The good news is, we didn’t lose our power. The bad news is, the snow is extremely heavy and thus hard to move. And there’s a lot of it at the little house in the big woods. Thanks goodness for Little Green, our electric snow-thrower. For years, Clif and I shoveled by hand the driveway and the backyard pathways, but no more. If Little Green ever stops working, we will buy a replacement. Pronto. Even with Little Green’s help, there is plenty to shovel, and I will be working at it off and on during the day. Nature’s gym! However, I must admit I’m more than a little “winter weary.”

Winter weary or not, Happy Valentine’s Day to all. I hope it is a sweet one with plenty of chocolate.

From NPR’s the salt: If you hate skim or low-fat milk, then here comes some good news. According to the salt, “two recent studies…conclude the consumption of whole fat dairy is linked to reduced body fat.”

From Mother Earth News: ‘Tis still the season for soup, and here’s a bean soup recipe that sounds warm and hearty.

From the Portland Press Herald: Tired of soup? If you’re in Portland, then head to the Daily Greens, a salad bar at the Public Market House.

From Eating Well: For Valentine’s Day or any other day—a recipe for Dark Chocolate Meringue Drops.

From the New York Times: In his column, Mark Bittman suggests that all restaurant servers should be page a real, non-tip adjusted wage.

From the Guardian: From a girl named Jack—how to save money on groceries.

A fine, cold day. The windows are frosted, and the snow in our yard still glitters. Today, there will be a walk with the dog in the woods, and I’ll bundle up with hat, head band, neck warmer, warm coat, leggings, and warm gloves. I’ll also bring my camera. The other day, I took a picture of bittersweet on snow, and it came out so well that I’m going to print it and see whether it will be a good photo for a card. During the course of the year, I send and give lots of cards made with photos I have taken. I have estimated that I give nearly 100 photo-cards in any given year. Birthdays and anniversaries. Sympathy cards. Thank-you cards. Notes just to say hi. Bundles of cards given as gifts. On Monday, I brought “flowers”— five note cards with pictures of flowers—to my friend Esther, who hasn’t been feeling well. So the moral of this story is that when I go out, I almost always bring my camera with me. You never know when you’re going to get a good picture.

From Sustainable America: Ten things to do with stale bread.

From Bill Moyers & Company: Amy B. Dean interviews Michael Pollan, who maintains our food is dishonestly priced.

From Eating Well: A recipe for clementine and five-spice chicken. Just reading the recipe made me hungry.

From the Good Shepherd Food-Bank’s blog: Heat or eat?

From Maine Today: Soup recipes from the blog Spoon & Shutter.

From Maine Magazine: Little BIGS, a bakery to try out in South Portland. My, oh my, they even sell donuts!

For the first time in a long while, I will not be writing “cold, cold, cold.” Today in central Maine, the weather is very fine for the end of January, and soon the dog and I will be going for a woods walk. I love the the woods in winter, the calm and the quiet. At least for me. For the creatures of the woods, I expect life is anything but calm. There is the constant search for food and for some, the constant avoidance of becoming food. That, of course, is the way of things. In the woods, the dog sniffs at all the enticing smells, and I take in the beauty, the dark trees against the snow. At home, at the end, there is always tea and fruit and a little something crunchy to go with it. Winter pleasures.

From the Portland Press Herald: A food pantry on SMCC to help its struggling students.

From BuzzFeed: ‘Tis the season for soup, and here’s a “definitive” ranking.

From NPR: Obese kindergarteners have a tendency to become obese adults.

From Eating Well: Need a break from soup? Here’s an almond-&-lemon-crusted fish recipe.

From the Guardian: Think you are hip because you eat quinoa? Well, hold onto your coolness because a new grain is coming to town, and that grain is teff.

The weather report in central Maine remains constant: Cold, cold, and cold. I take the dog out for two short walks rather then one long walk, and I still can’t wait to get home. I’m so bundled up that you can just call me “Laurie of the North.” I should have Clif take a picture of me and post it on this blog. I wear a hat, headband, neck-warmer, the heaviest coat I have, leggings, fleece pants, and big warm gloves. Even so, as I walk, I feel as though my face is frozen into a grimace. It must look like I’m smiling because when cars go by, drivers smile and wave at me. Or maybe they just think I’m nuts. Stay warm this weekend!

