Dinner for six in a two-person house

We had our first real sit down dinner party in this little house on Saturday, and it worked.

We've had family and out of town cycling friends here in the past, but those were mostly outdoor patio and lawn chair affairs with plates balanced on laps.

This time we were hosting the first of the church Little Dinners, with four guests who had never been in our home before, and no dining room.

What we're finding in small house living is that often things have multiple purposes. We managed to pull together enough seating from all through the house. My large desk moved to the center of the whatever room and dressed with a tablecloth served as the table (with warnings to our guests to watch their knees). The food and the company were very enjoyable. The dog almost behaved.  (He is accustomed to quiet evenings and having his parents to himself, so his patience with "invaders" wears thin after a while.) We may even do this again!  I may even decide to swap out the desk for a table that also serves as a desk, who knows! We really haven't figured out what that room is anyway. It was the bedroom before we added the second story, and now it is the room next to the living room.

We're about to have our second "January thaw,"  so I'm having a last look at the pretty white snow before it turns to slop this afternoon. I'm seeing a predicted high of 57 degrees on Wednesday, followed by a drop back into the teens on Thursday. Strapping on my seatbelt now for the wild barometric roller coaster ride!  Looks like the snow will be back in time for the Audubon center's annual Snowflake Festival on Saturday, whew.  I go just to see the sled dogs. If the snow is good, we may pack our snowshoes.

I'm enjoying the quiet today.  My only immediate plan is to tear an old sheet into strips, which will be repurposed into a rug at my weaving class starting this week.  Banzai!

Back on the Planet Hoth

Globally speaking, this may be the warmest winter on record, but at any given time, some of us find ourselves caught in the extremes of this whole climate weirding process. Australia's Bureau of Meterology has added two brand new colors to their temperature maps to reflect the record-breaking heat. The brushfires are so widespread that they can be seen from space. 

Here in western NY, we're on the not-quite-so-extreme other end at the moment. We're talking single digits and wind chills in the minus territory.  Mr. Winter Outdoor Adventurer caught a ride with the neighbor instead of walking to work (or even walking to wait for the bus) this morning. It's actually warmer today ("warmer" being a relative term) than earlier this week, when the whole town basically shut down, but I guess he wanted to get to work earlier than usual.

He had some  adventures this past weekend, backpacking with a couple of buddies on the Westside Overland Trail.  Here, I'll let him tell the story:

Hiking through the hurricane. The Westside Overland Trail is usually a placid, gently rolling trail running for 24 miles north to south in western Chautauqua County linking several state forests with private woodlots and fields. The only hills to speak of are the valleys into and out of the small stream crossings like the Brokenstraw, Wing, and Prendergast Creeks. This is usually a quite hike. Usually.

Three of us, Marion from Canada, Garrett from Buffalo, and I camped at the southern end Friday night planning to hike north for 20 miles over Saturday and Sunday. There was a high wind warning and it started howling around 7. By 8 we were snug in our tents thinking the huge hemlocks we were under had seen many storms and were not going to fall. It was cold with a light coating of snow and despite the noise, we slept well. The wind was still raging in the morning, ripping through the trees, but with no alternative, off we went.

The winds dropped throughout the day and by afternoon it could only be called breezy and the temp had risen into the upper 30. Our camp for the night was in a deep glade of old growth hemlocks on Prendergast Creek. The evening was quiet and the sky showed moon and stars. I warned the others to expect snow by morning. We fell asleep listening the the brook.

At 3AM the wind started raging again, more ferocious then the day before. It was obvious that we had passed through the eye of the storm overnight and were now on the backside. Unzipping the tent, I shined my light up into the trees overhead and watched them twist and sway under the starry sky until icy pellets started falling. I zipped back up and snuggled deep into my nylon and down cocoon. I never did hear that creek, flowing right next to the tent, again.

