Sunset, January 22, 2012

Today is grey and windy and all the snow has gone. So I'll cheer myself up with this photo from Sunday evening. I know it looks like I've fiddled with the colours, but I haven't. This was just how it looked.

Winter warmer

It's very lovely outside, but very cold with it. You need a nourishing, central-heating sort of meal on days like this. This cabbage soup is popular in our house and it's easy (and cheap!) to make.

I feel that cabbage soup has a bit of an image problem. There's the cabbage soup diet, for one thing, which I've never really looked at (until right then) but which somehow seems very depressing and January-ish. Then there's the nothing-but-cabbage soup diet of the Bucket family in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I've mentioned before (in the context of the 2009 cabbage glut). Cabbage soup just sounds boring and desperate.

I don't have a cabbage glut this year - it was a bad year generally for the cabbage family in our garden - so this cabbage was one I had to pay for. It's huge though, and this recipe only used a quarter of it. Cabbage is cheap to buy and lasts a long time in the fridge, which makes it a useful vegetable to have around.

The soup is very simple: onions, garlic, carrots, cabbage, lentils (for a bit of protein), some good stock (I used ham stock) and tomato sauce (in this case it was some of the sauce I froze down in the summer, but a can of crushed tomatoes would work just as well). You just fry the diced onion, garlic and carrots in butter or oil, then stir in the shredded cabbage, add the stock, lentils and tomatoes and then simmer for 30 minutes until the cabbage is tender. Let it sit off the heat for 10-15 minutes to get to a comfortable temperature for eating.

I was making bread anyway this morning, so I used some of the dough to make rolls to eat with the soup.

Ice trees

I nearly always have my camera with me when I go walking, but today I didn't take it, thinking that there wouldn't be anything new to see as the weather had been still and clear. But tiny, delicate ice formations had grown up overnight, so I had to go back to the house and find my camera. I should know by now just to always take it with me...

Proper winter

Now, that's more like it. Lots of wind and steady snow all through yesterday have left us with a much more normal January landscape.

The blown snow makes interesting drifts and coats objects in unpredictable ways. The grass at the back of this next photo stands clear, while the bent blades in front of them have been caked with snow. To my eyes, there's something arachnid about them.

 Snow-spiders.

Undecided

The weather still hasn't quite managed to get into full winter mode. This morning we woke to freezing rain and the cancellation of the school buses. You could probably hear the children's cries of disappointment over missing a day of school from where you are. Then the rain turned to snow, then back to rain again. It's very strange weather, as though a control switch somewhere hasn't quite clicked over to 'Winter' from 'Fall'. It reminds me of last summer, where it took a long time to get properly hot.

Getting through winter

At this time of year, my mother's great joy was in watching the slow lengthening of the days. She was always happier once the longest night was past and she could report to the rest of us the hours of sunset and sunrise in the newspaper as they slowly notched respectively forwards and backwards to mark the arrival of spring.

I do that too, to some extent, although the newspaper has been replaced by various websites which give the same information. The other indicator I keep an eye on is the average daily high and low temperatures. Right now we're at the coldest point of the year. For our nearest weather station (the forces base at Trenton), the lowest temperatures are -3°C/26°F as the average daily high and -13°C/7°F as the average low. The period of time when this is the case starts on December 27th and ends on January 15th, when those figures both rise by one degree centigrade. We then stay at the -2/-12 point until February 3rd when the averages go up again.

During February the changes happen more frequently, so that by the end of that month we're at an average high of 4°C/39°F and an average low of -6°C/21°F. It's probably very sad of me, but I've even marked these changes in temperature on my calendar as a way of helping to negotiate the month.

Do you have a similar coping mechanism for the cold, dark stretches of the year?

Please don't comment to tell me that you live in an area where there aren't any cold, dark months because that really won't help me at all. ;-)

Sparkly

That's the lake near our house. Still unfrozen in early January. That's not something we've seen so far since we've been living here. It usually freezes over at around the time of the winter solstice and then melts again at the spring equinox. I thought it would freeze last night, as the temperature dropped to -15°C/5°F, but here it is, still sparkling the sun back at us.

