Snow Day Soup, A Recipe
lard, a dollop
1 lb of ground pork, pulled from the barn freezer, hastily thawed
1 onion, less the creeping brown spot, chopped
The Last Two Carrots, peeled, cut quick-cooking small
garlic, 3 (was likely actually 4) cloves, thinly sliced
3 potatoes, vaguely soft, peel left intact, cut similarly to The Last Two Carrots
frozen unprocessed tomatoes from this summer's garden, briefly considered but abandoned
1 dusty can of crushed tomatoes pulled from the back corner of the pantry, opened carefully
1 quart of last week's chicken stock
1 quart of this week's chicken stock, ladled from a bubbling pot on the stove
frozen greens, impulsively added
enough salt
enough pepper
First- disabuse one's self of the plan to head into town for the shopping; the barreling snow will help.
Thaw pork a careful distance from the wood stove; eventually run under cool water when things become urgent.
Retrieve frame of picked over roasted chicken from the refrigerator, vegetable scraps from the freezer. Marry the two in a stockpot. Scrape in chicken jelly from bottom of pie plate that previously held roasted chicken while reciting the basic layers of winter wear to feral children in various states of undress. Yes, a hat, you say! And, yes, water! Yes, salt! Yes, pepper! to the stock. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, cover, and-
flee! the confines of your lovely but wanting-of-snowt interiors. Shovel. Swing. Snowball. Ski. Skiss sthe sgoats. Repeat.
Stumble back inside hours later on numb limbs to find only the stock has done the good work of being ready for the lunch hour.
Quickly melt dollop of lard in favorite soup pot. Add pork, season generously, stir regularly, cook thoroughly, promise baby a thousand times, a thousand ways- lunch is coming.
While pork cooks- chop, everything. Also slip baby slices of carrots that will be later found chewed up and spit throughout the house.
As vegetables find themselves appropriately cut (and once pork is fully cooked), add them to pot. Onions, garlic, carrots, potatoes, amen. Season lightly with salt and pepper with each new addition. Cook for a minute or two or more or less.
Add tomatoes. Swish chicken broth in tomato can to claim all that there is. Add chicken broth, this week and last week's. Ask - should there be something green? Impulsively toss in frozen greens before you've given answer.
Bring soup to a boil and reduce to a lively simmer. Cook for around 45 minutes, which should be just long enough to get the potatoes and carrots tender but not short enough to feed the baby before her nap. Feed her yogurt and regret not having arrived there sooner, at least before the carrots.
Enjoy!
Failed starts and doing it anyways- day one of the new year.
I could not remember the url for this website earlier today and when I did finally track it down, I found myself a stranger in what once was built to be a home for my writing and our business. Did I really write that? And with so much exclamation? It's hard to imagine. But- I decided to do what I hoped to do anyway, to write. I did find the website after all.
Elsewhere-
the camera was dead, the charger was long gone, and a replacement was ordered- but it won't arrive for another two weeks, didn't of course arrive before we left for our New Year's Day hike. So, it is here that our heroine retrieved the phone previously hidden away in pursuit of nobler devices, it is here that the contemptible little gizmo was returned to the palm of its captive-
but simply for the camera, simply In The Meantime, simply just that because there's little good to be found in it otherwise.
Perhaps that's a wild generalization.
But also- perhaps daily life gets caught in a current of outside forces with the access a tiny little handheld, pocket-friendly computer provides. I want to be both my current and my paddle, rather than swept away down the path of an unchosen life, only at-the-mercy and never steering. It was with that in mind that I tucked my phone away in the first place. Read a heap of poetry, drank water and coffee and more water, ate eggs and sweet potatoes, did the dishes and hiked until I could see the ocean- the kids and their tenderness, their piercing intensity, woven through all of it. And then- I sat by the fire and tried to remember what it was like to have something to say and write it out coherently. I wrote and I wrote- til the sun went down and the computer burned my eyes and Gus came in with wet Christmas mittens telling his father, I forgot how fun not watching TV can be.
Last week for a practical skills homeschool lesson we pulled a worn and loved flannel from my bottom draw and turned it into a smock for the baby. Woven through explanations for bias and grain line and thread tension was a reminder of how powerful it can be to take something into your hands and work it into a new and useful existence. Recently I mended a mitten's sizable hole in less than a minute for a boyskier who was running late to the mountain. You might have thought I laid an egg, I clucked so at my own cleverness when the thing could be stretched over a wriggling hand without unraveling further. But isn't it actually really thrilling? To take a problem in your hands and resolve it simply and effectively, with practicality and whatever else might be on hand? I think so at least.
As mending has found itself in a moment that sometimes feel more inclined to spotlight an aesthetic rather than a conservation of resources, I'm pulled to dive deeper into my own habits- both in terms of mending and making. Isn't it easy to consume, consume, consume, even in the simplest of habits? Bellow, a list of where to start while mulling further.
A woman's markedly boring accounting of items left unfinished (or un-begun) over the last however long:
-A baby's first birthday quilt in need of quilting; binding, too. (I love this project; worry over messing it up has me stalled.)
-A fussy shawl (it is so fussy)(likely frustratingly small, too)(that I haven't finished it makes sense, I think).
-A knitted cotton bib seeking edging, button.
-A cabled sweater, unfinished for years, short on yarn, will likely unravel, am mostly at peace with that outcome. Mostly.
-An as yet not begun quilt for Gus who will be 10 in the late summer. Have amassed vibrant pile of thrifted linen to work with.
-An oversized coat, cut from a secondhand quilt.
-A cropped cardigan made from wild wool originally intended for Gus, now inherited by me (the wool, not the cropped sweater)
-A pile of long abandoned quilt squares in various stages of completion, for our bed
-A length of rust red fabric, hopefully enough for a dress
