WIAW 97 – The Twelfth Day of Christmas!

Well – today is Twelfth Night, The Feast of the Epiphany, Little Christmas, Dia do Los Tres Reyes… the very end of the Christmas season. Tomorrow is just – winter.

But this is sort of a cheat, because that’s today – but this isn’t today’s food, which, after all, I have not yet finished eating…  It is, however, a useful marker of the year as it starts to pass (even as new as this one is!)

Here in New York City, it is finally cold. And when the weather finally went below freezing (after smashing a record for consecutive days above in this city) it did it thoroughly and went below 15°F! It was in the 70s on Christmas Eve – none of us know where our heavy coats are… we usually have them out in early November… So, having finally finished the last of the local lettuce on New Year’s Day, I’m suddenly all about soup and stew.

I still do have a couple of gingerbread waffles in the freezer, but I’m back to more typical breakfasts, now. On Monday I ate my bean tacos with egg…  I think I’ve explained this? I made a thick omelet and cut it in strips – then pop a strip into each taco, to have with the beans. It is really my fastest and easiest breakfast, both to fix and to eat. I’m trying to streamline my mornings, and this breakfast helps a lot.

OK, the mug is a bit corny – it has Snoopy and Woodstock dancing on the other side. And it was a gift from someone who sometimes made me feel like that – and died many years ago, so I treasure the reminder. I’m cycling through the mugs I have kept, and remembering why I keep them. And then I’ll thin out the ones that don’t make me smile… (We all know mugs reproduce in the back of the cabinet… I have to do this, every few years.)

For lunch I tossed a little of everything in a pan. Cooked chicken, and leftover green beans, and some frozen peppers, and rice – and probably something else… Emptied a few containers, made some more room in the fridge… Now I start using the vegetables I froze earlier in the year!

Then, as I said, it’s cold… We’re fine and warm inside (for which I am thankful – my last apartment was very cold!) but it was bitter outside… a good time for a steamy, warming stew. I cooked Roman beans with aromatics and root vegetables – onion, celery, carrot, parsnip – and butternut squash.  Then I added cooked pork shoulder, and some of those green muffins from the freezer – these were kale. We ate it with millet and quinoa mixed and cooked together – we like that combination. I made big pots of both the stew and the grain mix – Rich will have some to carry to gaming later in the week, I’ll have a fast dinner, we have a few lunches on hand…

Once I’m away from the All Salad All the Time season, I do have to pay more attention to lunch. I made some chili the other day, I have the stew, I’ll make soup… I need to make sure there is always something I can reheat or  throw together, because I never want to spend real time on fixing lunch… but I still need to eat a real meal. (And I’m sure many of us have that issue!) Last year I played with keeping cooked lentils on hand, to make into soup in 10 minutes – this year I plan to expand that concept out to other beans – black beans, white beans all make wonderful soup… and of course, you can always use canned, if that works better for you. So I’ll play with that.

Meanwhile – keep warm, please! (Expect those of you in Australia – you  keep cool!)