The stream has frozen again, making its usual interesting shapes. I like the rabid-jaw effect of the ice in this shot:

Crème brûlée weather

We had about an inch of snow on Thursday night, followed last night by a short period of freezing rain. Walking outside this morning is like stepping through the crispy layer of a crème brûlée into the soft snow underneath. Very satisfying crunchy noises ensue.

Winter has its compensations.

I'm now congratulating myself for my laziness in not shovelling the front steps yesterday: it's a lot easier to shovel snow with a thin layer of ice than it is to remove a thin layer of ice from a hard surface.

Advancing ice

Yesterday there were hints of ice at the edge of the stream, nothing more:

After a very cold, clear, night, the ice is now covering the stream completely:

Any blades of grass sticking out above the surface have been caked in their own covering of hoar frost. I never get tired of this effect. Makes me think of aerial photographs of pine forests...

Boxing Day bonus

The mild winter (still no snow!) means that some of the greenhouse vegetables which would normally have been killed off by frost are still producing food. After the rich main meal of Christmas Day, it was time for something a little lighter for our Boxing Day lunch. I was able to harvest salad onions, some lettuce and dill, along with some young spinach leaves (these were about the only thing which would normally still be alive at this time of year).

The dill and onions were chopped up and combined with a block of cream cheese and some lemon juice, salt and pepper to make a quick and easy pasta sauce. Once the cooked pasta was coated with the sauce, I stirred in some leftover smoked salmon, cut into strips. The spinach was sliced into thin strips and mixed with the lettuce leaves and some chopped cucumber (not from the greenhouse - but it was Canadian!) to make a green salad to go with the pasta.

Then we completely ruined all that lightness and freshness by having Christmas Pudding for dessert. I didn't serve it yesterday, having finally learned from long experience that no-one is capable of eating it on Christmas Day.

Christmas dinner harvest

There's a hard frost forecast for tonight and tomorrow, so just now I seized the window of opportunity of a mildish spell (a bracing 0°C) to dig up some winter vegetables for our Christmas dinner. I got a big haul of sunchokes and a good handful of Cavolo nero from the barnyard and some carrots, sage and parsley and the last of the beets from the greenhouse.

The Cavolo nero (black Tuscan kale) has been the surprise hit of the winter garden. It has a sweetish flavour and has been holding up well outside to the frosts we've had so far. It's good steamed or used in a stir-fry. Most of the other brassica crops did very badly in this year's cold and then very dry late spring, but this kale managed to survive all of that. I'm impressed by its resilience and will definitely grow it again next year.

Non-white Christmas?

The Weather Network produced a story based on statistics released by Environment Canada on the likelihood of a white Christmas in various cities across the country. We don't have any snow on the ground at the moment and there isn't much in the forecast, as the end of the Fall season continues to be milder than usual. I went out for a bike ride yesterday, which isn't something I'd normally expect to be doing in mid-December.
The tree-foraging detail was out in force on Saturday. We repeated last year's self-sufficiency trick of cutting down one of our red cedars for our Christmas tree. Much more fun than picking up one wrapped in netting from a shop!

It seems that this might be the first Christmas for us in Canada where there isn't snow on the ground. Which doesn't bother me in the slightest, but has got me thinking about why it's such a big deal. When did people first start making a fuss about whether it's going to be a white Christmas or not? Is it all because of the song, 'White Christmas'? Was that the trigger? Can we blame Irving Berlin for this obsession? Or is this desire for snow on the ground older than that?

UPDATE: The BBC Magazine has a piece about Charles Dickens this week, which firmly places the blame on him:

Specifically, the idea of a white Christmas - which was and still remains a relatively uncommon occurrence in much of the UK - appears in A Christmas Carol as if it happened each and every year.

In his biography of Dickens, Peter Ackroyd wrote: "In view of the fact that Dickens can be said to have almost singlehandedly created the modern idea of Christmas, it is interesting to note that in fact during the first eight years of his life there was a white Christmas every year; so sometimes reality does actually exist before the idealised image."

I had a quick look at the Project Gutenberg version of the book and the word snow appears 12 times. Generally he's not romanticising it, though: he describes it quite realistically and is mainly using it as a contrast to the warmth and comfort of indoors and the high spirits of the people.

