The Daily: 6 November 2023

Sunday the clocks all changed. No, I’ll not use passive voice. Except for the Apple things in this house, the clocks do not change themselves. To spring forward and fall back, I have to wander around the house setting some dozen clocks, ranging from the phone system to the enormous wall clock in the dining room. That one alone can take ten minutes to change, most of the time spent trying to convince it that it wants to go back on its wall hanger. The entire project usually takes about a half hour. Which makes the name — Daylight Savings Time — seem an oxymoron.

I don’t like the time change. I don’t like clocks much either. I really don’t like setting my body to artificial clock time. While I will appreciate not driving to work in dawn twilight, now I will be driving home in solid darkness. It is 5:30pm now. There is no light left to round out this Sunday. I feel like I’ve had one of my precious weekend hours stolen, and this is repeated twice a year every year. To what end? Only that we all march to the same drum in the service of capitalism. Which I also don’t like…

Corn snow falls on 29 October. High 43°F. First frost and first hard frost on 31 October. First snowstorm, no accumulation, November 1st. High 25°F.

This was my weather journal entry last Wednesday. For context, it was warm enough to walk barefoot in the damp grass on October 28th. In fact, many October days set record high temperatures throughout the state. I have not yet seen whether October itself is one of the hottest months on record, but that has been the autumnal trend around here. Halloween is one of the latest first frost dates on record, more than twenty days beyond the 21st century’s average of October 1-10.

The weather has finally caught up with the sun. It is November and it’s just now getting around to ending summer. In the days of yore when normal still reigned, New England was cold long before Halloween. Short days and high pressure systems blowing down from Canada, made for ice-foggy mornings and blustery, steel-grey afternoons — with surprise storms, moving in mostly under the cover of darkness. I’ve seen more than one white All Hallow’s, with carved pumpkins deliquescing under mantles of ice and all the Halloween decorations buried under snow banks. It is very strange to still have fresh tomatoes almost to the end of the month.

But the tomatoes are all gone now, the ones I never managed to gather looking like dejected party balloons on the morning after, despondently drooping from vines of rusty-brown tattered streamers. There were beans left behind also, gold Romanos planted in early August when I still thought that garden recovery was possible this year. I didn’t harvest more than a few quart bags full.

Truthfully, I gave up on the veg garden in September, choosing to focus on the perennials and young fruit and nut trees that were stressed by the aggressive grassy weeds, the saturated clay soil, and the seemingly endless warmth. It was so warm and wet for so long, we didn’t have much of a leaf-peeping season. The trees remained green until the leaves collectively gave up the ghost, turned brown, and fell off in late October. Hopefully, they only appeared to die.

The apples and peaches in my garden still have green leaves, though all are sadly limp now. Peach leaves are especially morose after a sudden freeze. They are so elongated that, from a distance, they appear to be mossy-green tentacles trailing off the twigs and branches. On the other hand, the spicebush and basswood leaves all turned into miniature golden suns in the last couple weeks, a consolation prize for a rather colorless season of harvest.

I brought out Early Winter on Sunday. There was little of Halloween to put away and no reason to prolong the last days of autumn. The house is warm and chocolatey now, with silver candlesticks and glass pumpkins adding frosty notes for contrast. I put up my turkey tree to remind myself that there are always reasons to be thankful. Even after this disastrous growing season, I have bins of alliums and roots and tubers, a well-stocked freezer, and a full belly. Maybe too full. But a little extra belly to burn going into winter is not a bad thing. If it’s still hanging around in February, then I’ll be concerned.

I doubt that is going to be the case. All the forecasts for this winter are pointing to snow-mageddon this year. El Niño is stronger than it’s ever been, liable to make rivers of the North American atmosphere. The polar vortex is very weak and droopy, meaning those rivers will be frozen after colliding with Arctic air. Up here in New England, we’re likely to be buried for most of January and February. I’m going to need extra calories to fuel the endless hours of shoveling the walk.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac is predicting that the snow will start falling in mid-November and possibly not stop until April. Their extended winter forecast for 2023-2024 warns much of my country to “get ready for a winter wonderland”. The only good thing about this is that ski areas will finally get some love from the weather. That, and my mom will get her white Christmas — though she will not like the white 12th Night, white Valentine’s Day, maybe even white Easter.

It will be a winter of stews and soups and bread, that’s for sure. I started it out last week. I did not finish the accidental buttermilk cheese within what I figured was a healthy span of days, so I used the remaining couple cups as soup base. I cubed and roasted sweet potatoes, blue potatoes and russet potatoes (something like 6-8 pounds in total), coated with thyme and rubbed sage. Then I boiled two cups of lima beans with a couple bay leaves. While that was going on, I made a broth. I sautéed about a half dozen small red onions, a small bulb of garlic, and an inch or so of ginger root, all minced fine. Then I added two quarts of veg stock, the remaining cheese, and a cup or so of cooking sherry and brought it all to a rolling boil, letting it stay at that temperature until the cheese had melted into the broth. When the potatoes and beans were cooked, I added it all to the broth and let it boil a few more minutes to allow some of the potato starch to further thicken the liquid. Then I added a bit of salt and flaked Aleppo pepper and let it simmer on the back burner until I was ready to eat. I served it with this week’s bread — a sourdough boule baked in a Dutch oven.

I also made a new hummus hybrid. I had roasted a yellow pumpkin, and it was waiting on the counter to be mashed and delivered to the chest freezer. As I was pulverizing the boiled chick peas, I looked over at the quartered pumpkin. I figured one quarter was not going to fit evenly into a quart freezer bag (which turned out correct — 3/4 of the pie-sized pumpkin made 4 rounded cups of mash). So I took one quarter and dumped it in the bean paste. Then I added about 1/4 cup of roasted and shelled sunflower seeds, a few tablespoons each of balsamic vinegar and olive oil, a teaspoon of thyme, and half a teaspoon each of chipotle chile and allspice. I blended it all until it was smooth… and then ate many warm spoonfuls right out of the bowl. I’d definitely make that again!

Sadly, there are no more food pictures… but here is more Thanksgiving stuff. Just in case you might want ideas for making a bit of gratitude to glow in your gathering place.