COLD!

I'll be running around outside today while the temperature is still in the relatively civilized low 30s. (I trust my Canadian and Brit friends can translate.) There is shopping that needs to be done, both for ongoing house projects and for food, and now's the time to do it.

This area has always gotten only a moderate amount of snow. We can go several winters without receiving any at all, though our winters can be quite wet. We are just far enough south that precipitation that falls during the cold months is more likely to be rain, which becomes snow the further north the system travels. No measurable snow has fallen yet this year, and there is only a minimal chance that some may accompany the so-called Alberta Clipper as it descends upon us over the next few days. (They usually bring only air, very clear, and very cold!)

We get so little snow that when some does arrive, the city goes nuts. The mere sight of a couple of flakes can set the entire emergency road clearance system in motion, people crowd the stores for toilet paper, milk and booze (not necessarily in that order), and workers use their sick days so they can stay off the roads. The fact that it's usually much ado about nothing doesn't change our behavior. Mass hysteria sets in at the mention of a snowflake. It's one of the things that defines Washingtonians. It makes us a national laughing-stock, but God knows there are worse things about D.C. that we could be associated with. I'll take the snow.

When we do get a real snowstorm, a holiday spirit takes over. The last really major snow event I remember was in the winter of 1995-96, which happened to coincide with a historic showdown between Newt Gingrich's Republican House of Representatives and the Clinton White House. First we heard the weather report. We were ground zero for two major snowstorms headed for us back-to-back, so this loyal Fed knew he'd have at least one day off. But then came word of the Congress-White House budget standoff. A big game of chicken came to its logical conclusion, they refused to deal with each other, and the entire federal government shut down for a week. This was unheard of, certainly the first and only time it happened in my experience. It meant that only "essential workers" were allowed in their offices. While it was a bit deflating to be considered non-essential, (heck, it's just the Peace Corps!), I was grateful not to have to go out in the mess, at least for a couple of days. Once roads were cleared and the weather improved but the offices were still closed, though, things got a little antsy. All in all, between the weather and the government's shenanigans, I didn't enter my office for two weeks. That's a record I don't think will be broken any time soon.

The street I grew up on, Meadow Lane, gently curved down a long, steep hill, at the bottom of which sat our house. Our little suburban street was among the last to be plowed or salted, so that meant on a string of good, cold days our hill was the place to be for sledding. As was the case with my bicycle, my sled was an ancient hand-me-down, big and bulky, with all the finish worn off by the squirming bodies of my older relatives when they were children. It was a little creaky, but it worked. My father kept the runners smooth, and the steering bar still did its job. Since the sled was so big, I could give rides to other kids, and that was fun. I'd sit up and steer with my feet while somebody else, who may not have had a sled at all, sat in front of me. Depending on who was with me, I'd either make it a smooth ride all the way down or I'd run into a snow bank at full speed, forcing a crash into a cold, wet pillow. We'd do that all morning, then head back to our houses for a hot bowl of soup or some cocoa, and then start all over again.

If I lived on a hill now, I'd actually wish for snow. I'd do it all again in a heartbeat.

A Born Foodie

The story in my family is that before I was six months old, I cried all the time. My mother took me to the doctor, who had a simple verdict: "He's hungry." So to shut me up my mother cut the ends off of rubber nipples and gave me oatmeal from the bottle. It worked, and food has made me happy ever since.

Of course, we've now fetishized food to an extent that was unimaginable when I was growing up. I'm as guilty as the next pampered boomer, but I come by the trait honestly. My mother was a good cook for her time and took great pride in what she put on the table. Both my parents having grown up in Washington in families that took their vacations at the beaches either on the Chesapeake Bay or the brackish Bay-fed rivers of Virginia's Northern Neck, and my mother having been raised Roman Catholic to boot, we had our share of fish. Dishes that were commonplace on our table are now either rare or downright unheard of. We regularly had smoked finnan haddie (smoked haddock steaks poached in milk--it made me gag) and oyster stew (indescribably delicious). A lunchtime standard was sardines on crackers, which my parents washed down with beer, and there were innumerable all-day crab feasts and fish fries.

Aside from fish, my mother loved eggplant. She was a lonely minority of one in the family until those breaded french-friend eggplant sticks came out, and then nobody could get enough of them. (I don't think they're made anymore.) I loved her stewed tomatoes, sweet, with bread broken up into them, and her succotash. Her salads, made with simple iceberg lettuce and the standard chopped raw vegetables, were delicious, especially with Kraft French Dressing, which I called "red stuff." (I have never figured out what was "French" about it.) I especially liked the lettuce when it was slightly wilted--a taste I later discovered would not be found unusual at all by those self-same French, who serve braised lettuce as a standard green. (OK, the French would only bowl with a head of iceberg lettuce. But that's all we had.)

