The Daily: 13 November 2023

Early this morning, the Hunter’s Moon went dark. I suspect that in the luna-solar calendars that tied the new year to the end of the growth season, this thirteenth dark moon in a solar cycle would have been considered New Year’s Eve with the new year beginning with the sighting of the crescent moon and the beginning of another round of moon cycles. It is certainly a new month, and yet it is also no month at all. It is a day between one moon and the next.

If I had my way, there would be no work done on these dark moon days, even going beyond the normally accepted day off wage work that is filled with all the body’s needed work. The dark moon would be a time of real rest. And to make that work for all workers, everything should be closed (aside from emergency responders and the very few industrial processes that can’t be turned off). No restaurants and shops. No travel or entertainment. There might be minimal work done in the home, mostly related to eating and tending to needs, but no projects that require either hard labor or shopping for supplies. My feeling is that it’s also not a good day to begin things. So no new tasks either.

I try to follow this as much as I am able in a wage-based economy. I start the day with meditation. I put aside all the obligations clamoring for my attention and just ignore the virtual world altogether. I wait to start new things until the new moon. I read what I want to read and make rambling, rather incoherent entries in my journal. I let ideas spool out however they might and try not to get too invested in any of them. Just notice and let go. Rarely, I will write down something really good because I am old now and can’t hold on to mind things as well as I once could.

A monthly day of quiet rest has one further benefit. It forces you to stop doing things. At first, this can be sheer agony. There’s nothing to distract you from your spiraling thoughts. But with practice, these breaks from busy time allow you to see the world as it is — the beautiful, the wondrous, the broken and the dying. It allows you to see connection and your role in all of it. And sometimes these monthly days of disengagement unearth possibilities — new ideas, new ways of seeing, new ways of being. It’s easiest to see the next step when you are standing still.

Tomorrow, the year starts again with the Winter Sleep Moon. Today, in this slack tide, I am at rest.

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However…

In the continuing rolling disaster that is life these days, my furnace blower has developed intermittent emotional issues. It sometimes, but not every time, decides that it doesn’t want to work. There is no discernible pattern or cause, and its mood can last for hours at a time. This makes for a cold house when the outside temperatures are below freezing. I bought a couple small electric space heaters to take the edge off the chill, and I have a furnace service call in for as soon as someone can fit me in their schedule. The blower worked for most of the weekend, but I think I’d still like to replace it. With my luck, it would die for good on Thanksgiving with a full house of visitors and no hope of getting someone to come restore the heat.

In the meanwhile, I did what I usually do with stress: I cooked soup and baked bread. Besides making delicious smells and warm ballast for the belly, cooking soup has the further benefit of heating and humidifying the kitchen. Baking artisan bread requires such high oven temperatures, it warms the whole first floor. In the summer this is not at all appreciated — hence my desire to build an horno — but in the winter, baking can reduce my furnace use substantially. On sunny days — arguably not much of a thing in New England’s November, but still — the heater hardly runs at all.

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I found these blond pumpkins at a self-serve farm stand by the side of the road. All their pumpkins were $5 each. So I bought five. I don’t know what they are. Perhaps a cross between a pie pumpkin and Long Island Cheese pumpkins. On the outside, they resemble pie pumpkins except for their butternut squash color and a slightly more ribbed exterior. On the inside, they are about the color of mashed potatoes. They have much thicker flesh than pie pumpkins. One of these pumpkins yields 6-8 cups of roasted mash. They don’t have a lot of scent even when roasting, but they are the sweetest pumpkins I’ve ever tasted, with a mellow sugar not unlike marshmallow. (Real marshmallow, not puffed corn syrup in plastic bags… )

I thought they would make excellent soup.

So I decided to make pumpkin and wild rice soup with herbs and goat cheese.

First, I roasted one whole pumpkin in a 250°F oven for most of the morning, softening the meat and browning the rind. When I deemed it done, I pulled it out of the oven and let it cool on the counter for about an hour. Working with too-hot pumpkin is a mistake you only make once.

When cooled, I sliced it in half, removed the seeds, and scooped the flesh out of the rind with a soup spoon, putting it into a large bowl.

Then I peeled and minced a small bulb of garlic and five shallots. I sautéed these alliums in about 4Tbs of unsalted butter.

While the alliums were cooking, I finely shredded a semi-soft goat cheese into the pumpkin. This gave me about two cups of shredded cheese.

When the alliums were translucent, I added three quarts of veg stock and the cheese and pumpkin mix. I then added about 2Tbs each of rubbed sage and French thyme, maybe a teaspoon of allspice, and about a teaspoon of crushed Aleppo pepper.

Using an immersion blender, I puréed the whole thing. It wasn’t quite the creamy texture I wanted, so I added a cup of whole milk. I also added a little salt and about an eighth cup of maple syrup.

I brought the whole thing to a low boil, stirring constantly to keep the dairy and sugars from making a mess.

When it was boiling, I added a cup and a half (because that was what was left in the crock) of Lake Champlain wild rice. Then I immediately took it off the hot burner and put it on another burner set to its lowest heat level.

I went out to check the mail (no luck this weekend) and came back in with six leaves of garden sage which I tied into an herb bundle to add extra sage flavor as the rice cooked.

I let the soup cook until the rice was hydrated and starting to curl and crack open.

It’s not much to look at, but it smells divine — rich and nutty and sweet. It tastes even better. Though, I think I may add sautéed mushrooms next time I make it — or even later on this week. That’s the great thing about a pot of something; you can add things both for flavor and to stretch the pot.

I’m serving it with this week’s bread — cheesy sourdough — and a sprinkling of toasted pumpkin seeds.

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It was a blustery grey day when I was making the soup. Most of the snow had melted, but any that remained had turned to ice. The northwest wind created a chill that “felt like 21°F” though the air temperature was about ten degrees warmer. We’ve found decidedly wintry weather. So while I was cooking and not doing much else, I listened to Voces8’s Winter. Here is their version of “For Now I Am Winter” by Ólafur Arnalds and Arnór Dan. (And because I love this song, here is Arnalds’ original.)

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©Elizabeth Anker 2023