By this time it was getting dark, and snowing pretty heavily; and as Scrooge and the Spirit went along the streets, the brightness of the roaring fires in kitchens, parlours, and all sorts of rooms, was wonderful. Here, the flickering of the blaze showed preparations for a cosy dinner, with hot plates baking through and through before the fire, and deep red curtains, ready to be drawn to shut out cold and darkness. There all the children of the house were running out into the snow to meet their married sisters, brothers, cousins, uncles, aunts, and be the first to greet them.

and:

The house fronts looked black enough, and the windows blacker, contrasting with the smooth white sheet of snow upon the roofs, and with the dirtier snow upon the ground; which last deposit had been ploughed up in deep furrows by the heavy wheels of carts and waggons; furrows that crossed and re-crossed each other hundreds of times where the great streets branched off; and made intricate channels, hard to trace in the thick yellow mud and icy water. The sky was gloomy, and the shortest streets were choked up with a dingy mist, half thawed, half frozen, whose heavier particles descended in a shower of sooty atoms, as if all the chimneys in Great Britain had, by one consent, caught fire, and were blazing away to their dear hearts’ content. There was nothing very cheerful in the climate or the town, and yet was there an air of cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and brightest summer sun might have endeavoured to diffuse in vain.

 The phrase 'white Christmas' doesn't appear at all in the book. I had a look at the Google Ngram viewer, which searches across the text of books published between 1800 and 2000. It's case-sensitive, so I searched for both 'White Christmas' and 'white Christmas' and these were the results (click on the image for a closer look):

The red line is 'White Christmas', the blue one 'white Christmas'. A Christmas Carol was published in 1843 and, sure enough, the phrase starts appearing at about that time, increasing in popularity until the big bump after 1941, when Irving Berlin's song was first performed. It's not a very scientific analysis, I know, but perhaps the original concept does owe more to Dickens than to Berlin.

Resurrections

The French tarragon which looked so woebegone a few weeks ago has come back to life after some intensive care in the kitchen:

And the remaining tomatoes are slowly ripening:

The greenhouse tomato plants were killed by frost in the last week of November and I spent an hour or so this morning clearing the plants and their supports from the beds. But it really hasn't been very cold yet this November and December (tempting fate by saying that, I know). I'm still picking broccoli florets from the plants in the greenhouse and the Tuscan black kale outside is producing well.

Yesterday morning brought a hoar frost. It turned these swamp milkweed seed pods furry:

And made the asters look like they were flowering all over again.

Mixed precipitation

We had our first storm of the winter overnight: a mixture of rain, freezing rain, and snow. Made for some nice photographs this morning, so I'm not complaining.

I've been taking pictures of these beautiful Bittersweet nightshade (Solanum dulcamara) berries for weeks (there are just so many of them this year), but today's weather has brought them to Christmas-card perfection:

And, just along the same fence, even barbed wire can look attractive when it's encased in a coat of ice:

Dropping fast

The sun and the temperature. Very clear today and we're expecting a low of -6°C/21°F tonight. That might finally kill off the greenhouse pepper and tomato plants. The sun's now setting at around 4.30pm and it's a lot easier to get the chickens are to settle in their coop than it is on summer evenings.

I was wrong (again!) about the gender of the three chicks that we hatched this year. They turned out to be two males and one female. It's good to have roosters back in the flock after we lost the father of these ones in the summer.

Fronts on Front Street

The older stores on Belleville's Front Street show a genteel, polished appearance to users of the street, but it's a different story in the alleys leading up to it. There, the limestone structure of the buildings is on display, with no attempt to hide its roughness with a layer of plaster.

I haven't yet worked out why 'Front Street' is the preferred term in this part of the world for 'Main Street' (or what would be 'High Street' in England). But when you see the contrast between the sides and the fronts of these buildings, it makes you wonder if that's got something to do with it...