One day for lunch my mother bought a can of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee ravioli and gave me some. I was hooked for life, I devoured the things at first bite. (I still do when I want to indulge in a guilty pleasure.) I discovered another lunchtime treat one Saturday afternoon when my parents made a "grownup" sandwich full of strong flavors: smoked Lebanon baloney, sharp cheddar cheese, mustard, dill pickles, onions and lettuce on pumpernickel bread. They gave me a bite and for years that's all I ever wanted for lunch. Can you even buy Lebanon baloney any more? It's a Pennsylvania product (from Lebanon, PA), made with beef and garlic.

I was just about the only kid in the school cafeteria who willingly ate what was offered. Lunch was 25¢; for me that was a real bargain because I usually ate what my classmates didn't want as well as my own food. I especially remember the Willston Elementary School version of pizza: a slice of white bread covered with American cheese. The cheese was topped with a dollop of tomato sauce in the middle, and some dried Italian herb, either oregano or basil, was sprinkled over it. The whole thing was run under the broiler until the cheese was soft, and there you had it: pizza! (Since there weren't any pizza joints yet, we didn't know any different.) Yet another lunch favorite was peanunt butter and jelly sandwiches served wth tomato soup. I've no idea why, but one day I tried dipping the sandwich in the soup. Again, hooked imediately. I anticipated the sweet-salty-sour combination I'd later find in Asian food by decades. If I ever indulge myself these days with pb&j and soup, I still dip.

My mother and my own appetite encouraged adventure and I'm still game for just about anything at least once. The late explosion of food as a cultural phenomenon has been great fun for me as well as for our dinner guests. Steve has his garage and his workshop; I have my kitchen. I've cooked most of our dinners for the 30 years we've been together and enjoyed the exploration required to avoid monotony. Of necessity, I've broadened Steve's culinary horizons. When we met, spaghetti was ethnic food for him. Macaroni and cheese is his favorite thing, so I took that and made a one-dish dinner out of it and it's now a staple, which he enjoys. He's also learned to love Mexican food, at least the version of it available in local restaurants. He's not a fish eater (though he likes shellfish), so my early exposure to our local fish hasn't opened any culinary doors for me, and a gag-reflex aversion to cilantro keeps him away from Thai and Vietnamese food. I can indulge that occasional yen from one of the many carryouts within a stone's throw of our house, but I haven't bothered learning to cook it. That's small potatoes, though, to keep the food trope going. We're pretty well fed as it is.

Still the same

It was another weekend of working on the house as we furiously try to get things done to start marketing the place next month. As hard as Steve is working and as industrious as he is, February may be pushing it a bit. He finished painting the upstairs hall and the stairwell this weekend. Sounds simple, but it's time consuming to put up painter's tape, then paint the ceilings, walls, and trim. Unbelievably, all that got done this weekend. There's still cleanup work to do, which will keep me busy this week, and he wants to put a new coat of polyurethane on the hardwood stairs to make them look better. It needs to be done, but that adds time before he can start on the basement. The basement is a relatively small paint job, but it involves taking down wall paper, a time-consuming step. Then will come the kitchen. Mostly trim to paint there, but there will also be substantial drywall work. The kitchen will be the last indoor job. Then will come the front porch, which needs a major re-do. I'm thinking maybe March, if I think of it at all. I've come to the realization that the less I think about the meaning of "days of transiton," the more sanity I can maintain.

We're headed for another big cold snap here, but at least there's no snow in the picture as there is for our brethren further north. I'm wearing several layers of clothes to stay warm, even with the thermostat turned up to 70. I don't remember the house I grew up in being as cold inside as this one is. Maybe because the old family house (actually younger than the one I'm living in now) had radiant heat instead of forced air? A fall ritual, one of the fun things my father and I did together, was bleeding the radiators. There was a special key that turned a valve on each radiator. Opening the valve would release air pockets that had formed in the pipes over the summer. You let the air out until dirty black water appeared, then closed the valve, knowing that the radiator was full of only water. Each year, the first time you turned on the heat, the radiator pipes would protest with clanks as they expanded from the unaccustomed heat of the water inside. The noise stayed around just long enough to reassure us that the whole thing was working. I loved that sound. It guaranteed a cozy winter.

FOOD FRIDAY!

