These Are Really Cold Days

Valentine’s Day at Boomerang Creek

Valentine’s Day at Boomerang Creek.

These are really, really cold days.  When the term ‘polar vortex’ takes over nightly weather reports, all creatures great and small, winged, hooved and footed find themselves in the unforgiving grip of brutal extreme weather. For the past week, our outside thermometer has registered early morning temperatures of -8 degrees below zero and daytime highs in the single digits. potentially pipe-bursting cold with windchills in the minus teens.  This is the kind of cold that reminds us why bears hibernate in arctic regions and humans make life-changing decisions to move to regions where skies are blue in February and temperatures below 50 are rare. 

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These sub-zero days, I wrap up from head to toe and head outside to feed the birds, squirrels and rabbits.  My fur-lined hat has side flaps that snap under my chin.  I am dressed in triple layers from neck to thigh, fur-lined boots that almost reach my knees.  I’m gloved and wearing a plaid fleece coat with a wool scarf wrapped around my mouth and nose.  I’m almost invisible.  I’m on a mission to refill the suet feeder and add thistle feed to the tube hanging below one end of the clothesline T-post where birds line up like jets on an airport runway for their turn at the feeders. 

Armed with a kitchen broom, I sweep snow light as powdered sugar from the porch and open up a pathway from the house to our studios across the snow-covered glade. Along the way, I take down two birdfeeders, sprinkle birdseed on the ground, and carry them empty to my studio where a large container of birdseed is kept on hand.  As I walk back to return the feeders full to their hooks on the branches of a large cedar tree, I read the footprints left by the animals and birds that have passed this way in search of food to stay alive.  Finally, I dump the day’s vegetable and fruit waste onto the compost, and I am by then quite done with being outside. 

In my studio, warm and inviting, I am greeted by walls filled with art that captures sunny Italian landscapes, a swimmer floating on her back in impossibly blue water, and shelves filled with books that take me to distant places far from the snowy landscape outside. After taking off my winter coat, gloves and hat, I walk to my writing table with a window on the backwoods that snugs up along the studio.  Snow has begun to fall again.  And in my effort to feel warm and nourished, I search for a recipe on Cooking.NYTimes.com—my Sam Sifton go-to recipe source. 

What I find is a recipe by Ali Slagle for Tomato and White Bean Soup with lots of garlic. It serves 4 and takes only 30 minutes to prepare.  What I love about it is that you only need a few ingredients.  Pantry items that I keep stocked with assorted beans and cans of tomatoes, and heads of garlic that are always on hand in the kitchen.   Winter calls for soups to keep the body warm and healthy, so garlic is a staple in my cooking.

Ali Slagle uses a full head of garlic in this Tomato and White Bean recipe.  “The soup,” he writes, “owes its surprisingly rich and complex flavor to how the garlic is cooked:  By smashing the cloves (he uses 10), you end up with different sizes and pieces of garlic.  These cook irregularly, which means you’ll taste the full range of garlic’s flavors, from sweet and nutty to almost a little spicy.”

Tomato and White Bean Recipe

Ingredients

  • 10 garlic cloves

  • ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil

  • 2 (14-ounce) cans of cannellini beans (including their juice)

  • 1 (28-ounce) can crushed tomatoes

  • 1 cup stock or water

  • Kosher salt and black pepper

  • Heavy cream (for garnish when serving)

Directions:

  1. Peel the garlic, smash the cloves using a meat pounder or wooden potato masher. 

  2. In a medium saucepan over medium heat, heat the olive oil, add the smashed garlic cloves, and lightly brown them while stirring occasionally for 3-5 minutes. 

  3. Now it’s time to add the cannellini beans and their liquid, crushed tomatoes, stock, and season with salt and pepper. 

  4. Bring to a boil, then partly cover and simmer for 15-20 minutes.  The soup will by now have thickened.

  5. For the final step, purée the soup until smooth using a blender or immersion kitchen tool. Serve with a dollop of heavy cream on top. 

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If serving for dinner, I make a pan of cornbread to accompany the soup and a simple Caesar salad of romaine lettuce, thinly sliced red onion, shavings of parmesan cheese, and a small handful of croutons.  So simple, and so delicious.

It is now time to leave my studio, once again wrapped up from head to toe in my winter gear, and trudge across the pathway to the house.  Newly dusted with snow, fresh tracks from hungry birds crisscross the walkway as impressions of my own footsteps are added to their story. Inside the house, Kit has a warm fire burning in the Buck Stove.  In 30 minutes, a pot of garlicky Tomato and White Bean Soup and a pan of golden cornbread will be ready to serve.

I’m tired of the relentless grip this polar vortex has had in February.  But these really cold sub-zero days, there is always soup on our stove.  And for that, I am enormously grateful.

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Ella and the Great Blue Heron

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Snow Still as Stone