From Mother Jones: Michael Pollan’s take on the paleo diet.

From Eating Well: Mushrooms are not only delectable but if exposed to light, they also are rich in Vitamin D.

From NPR’s the salt: How food hubs are helping new farmers.

From Oxfam: The best and worst places to eat in the world. Who is number one? Not the United States but rather the Netherlands.

From the New York Times: Cooking for the cold. Melissa Clark’s lentil soup with lemon might just be on our menu next week.

From the Portland Press Herald: Anne Mahle’s recipes for no-knead bread using a sourdough starter.

From Salon: Journalist Sarah Gray lives on food stamps for a week. It’s a gimmick, of course, but Gray is a good writer, and there are lots of details about our food system in her piece.

This will be a quiet Martin Luther King weekend at home, where Clif and I will spend time working on our various projects, which include fixing the gate to our backyard, refurbishing the bike we found at the transfer station, getting photos ready for an upcoming exhibit at Railroad Square Cinema, and that perennial chore—decluttering. Naturally, the weather is supposed to be calm. Doesn’t it just figure that on a weekend when we are staying close to home, the roads will be clear and dry? Tonight, we will be going to a potluck at the home of Margy and Steve Knight. I will be bringing homemade crackers and a cranberry and hot-pepper jelly chutney on cream cheese. 

From NPR: Sometimes, it’s all right to play with your food.

From Eating Well: Six low-calorie soup recipes for these cold winter days.

From the Portland Press Herald: Let them eat pie—sample 50 pies in 3 hours. The event is Pies on Parade on January 26 in Rockland, Maine, and it’s a fundraiser for Area Interfaith Outreach Food Pantry.

From the Guardian: “Toast is trendy.” That’s right. Toast. It seems that toast bars are the new rage, and some of them charge $4 per slice.  Now, I am a toast lover from way back, but at those prices, I guess I’ll continue to make my own bread and my own toast.

From the New York Times and Mark Bittman: A video featuring The Scramble: A Simple Greek Lunch. I could have a plateful right now.

As the title of this post suggests, we had a weird, weird weekend with the weather. On Friday night and into Saturday, there was another one of those events that we Mainers love so well—an ice storm. Fortunately, this one didn’t last very long, and it didn’t knock out the power. Nevertheless, when we got up on Saturday, there was a thin coat of ice outside on everything—the steps, the driveway, and our road.

To console ourselves, Clif and I scarfed down a few of Mrs. Dunster’s chocolate sugared donut holes as we debated the merits of staying home or going to Waterville for the first film in the Cinema Exploration film series at Railroad Square. (Waterville is about 25 miles away.) Now, anyone with a lick of common sense would have resigned herself to staying home for yet another weekend and working on one of the many projects that are pending. But Clif and I were just plain tired of having to cancel our plans because of bad weather. Thus the debate.

“Well,” Clif said. “It’s supposed to warm up by noon.”

“And the roads won’t be so slippery then,” I finished. When two people have lived together for nearly forty years, they tend to finish each other’s sentences.

“Let’s try it,” Clif said. And try it we did, skittering down the steps, slipping across the driveway, and skidding up the Narrows Pond Road, where a cop’s car was parked at the top, presumably to discourage anyone from sliding down the road right into the Narrows Pond.

“This is terrible,” Clif said.

“It is,” I replied. “But let’s see how the main roads are.”

The main roads were not great but passable, salted and sanded enough so that a trip to Waterville seemed possible and not suicidal. Therefore on we went, making it to Waterville in pretty good time. And here’s the amazing thing—we weren’t the only nutcases that had braved the slippery roads to come to the film series. There were 15 of us for the morning show and another 15 for the noon show. I expect a lot of people felt the way we did—they were tired of being cooped up inside because of bad weather.

After the film—What is Cinema?—we had lunch with our friends Alice and Joel at the Mexican Restaurant adjoining Railroad Square. We all agreed that What is Cinema? was a good movie and that the series was off to a great start. We had a long, leisurely lunch, and by gum, by the time we had finished, it had indeed warmed up. While it was raining rather hard, the roads were more than passable, free of ice and not particularly slippery.

