Here’s what we woke up to Sunday morning — a little over two feet of new, wet, heavy snow — the dog door was drifted over, as was the front walkway.I shoveled, and luckily my neighbor with the sno-blower did my front sidewalk because this was like Midwestern snow — heavy, wet, soggy — did I mention heavy?
Usually we have fall, then winter. It’s one of the things I loved when I first moved up here — a return to four actual seasons — but this year we went from summer, to a 20 degree frost, to almost 3 feet of snow. Yikes. Dead tomato and pepper plants, hoping for the best with the brussels sprouts and cabbages and those carrots still in the ground.
And the cold weather has us all thinking of food. I walked into the liquor store (winter weather demands bourbon) and it smelled fabulous. “Oh my god,” I said. “What’s for lunch?” “Ham and beans,” replied the liquor store guy, grinning. He’d closed and renovated the family grocery store (which I missed this weekend when I just needed a couple of things and didn’t want to go across town) but he made sure to put a kitchen in. It smelled fabulous.

And then my friend Debbie called tonight with a great suggestion — the Sunday night single folks supper club — a couple of weeks a month over the winter — a rotating group of hosts — Sunday nights get a little lonely — all of us random singles gathered around a table, eating good food, gathering — which is what it’s really all about.

I’m having another one of those weeks at work where there is too much to do and not nearly enough time alotted to do it –

So here’s a couple of links –

Bob del Grosso contemplates the chicken-and-the-egg nature of cooking on a farm.

And Shuna gives me hope that even though I’m currently in the weeds, there might be a way out …  

So, in trying to find my mother an apartment that she can afford, and that isn’t a shoebox, and that is in a building that’s not just full of old people on oxygen, we wound up going to look at some buildings in Milwaukee. I hadn’t been to Milwaukee since my 6th grade field trip to the Stroh’s Brewery, and I remembered it as a grey colorless place, an industrial city full of tanneries and breweries and factories.

Well, Milwaukee has certainly come up in the world. We looked at a number of very cool industrial buildings that had been renovated into big loft-style apartments. The one my mom liked best was right downtown, on the river walk (which I was delighted to see was full of people actually walking on a lovely fall day) and about six blocks from the Public Market.

The Public Market was delightful — it’s not huge — not like Ferry Plaza or Pikes Place, but nonetheless, there, in the middle of what used to be a midwestern food desert — was a building full of fresh produce with a beautiful butcher counter and a bunch of different lunch options. I had a terrific BLT made with Neuske’s bacon (although the Hawaiian plate lunch was also intriguing). And there was a gorgeous fish counter with oysters too. My little mom was very cute — I was teasing her that she was like someone who’d been let out of jail — she loved being in the thick of things and with all those people around. I loved seeing all the renovation and how the downtown had come back to life in such a vibrant way. It was a terrific surprise …

LivingSmall will be travelling all week. I need to go back to where I grew up and give my mom a hand. Looking forward to seeing some old high school friends and my 97 year old granny. Back next weekend.

All summer I was getting up about 5:30 because that’s when the sun came up and I was really enjoying it. I had time to get a lot done before having to sign on at work — write a blog post, walk the dog, water the garden. It was lovely. And then the earth tilted back the other way and I found it harder and harder to get up in the morning.

I thought about buying one of those fancy light alarm clocks that are supposed to simulate the sun rising — you set the timer and they gradually light up the room. But they were expensive. I just couldn’t see paying almost a hundred bucks for an ugly dome-shaped light thingy. So I went to the hardware store and bought a timer for eight bucks. I put the lamp on the far side of the bed on the timer.

It’s brilliant. The alarm goes off at 5:30 and I turn it off. Five minutes later (not clever on my part, just hard to set the timer accurately) the light goes on. Then the dogs and I hang out for another ten minutes or so and I’m up and making tea by quarter to six. At least for me, not having the option of putting off turning on the light has really helped. Click. On it goes. We’ll see how well it works in the dead of winter when it’s really dark, and cold, and the last thing anyone wants to do is get out of bed, but for now, it’s really working well.

It happens every year at Labor Day — the weather gets threatening and we all swathe our tomatoes in some sort of jerry-rigged cold frame/greenhouse kind of thing. One reason I’ve always sort of liked the trellis-and-string method is because it also provides a handy structure to hold the plastic up.