The wind increased still more, screaming through the trees and battering the tent. At one point I rolled onto my side, one ear pressed into the stuff sack of spare clothes I used for a pillow and that pressed hard into the ground. I heard the wind screaming in the upper ear and a strange wailing sub-tone, fainter and in a higher key, but in tempo with the raging noise above. I don't know what caused it, maybe my air mattress was picking up the vibrations but is seemed like the earth itself was wailing and it was spooky.

I got up at 6 and in the dark and began to boil water for breakfast. By 6:30 I started to wake the other two when Mother Nature gave us a wake up call. A nearby tree, we could not see where in the dark, succumbed to the wind and came thundering down. We broke camp quickly, ate a fast breakfast and were off by 7:30 but not before another nearby tree came crashing down. Our pace was pretty quick. We had to climb over or around several other new windfalls.

After a couple of miles the snow began in earnest, not falling, but flowing sideways. We left the woods for an open field and I commented to Garrett that it was good to get away from the trees. He replied, "yeah, but now we might get hit by a cow." It was a crosswind and with the packs kept blowing us sideways. Within an hour it was all white and visibility was quite low, the temp had dropped 10 degrees since breakfast to 21. My wife, Susan, was to pick me up at the hike's end but we all agreed to call her and pick us up a couple of miles short of our planned destination. As they headed toward Buffalo, Sue and I turned toward home and had to drive around several road closures and accidents.

He had a blast. Clearly, he loves this stuff. I had two white-knuckled drives: avoiding deer and Amish buggies, in the dark, in the middle of freaking nowhere, on the way home from dropping him off Friday night.  And again on Sunday morning, in 60 mph wind gusts and white-out conditions. I guess you could say we both had winter weekend adventures.

It wasn't enough for him.  Monday he went out there again to ski. I stayed home. I wasn't worried. The LAKE EFFECT WINTER STORM WARNING wasn't in effect till that evening. There were flurries when he arrived back home--immediaitely snagged as he got out of the car by our elderly next door neighbor, who was frantic: her daughter and grandson, returning home from a weekend in Canada, had been in a bad accident on the Thruway.  The daughter had borrowed a phone long enough to say they were okay, despite her head slamming into the door, but we had to wait for details on the situation. Tom got on the phone to the state police, but they were busy sorting things out--accidents were shutting down the Thruway from just west of Buffalo all the way to the PA state line.

We finally got the news that Catherine and Ian had been taken by ambulance to the hospital in Irving (about an hour from here in GOOD weather) to be evaluated for her concussion. Around 7:30, she was judged good to go...nowhere. The waiting room. The car had been totalled, hit from behind by a semi and spun around into other cars for a 6-vehicle pileup that looked like this:

Almost miraculously, there were only minor injuries. But Catherine and her 10-yr-old son were still an hour away, and the weather situation was seriously deteriorating. So, on a night when normal people stayed home, Tom and I got back in the car for another adventure. We had the good fortune of getting behind a plow in both directions over the treacherous ridge. Otherwise, it would have been difficult to know where the road was. Happy ending for all concerned.

Tuesday, we stayed home and Tom baked bread.

 
It's cold. It's snowing. It's winter. It's okay.

January Thaw

It seemed like a normal winter around here for a while. Lots of snow, followed by a thaw.

But the "thaw" was unusually warm, and all of the snow (except for the big piles left by the plows) went away. Temps were in the 60's yesterday. It was comfortable to go out without a coat -- I even had a window open for a bit -- and the birds were singing like it was springtime.

Which it wasn't, of course. Overnight, the cold front blew through and the temperature dropped by 30 degrees. It's still dropping.  Back to the illusion of normalcy, for now.

