Hazy days of winter

Red is off to California for a week, and I have been left at home to cook for myself. In many ways this is a acceptable, even a positive, thing. I don't cook as much as I might, primarily because she's so much better a cook than I am, but when I'm cooking for myself, that's not an excuse. On the other hand, it's winter. While Red is in the land of Alice Waters and year-round produce, I am in the land of scraggly carrots and canned tomatoes. Last week, I made a mushroom stew with some chestnuts, which I think is about the pinacle of winter food. Soups, stews, casseroles, gratins, and roasted vegetables are all wonderful things, but they already make up the bulk of my repetoire in the kitchen. In fact, outside a pretty decent ginger eggplant stirfry and a few pasta dishes, they make up the entirety of my fallback dishes, those I could make when I haven't had time to plan anything else and I'm too lazy to find a recipe. This is an awful time of the year to try to experiment with produce, but what the hey. If Odessa Piper can hew to those Alice Waters principles at L'Etoile in Wisconsin, I'm sure I can manage a nice winter vegetable risotto. And we'll bury the mistakes.

But today I spent twelve hours at the office. Tonight I'm having a nice, cheap, greasy, lazy pizza; ambition can begin tomorrow.

Posted by snarkout at January 10, 2003 10:17 PM (etcetera)

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