Here’s what I woke up to this morning — yup, that’s snow. About four inches — and it’s supposed to keep coming down all weekend. Yesterday I woke up to a hard frost — I went to check the tomatoes and they were dead. Dead dead dead dead dead.

So I pulled them up and threw their soggy carcasses into the compost. I salvaged enough late ones to make this big pot of frostbitten-tomato sauce.  That’s the last of the tomatoes, a couple of carrots, and a sautee’d onion — later I added a can of Muir Glen organic tomato paste and ran it all through the food mill. I don’t always get too worked up about the skins and the seeds, but I’ve found with the late-season ones that if you leave them in the sauce gets really bitter. I left the sauce until this morning because I decided to do a Bolognese and the meat needed to thaw out. I thawed a package of ground antelope, two stray Italian sausages, and a pack of elk Italian sausage I found in the back of the freezer. This morning I sauteed up some more carrots and onions, browned off the meat, and added a quart of my good local Jersey milk. I let that all cook down for a while, then added it into the big red pot of tomato sauce with about a quarter of a bottle of white wine. It’s cooking down on the back burner now — later I’ll can it in the terrifying pressure canner.

The markets might be crashing still, but thanks to my anxiety habit of hoarding dry pasta — with six or seven quarts of nice Bolognese on the shelf, I should be fine all winter.