We made it home without incident, where we were greeted by the dog and the cats. We turned up the heat, made tea, and settled on the couch with our respective books. The orange cat was on my lap, the dog beside me on the couch, and Little Miss, the black and white cat, was at the other end. (We have a long couch.) The rain beat on the roof, and we were glad to be home. But we were also glad that we had gone to the film series.

No matter how much you love home—and I love mine very much—it is good to go out now and then. Especially this winter, when we have had to stay inside so much because of bad weather.

Cold, cold, cold, and more bad weather predicted for the weekend. So what’s new? Our weekend is chock-full of plans—going to the movies, pizza with friends, a trip to Shannon’s in South Portland so that we can measure for shelves in her kitchen. What will have to be canceled? Only time will tell. In the meantime, we dream of spring…

From the Portland Press Herald: Another great piece by Gillian Graham about hunger in Maine and two volunteers, Dick and Carol Ogden, who volunteer at the food pantry in Alfred, Maine. They also organize the monthly Good Shepherd Food Bank Senior Food Mobile event, where 12,000 pounds of food are given in 90 minutes. “If more people could see something like this, maybe hearts would soften a bit,” he [Dick] says.

From the New York Times: Paul Krugman’s take on the war on poverty. Believe it or not, there is some good news.

From the World Resources Institute: The Global Food Challenge Explained in 18 Graphs. There is a lot of information in this piece, but it’s presented very clearly,  The global food challenge is a huge one, made worse by the pressures of climate change.

From Huffington Post: “With the money they made in 2013 alone, the world’s richest people could have paid to feed the world’s hungry school kids 163 times over.”  So why don’t they? A little greed problem? A little empathy problem?

And, on a lighter note…

From Yahoo Food: Soy-Maple Broiled Tofu. I’ll definitely be trying this one at home.

Sherlock’s response to this cold, blustery day.

On the other hand, Liam and I went out for a two-mile walk today. Sometimes, I think cats are smarter than dogs and people.

Because I’ve been on vacation for the past two weeks and haven’t posted much, I thought I would also post these pictures of our yard, our road, and the Narrows. In between storms and weather so frigid my nostrils stuck together when I took a deep breath, we did have a day or so of glorious, bright winter weather, when it wasn’t too cold to enjoy being outside. The dog and I went for a walk on one of those days, and here are some pictures I took.

My-oh-my, the weather has been frightful these past two weeks, which have encompassed Christmas, New Years, and vacation for Clif and me. There have been snow storms; an ice storm that knocked out our power for three days, including Christmas Day; and weather so cold that our dog, who loves snow, only stayed out in the backyard long enough to do his business. And now a driving rain, most unwelcome in January, with the threat of more frigid weather to follow. Something tells me that Clif and I will not be leaving home without our grippers on our shoes.

Despite the bad weather, our holidays were merry, even though there was a fair amount of improvising with food. Instead of our usual cheddar cheese soup on Christmas Eve, we had a soup I had frozen—ginger-carrot soup—along with chickpea patties—also frozen and thawed thanks to the power outtage. Scratch the stuffed shells for Christmas Day. Instead, it was appetizers—bread, crackers, veggies, various cheeses, spreads, and cold cuts. Not my idea of a great Christmas meal, but Shannon, who loves appetizer meals, was delighted.

Somehow, though, everything worked out. Because of the ice-storm brouhaha, my brother and his family couldn’t come over on Christmas Day. They could, however, come over on Friday, and since our power was back on, I could make stuffed shells for them along with a homemade chocolate ice-cream pie.

And the cheddar cheese soup? A New Year’s Eve meal with Shannon, Mike, Dee, and our friends Joel and Alice. So we had the holiday food we love, only pushed later during the week.

I must admit that by the time the holidays were over, I was just plain tuckered out. But Clif and I still had several more vacation days, and in between cleaning the roof and the driveway, we ate more than we should have, we read, we rested, and we watched movies, both at home and at the cinema. (There have been some very good movies this year.)

Now vacation is over, and it’s time to get back on track—with work, with exercise, with eating, and with the many projects that seem to fill our lives. Our current project involves making shelves for Shannon and Mike’s kitchen. Clif, handy guy that he is, will do most of the work. I’ll try not to get in the way too much. And there is also cleaning and decluttering, a never-ending task for me as I’m sure it is for most people.

Onward and upward into 2014. I’m hoping it is a year of family, friends, good food, biking, and creativity.