With the new beds up against the fence like that, I just stapled the plastic to the fence, then draped it over the top of the bamboo and it’s held down with rocks. Lots of rocks. Big rocks because Livingston is windy. I also filled a bunch of wall-o-waters and stuck them in there in between the plants to try to help out with thermal mass. They’re helping a little — keeping it about 3 degrees warmer overnight inside the beds than outside, and well, that three degrees can go a long way. Where the plastic is really performing though is in the daytime — yesterday we had a little thin sunshine after the fog burned off, and when it was 50 degrees outside, it was 94 inside the plastic. Tomatoes (and the peppers that are in there) like heat, so I’m hoping for a few more sunny days (today is supposed to go up to 80 — I might have to open the poor things up and give them some air) to ripen what looks like a great crop of tomatoes.

I’m pretty happy with the varieties I grew this year — I’ll definitely do the Sasha’s Altai again — they not only ripened early but were delicious. Prairie Fire ripened early, but was only okay — it was a nondescript small round tomato. I still haven’t found a cherry I’m entirely happy with — the Galina’s are good but don’t ripen that early, and the Black Cherry I grew this year is also nice but again, didn’t ripen significantly earlier than anything else. I don’t like the supersweet modern hybrids (just like I don’t like the supersweet sweet corn people are growing these days — I want corn that tastes like corn, not like candy), so I’ll probably shop around for a couple more cherries next year. The Milano Plum is a fabulous tomato — bigger and meatier than the Principe Borghese and bears heavily. The Jaunne Flamme was a husge success — they did really well and taste fabulous. I’m currently fermenting a little jar of seed to use next year.  And the Marglobes, what can I say — Marglobes are like that guy you have a crush on who you can’t quite get over. They seem so promising, and I every year I think see — this time it’s going to be great — but they never quite perform like I want them to — they grow gorgeous big green tomatoes that never seem to quite ripen in time, and then I wind up eating them ripened in the basement, wrapped in newspaper, and they taste sour. I might have to finally give up on them. I suppose we’ll see in March, when I’m down in the basement, poking seeds into flats of soil.

Now the Farmer’s Almanac is saying it’s going to be a very cold winter, and I have to say, if my mania for getting organized and stocking up is any indication, they’re right. It wasn’t a great year for jams and preserves — I didn’t get any cucumbers so I’ll have to make do with what’s left of last year’s pickles, but I did put up some gingered plum jam, some apricots in vanilla-cardamom syrup, peach chutney and tomato salsa. I’m hoping for another batch of tomatoes because I like that salsa — it’s clean and bright and it canned really well.

I also did a “big” grocery shopping this weekend, stocked up on pasta and canned goods and got my supply of beans all organized. I also ordered a few varieties that I’ve run out of, flageolet, cannelini, marrow and some Santa Marias from Steve at Rancho Gordo. While it might seem odd to order a staple like beans online, and while I considered the 69 cent bag of beans in the grocery store, I like Steve, and his beans are so much better — really — fresh, delicious, gorgeous, that I went online and placed a little order. They’ll last me all winter. I managed to resist going crazy in the pasta aisle this time — whenever I get nervous about the state of the world, impending financial meltdown, scary election, the Farmer’s Almanac saying it’s going to be really really cold, I find myself in the 2-for-1 Barilla aisle buying pasta. My brother used to tease me when he’d come home and find the pantry full of blue boxes, “feeling anxious, are we?” he’d ask. I have so much pasta in there that even in my current state of existential wobbliness, I resisted the siren song of dried pasta. It’s cheap. It keeps forever. If you really get stuck, say like in graduate school when sometimes it was a week or so at the end of the month when you were living off your change jar, well, you can always survive on pasta: pasta with garlic and oil, pasta with a can of tomatoes and an onion, pasta with butter and cheese.

And because we all live with our windows open all summer, the big cleaning of the year is not in the spring, but in the fall. It’s windy here, and dusty, so when the time comes to close the windows there is often a thin layer of dirt on everything — baseboards, windowsills, the corners where the vaccuum doesn’t quite reach. It was one of those weekends. I cleaned. I re-organized my closet. I slow-cooked. I organized the pantry. If by some strange chance all roads into Livingston are shut down this winter, I can survive out of my pantry. I’m ready.