medium onion, put in pot. Keep an eye on the onion, stirring periodically, chop three cloves garlic, add these to the onion, continue to stir, and add one generous tablespoon chopped ginger-root. 

-When the onion is good and soft and the whole thing is fragrant, add three-quarters of a cup of white rice, stir to coat. Add a can of chickpeas and five or six cups water, make sure to scrape any brown bits off the bottom, add some garam masala and cumin (maybe two teaspoons of the former and a half-teaspoon of the latter, maybe more), salt generously, heat to boil, then cover and simmer for fifteen minutes. 

-While the soup simmers, de-stem the chard (I don't know how much, as much as you have, unless you have a lot) and chop the stems and leaves separately. 

-After fifteen minutes, add more water and spices as needed, and cook fifteen minutes more--the rice and stems should be tender. Add the chard leaves, cook five minutes, salt and pepper to taste, and eat. Don't burn your tongue. 

Things I like right now. Because everyone needs to know. (And you might like them, too.) In the tradition of McSweeney's Recommends.

Cape Canaveral by Conor Oberst: I'm not really sure if it's cool to like Conor Oberst anymore, but I've been listening to this song almost continuously for the last couple days. And I'm okay with that.

Lewis Hyde: is probably one of the more genius people writing today. His book "The Gift" packs a lot of ideas into one well-written package, and every essay of his I've read is similarly astounding. For a free sample, Created Commons is pretty excellent.

Mac'n'cheese pancakes: sound terrible, but I think that's a survival mechanism. Because they're secretly delicious: little pasta tubies encased in pancake batter and crispity cheddar cheese. Add maple syrup, and you have the perfect storm of comfort foods. Especially if you're from Vermont (on this point, extra credit for drinking Vermont Liberty Tea with your 'cakes).

Snow-blowing: if you have to snow-blow, that means it snowed, which is one point in its favor. Also, it's noisy, uses fossil fuels, and is a lot easier than shoveling. And the engine is like a boat's, except you can plug it into the wall to start it instead of pulling a cord.

Music videos and movie trailers: I'm probably either way behind the curve or demonstrating how ADD my generation is by saying this (depending on how old you are), but I like these. A lot. They're fun-size movies (assuming you like fun-size candy bars--though maybe if you don't, you won't like these either). For music videos, try Lily Allen or Feist.

Finishing the NYT crossword puzzle: even if it's just Monday or Tuesday, seeing all the little boxes filled in is like sweet, sweet nectar for the mind.

Mad River Rocket sleds: only the most excellent sleds ever. Strap one to your back, walk into the woods, and find the sledding hill you always dreamed of. Don't be afraid of trees. Don't be afraid to wipe out. Fly.

The words welter, snaggletoothed, and gyre: look 'em up.

Bird feeders: birds like them. 'nough said.