I thought it might be fun during the winter months for our congregation to hold a series of Little Dinners. We did these all the time when we lived in Erie (many years ago) and it's a great opportunity for small groups (6-8 people) who normally only see one another at church to meet at someone's home for a potluck style dinner and get to know one another a little better over good food and conversation. Well, enough people agreed it was a good idea and I am now in the process of setting these up.  The first dinners will be on the 26th. We'll be hosting one here, which may require some rearranging of the furniture, but we're looking forward to it. Our church attendance is up this year, and we've welcomed several new members and regular visitors, so there are many more good conversations to be had!

The seed and flower catalogs are arriving, which always gets me excited. I haven't sat down to draw up my new garden plans yet (there's still plenty of time!), but I have lots of new material to get my imagination working productively.  I read earlier in the week that, properly motivated, Americans grew 40% of their own food in their backyard "victory gardens" during WWII. So why on earth do we accept produce out of season from other continents, picked too soon because it has to be shipped thousands of miles, and it ends up tasting like crap? Are humans getting dumber as time goes on? There are some difficulties with our less than year-old food buying club (an effort to buy more regionally produced, and better quality, foods at bulk prices) because of the need for people to change and coordinate their buying habits. I really hope that members will hang in there because the food really is better and it makes more sense to plan and shop this way. For those of you who live in and around Jamestown and who still are not aware, this is Furniture City Foods I am talking about. C'mon and get on board! Everybody wins when we work together.

My adventures in cooking with new recipes will continue this week.  I have learned that rolled oats and shredded zucchini are good additions to meatloaf, and I've discovered several winning recipes for quinoa-stuffed peppers. (I actually did a mash-up of three different recipes.) I'm looking for more recipes with quinoa and some new ones for lentils because I have a lot of both on hand.

Happy New Year!

Well, hello again, you survivors of the Mayan apocalypse! Whew, that was close, but the world didn't end, and we had to pay our hotel bill after all.

We traveled to the east coast for Christmas with the kids and grandkids, and our daughter's in-laws. It was a joyous occasion. When you have kids on both coasts and you live in the middle, the whole family unit doesn't land in one place too often. When it does, there is much eating, drinking, and merrymaking.

And now I have resolved not to step on a scale for the entire month of January.  After three post-Thanksgiving weeks of disciplined, healthy eating (minimal sugar and breads, lots of veggies), I started my Christmas baking and it was all over. There are some family traditions you really don't WANT to let go of, ya know? I have now successfully made kolache, a wonderful, almost sacred, Hungarian nut roll confection that was once my mother's exclusive territory. My kids grew up having it for breakfast on Christmas morning, and we will continue that tradition. Only once a year!

Speaking of traditions, I haven't completely thrown out the Christmas card one (as many people have), although I'm afraid they are going to be New Year's cards this year.  The hurrieder I go, the behinder I get.

Tom and I started out the year with a snowshoeing excursion. It is a winter wonderland here, and there are few things to match the peace and beauty of a snowy woods. Channeling Robert Frost! The dog had a good time too, although not on snowshoes. He ran wide circles around us, springing up like a porpoise, tunneling into the snow with his nose when he needed a get a particularly good sniff, and leaving lots of messages. And he wasn't as tired as I was afterwards either.

For the past couple of days, I've been staying indoors, putting away the decorations, cleaning up files on the computer,  and doing some cooking.  Yesterday it was a  big pot of chickpeas with several meals in mind: chana masala for dinner, a batch of veggie burgers for the freezer, and some freshly made hummus on the side.  We're getting ourselves back on the track we fell off of a few weeks ago. 

This morning, I made a quick trip out to get a flu shot, reversing my earlier decision to avoid it this year, after reading about the 181% increase in flu cases statewide over last year. It appears to be a particularly nasty flu, too. No thanks, I don't want any. I got the shot.

Though I haven't been posting here frequently lately, I have updated the calendar, and will be adding some new links, so bookmark and check back frequently.  It was my intention from the beginning to make this site a source for information about local events and resources, as well as sustainability in general. I hope that people will use my site as an index for accessing those links and not just come here to read my postings. There's so much more here for you than that!

Happy 2013, here we go!