TAGLIATELLE BOLOGNESE

Better late than never. I've been caught up this morning in taking care of my eyes. I had my first eye exam in 1 1/2 years. Got a clean bill of ocular health and a couple of new prescriptions, which I am having filled at Sears, using their current "2 for $99" promotion. If I were only buying two pairs of glasses, that would be quite a deal, but I added a third pair, prescription sunglasses, which always break the bank. I'm paying twice as much for them, so I'm getting out of this for a total of about $300. I don't know why eyeglasses are so frigging expensive, but they're a necessity.

The doctor I went to is new to me and I had one of those rare, very positive experiences you sometimes get in a doctor's office. I'd almost make the trip back here to Arlington every year just to keep him as my doctor. He was an older gentleman, with an Arabic name spelled in the French manner, so I'd guess he is originally from Lebanon. I noticed as soon as I walked into the waiting room that everyone was smiling. All the patients and the two ladies handling the paperwork behind the glass panel seemed happy to be there; the latter two were quite welcoming and attentive. I felt like a real person throughout the entire experience, the doctor smilingly invited me to speak and voice my concerns and was thorough in his explanations. Even his background music was remarkable: a mix of soft French café music with accordion, piano and bass, and Brazilian. I complimented him on his choices and he told me he mixes his own CDs for the office, staying up into the wee hours working on it. I liked the music so much I'll probably buy some of it and share it here. Finding a doctor you like gives truth to the old idea of finding a needle in a haystack.

Today's recipe is another Tyler Florence special. I made it last weekend. It's your basic meat and tomato sauce, but the milk, the puréed aromatics and long cooking, combine to render this basic sauce almost as soft as baby food, very succulent, especially on those fat tagliatelle noodles. Tagliatelle are called for because this is the "official dish of Bologna," according to Tyler. The mayor's office of the city even has a sculpture of a nest of dried tagliatelle over the front door. But spaghetti would do just fine.

2 ounces dried porcini mushrooms, wiped of grit
1/4 pound pancetta or slab bacon, finely chopped
1 medium onion, finely chopped
2 celery stalks, finely chopped
2 carrots, finely chopped
5 garlic cloves, minced
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for drizzling
2 bay leaves
2 sprigs rosemary
1 1/2 pound ground pork
1 1/2 pound ground beef
2 cups milk
1 (28-ounce) can crushed tomatoes
2 cups dry red wine
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 pound dry tagiatelle pasta
Freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, for serving
1 handful fresh basil leaves

Reconstitute the mushrooms in boiling water to cover for 20 minutes until tender, drain and coarsely chop. Retain soaking liquid.

Puree the mushrooms, pancetta, onion, celery stalks, carrots, garlic, together in a blender.

In a heavy-bottomed pot add olive oil, bay leaves and herbs and cook gently until fragrant, then add vegetable puree and continue to cook for a further 5 to 10 minutes.

Raise the heat a bit and add the ground pork and beef; brown until the meat is no longer pink, breaking up the clumps with a wooden spoon. Add the milk and simmer until the liquid is evaporated, about 10 minutes. Carefully pour in the tomatoes, the mushroom soaking liquid and the wine. Bring the sauce to a boil, then lower the heat. Slowly simmer, uncovered, for 1 1/2 to 2 hours, stirring now and then, until the sauce is very thick. Taste for salt and pepper.

When you are ready to serve, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil, add the pasta and cook for 8 to 10 minutes or until done to taste. Drain the pasta well and toss with the Bolognese sauce.

Serve with grated Parmigiano.

Learning

I'm having an adventure this morning. Between answering the phone and emails, and uploading music for today's posts, I'm playing with Winamp, the free, all-the-bells-and-whistles media storage facility that outstrips Itunes in so many ways, sound quality not the least. I'm in the midst of learning how to sync my Ipod with Winamp, and had to stop because I wanted to put something here. (If any of you have experience with Ipod-Winamp interface, I'd love to hear about it.) Must keep the writing gears lubricated!

I've also had some fun the last couple of days making a new e-friend, somebody who chanced upon a song that struck a chord and got in touch to thank me. He's thinking of starting a blog, and that gave me a chance to tell him how I got into it nearly a year ago via Kat, and about the unexpected bonus of finding a new category of friends--people who know me only by my written word and the music I choose to play--and I know them the same way. In some says we reveal more of ourselves here, both consciously and otherwise, than we do in our flesh-and-blood existences. You see what's in my mind, but not how I move and react in the physical world; others see only that and none of what you see. All this makes for an existence more rounded and richer than was once available to the run-of-the-mill, non-published writer, and it's a net plus, in my book. Far from alienating people from each other, I've found the computer to be a boon, a means to enrichment previous generations could never have dreamed of. Aren't we lucky?

The sun is finally coming out today, but of course with it comes cold winds. We're expecting another dip in the temperature over the next few days, but even this early in the year the days are lengthening visibly and the promise of more clement weather is there. I'll be going out in it in a minute or two to collect provisions for the evening meal....