Pre-winter harvest

It's getting to the point where denial of winter's approach is not going to be possible for much longer. In acceptance of this fact, I've picked a lot of the still-green tomatoes this morning and they're now taking up a good part of one of the kitchen counters. I've scattered some ripe ones over them pour encourager les autres. There's still some more to pick but there isn't room for them and this was as much as I could carry in one trip! They will gradually ripen over the next few weeks.

I also picked a lot of the spinach that's still outside and some of the prodigious quantity of parsley that I've got in the greenhouse. The spinach I trimmed of its stalks, blanched for 2 minutes and froze in ziplock bags. The parsley I just rinsed, divided into bunches and froze whole in small bags. Whether I remember to actually use any of them is another matter entirely...

Cooking from itch

I've only mentioned my pasta machine once here, I think, but it's proved to be one of the more heavily-used of the kitchen gadgets I possess. One thing I really like about it is the ability to mix flours so that I get a light wholemeal pasta. I've always found 100% wholewheat pasta to be too stodgy, whereas white pasta just doesn't fill us up for very long. It's a similar story with bread, although I use a different mix of flours with pasta. With my bread I usually make it half-wholemeal, half-white. When it comes to pasta I prefer a mix that's a quarter-wholemeal, three-quarters white.

Tonight I made spaghetti bolognese. Yes, it does take a bit longer, making the pasta first, but not as long as you'd think, with the machine doing most of the work.

I used one of the frozen batches of tomato sauce made from the greenhouse tomatoes, bulked up with carrots I'd harvested from the garden last weekend. Our onion crop was disappointing this year, so it contained store-bought onions, but at least the herbs were fresh from the garden. I steamed a few spinach leaves and sugar snap peas from the greenhouse over the boiling pasta and that was that. Feel like I've come a long way from the days when most of a meal like this would have come out of a packet, jar or tin.

The phrase 'cooking from itch' isn't mine, I should add. I heard it the day I bought the pasta machine at the yard sale and have been meaning to use it ever since!

Overwintering herbs

I've had mixed luck with keeping herbs alive over the winter. Thyme, sage, mint, and oregano seem to survive fine in the border next to the house and parsley usually comes back well in the spring. Plants like rosemary and French tarragon which would have survived over winter outside in England are less likely to do so here, so need some winter protection. The first winter, I dug up the rosemary plant and put it in the basement. Where I promptly forgot about it and it died of dehydration rather than cold. In the following year I took cuttings from its replacement and kept them in the kitchen, where I did remember to water them and they lived until the following year although the parent plant, left outside, did not. Last year, the rosemary plant I left outside did actually make it through the winter, although the smaller plants I kept in the kitchen did not. I'm just not good at remembering to water indoor plants...

But I am persevering and have taken four cuttings from the surprise survivor of last winter. I'm keeping these next to the kitchen sink in the hope that this will prompt me to water them more regularly...

Then I remembered the French tarragon plant I bought this year. I like tarragon but it's one of those annoying plants that can't be grown from seed, so I had to buy it from one of the local nurseries. I left it in its pot, thinking that it would be easier to bring it indoors in the winter that way. I went outside to find it and was rather disheartened by what I saw:

There are some small signs of life (if you look very hard), so I've brought it indoors anyway in the hope that a spell in the warmth of the kitchen will effect a minor miracle and bring it back to full health. Gardening is all about optimism, after all...

On borrowed time

It's been quiet around here because I've been away on a work trip to the UK. Coming back from such a trip at this time of year, I'm never sure whether the summer vegetables will have been killed by a frost or not.

This time we've been lucky and the tender veg in the greenhouse are still hanging on, despite a few frosts which have killed the tender plants outside.

Over the next week I'll be doing a big harvest of all the remaining tomatoes and peppers before we start getting into the really cold weather. Fortunately, there's no frost forecast in the short term, so this is not as urgent a task as it might have been.

The fall pea experiment in the greenhouse has partially worked. I picked a good harvest of sugar snap peas today but the regular peas ('Lincoln') on the right of this photo have not been quite so successful, despite good germination rates.

I'll probably just sow the sugar snap ones next year - but it was definitely worth trying.

The chickens are still laying which is interesting because this time last year we didn't get any eggs at all. We're only getting two or three a day now, but there were none for three weeks last year between October and November. Strange...