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Not So SAD

It’s March, friends! Not only that, the first Tuesday of the month (my blogging day) went sailing by when I wasn’t looking…whoops. Somehow, somewhen, we’re already into the third month of the year and almost up to the time change (except for those lucky folks who live in places like Arizona…ahem). I’m generally surprised by how fast Time is going these days. It doesn’t help that Toronto has been experiencing our warmest winter on record, which also bodes poorly for the planet. But…I kind of hate our “normal” winters, all grey and slush and cutting, damp winds. Without those last two, the grey is much easier to bear. I tend to struggle with SAD at this time of year, between January and March. This year…I’ve been waiting for it, and for the most part, it just hasn’t turned up. Why? Well, the weather could be a major contributing factor, of course. Or the Vitamin D that I’ve been mostly remembering to take for a change. It could be the ongoing culinary experiments — I’ve been making a point of trying new recipes and ingredients. Most recently, I’ve done ratatouille, stir-fry with broccolini, butternut squash & white bean chili, and tonight, Spanish lima bean stew (I’m on a bean kick). It could even be the (shhh) writing — I spent February doing writing prompts, a few hundred words a day, and rereading one of my favourite writing craft books, Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. (Bird by Bird by Anne…

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Cozy and Cheeseless

It’s that time of year again…the dead of winter when not much else is happening, so I do a cooking post! Like my other hobbies, my cooking interests keep evolving. Six months ago, I would have said my spouse and I were cheesetarians. We ate pasta regularly, and salads regularly, with plenty of cheese featured in both. Now? Again, it’s the dead of winter, so I don’t feel much like big leafy salads, and for some reason pasta has fallen off the rotation in favour of quinoa. We haven’t even been making omelets. So…next to no cheese. (Except cheesecake. That’s different.) Instead, we’ve been rocking stews and soups, the ultimate in coziness. We bought each other a Dutch oven for Christmas — those are the ceramic pots with an iron core that can go both on the stovetop and in the oven. Which means it’s perfect for browning your meat or sauteing your aromatics (new word for me!) and then throwing everything else into the same pot. Having a new kitchen toy, of course, has revitalized our kitchen game — at least temporarily. Disclaimer I: Those things are heavy (or maybe I’m just weak)! Ours is a 5 qt. pot, and I can only lift it when it’s mostly empty. Disclaimer II: We are not superhuman! We cook something big and ambitious once a week, twice at most. The rest of the time, we order in, or else we eat leftovers or premade food or something else that’s dead easy.…

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The Mighty Vegetable

Like many people, my spouse and I have been rotating through various pandemic hobbies… Mind you, we’ve both been working full-time and dealing with pandemic exhaustion and a certain natural tendency towards inertia, so our hobby attempts have been pretty minimal. (Wordle is good for that.) No new side hustles or DIY remodelling here…though we did get this done: Now? It’s on to vegetables. See, cooking is something we do together, to decompress after work (or at lunchtime, while we’re lucky enough to both be working from home), to get out of our heads and away from our screens/keyboards, to spend time together, to do something hands-on and also delicious. And I’ve become passionate about eating local. A few months after the pandemic started, we signed up for a small grocery delivery service that partners with local farmers and other producers. (I first wrote about them here.) Between that and our vegetable garden, we’ve been doing a lot of seasonal eating. This winter we’ve eaten so many roasted carrots and parsnips and squash that, uh, one of us finally rebelled. To be honest, the other one (me) was getting bored of our go-to vegetables, too. So I’ve started adding one new-to-us locally grown vegetable to every biweekly order. (Full disclosure: In the alternate weeks, we get delivery from one of the big chains and buy some non-local produce.) It started with rutabaga/swede [the big yellow and purple root vegetable, not the smaller white and purple root vegetable–apparently there’s some overlap…

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