Progress report and miscellany

As promised, here's the record of the work done over the holidays. Since I never took any "before" pics, you can have no real idea of the utter transformation that's taken place, but I can try to describe it: first, the beds in both rooms have been moved as far away from the doorways (the position of the camera in both photos) as possible, to emphasize depth. Before, the beds were right next to the doorways. In the room on the left, my desk and its jumble of computer and office mess were where the bed stands now, under that window. The walls were a busy pink and white floral print above the wainscoting (oh, don't ask!) and a very warm terra cotta, close to the color of the bed ruffle, below. It was a claustrophobic jumble. (The desk and computer are now where the bed was, in an alcove behind the camera. They're invisible if you're just passing the room, and take up no usable space. We should have thought this arrangement years ago. True, I have no window to gaze out as I sit here now, but I do have a nice African batik on the wall in front of me.)

The room on the right had a less-objectionable wallpaper of vertical stripes in shades of green above the wainscoting and a dark, forest green below. These new colors are much more soothing, and the position of the bed makes the room look huge. We put smaller rugs in both rooms, again, to emphasize openness, as well as the rich floors. All in all, we're pretty proud of this new look. Gee, maybe it'll add $10,000 to the price of the house! (Right!)

The temperature outside is currently 34 and it's raining. We're promised a high of 35 and continued rain for the next 24 hours. My walk was curtailed this morning when I started getting soaked. I am fighting a tendency to sprout greens and turn into a parsnip. I was completely inert yesterday, a blank slate. This is not good--boredom begets boredom. It's times like these when the thought of going back to work is the strongest. But all I have to do is think that notion through completely in order for good sense to return. I'd enjoy the company, there's no doubt. But having to go out in this mess just to fill a chair? I don't think so. (Still, I'll do it if I have to, or if that proverbial offer I can't refuse knocks on my door.)

I've been given an assignment that'll keep me busy and give me a sense of accomplishment: take some medium-grade steel wool to the stairs to clean them and rough up the finish a bit so a new coat of polyurethane can go down. I'll put Diane Rehm on the radio and start that after I finish reading the paper.

Oh. The paper. Finishing reading it won't take long, I'm sorry to say. The poor Washington Post has lately become a shadow of its former self. The reporting staff has been reduced by hundreds, there are fewer pages to read, and what there is to read is supplied more and more by wire services. Home-reported Congressional and overseas coverage are still first-rate, but the paper is obviously hurting. It's sad to see this former bastion of aggressive investigative reporting so reduced. The spunk is still there, but it's been diminished.

Thanks for all your faithful visits while I was off in the vacuum yesterday.

A fresh start

No recipe today--my schedule is knocked out of whack by the holiday and the fact that I haven't been doing much adventurous cooking lately. We'll be back in the groove next week, I promise.

And so we begin a new year. Wouldn't it be great to have completely a clean slate, and not have to deal with the detritus of the previous months? Alas, life doesn't recognize these man-made thresholds. We were dealt a hand that we are still playing, be it December or January. But as one of you remarked to me over the holiday, there is always hope. There's a French song that says, "tant qu'il y a de la vie, il y a de l'éspoir"--as long as there's life there's hope. I'll drink to that as the best alternative by far.

We had a very nice New Year's Eve with three friends. The idea was for them to get here as early as they could so we could play a game before sitting down to dinner at around 8 pm. The game turned out to be "History of the World," a war game, all strategy and planning. The others got the hang of it right away, but I was too busy tending the fire and dealing with kitchen issues to strategize gaining territory from the mountain redoubt in China I had been dealt. (And I'm really bad at strategy games. Bridge and chess both leave me scratching my head, and I found myself very much in that mode as the rules to "History of the World" were being explained to me. Being the host is a wonderful excuse for slipping away diplomatically and avoid looking like an idiot.)

Dinner was delicious and easy, pork and saurkraut, a dish tailor-made for the occasion, and a salad I threw together from the assorted marinated vegetables at the grocery store olive bar: olives (of course), whole garlic cloves, artichoke hearts, mushrooms, thin zucchini slices, peppers, sun-dried tomatoes. A show-stopping raspberry tart for dessert was supplied by our friend André.

We then repaired to the TV to watch Dick Clark ring the in the year. Despite speech problems from his stroke, I swear he must have a painting stashed away in his attic that is aging while his physical self remains youthful, à la Dorian Gray. He looks so good it's almost spooky.....

Painting continued apace yesterday. Steve has finished the bedrooms. Now come the upstairs hall and stairway. Little by little.....