The Daily: 15 January 2024

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Today, we remember Martin Luther King Jr on his actual birthday, rather than the closest Monday. Here is a good recording of one of the more well-known reasons we celebrate this man’s life.

I am home today for a change. This is the first job I’ve had in a long while that takes time out to remember Dr King. I am grateful for having the day released from wage work. There is so much to think about. Today, I am wondering what he would think of this decade. Probably not much.

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I am also grateful for the three day weekend. The first week of January was rough. COVID is horrible for rheumatoid arthritis, and this virus also seems hell bent on destroying my heart whenever it invades my body. I’ve had to spend much time doing breath work to keep my arrhythmia and blood pressure under control.

Still, I was feeling mostly over the actual COVID part of the illness on Epiphany and decided that I needed to do something about the clothes I’d been wearing for days — as well as the fetid smells in the rest of the house. So I started the laundry and took a shower. Which led to cleaning the bathrooms… which led to vacuuming… and so on…

While I was already cleaning, it seemed prudent to put away Yuletide. So I began that project also, digging out white stuff and carrying Midwinter to the attic.

As I was doing the laundry in the basement — the cat’s domain — I realized the house was perilously short on both cat food and litter. I also needed milk to make yogurt. So I did a quick test (negative) and donned a mask and ventured out. Along with nearly everybody else in the county.

It seems that everybody else knew there was a storm coming. It was not going to stay south of us and maybe drop an inch or two on us as most predictions were saying. It was going to hit us square on and dump feet of snow beginning Saturday night. So everybody else was storm shopping. There were lines everywhere. The gas stations were scary. Lucky I don’t need that… Every truck with a plow attached to its front end was gassing up for Sunday morning, the first opportunity in over a month to earn a bit of plowing cash.

And they were right. It was yet another round of epic weather to hit central Vermont (don’t mean to complain… but can we get a break… please…). It started snowing Saturday evening. The plows came out at 4am on Sunday. By the time I got up at 7am, we had six inches on the ground and it was still snowing heavily. By 9am the plow guys admitted defeat and went home, leaving behind a silence and an increasingly white world.

It snowed until about 4pm. I went out to see if I needed to shovel again and decided to leave the last few inches on the path. Snow is better to walk on than ice, and the temperature was dropping — there would be ice if I removed the snow cover. I pushed my yardstick into a snowbank that hadn’t been augmented with the shoveled path and measured just over two feet. The good thing about this storm is that it was cold. There’s not much heavy ice on trees and power lines, and the snow is light enough that shoveling wasn’t too onerous, even with my recently sick body.

Which is good because I had to shovel the path and shovel a separate path to the composters. You see, since I was cleaning and organizing I, of course, started making soup. Which generated a large pile of scraps that needed to go out to the composter… and so on…

But still… this is what happens when COVID-recovery-cleansing meets Yuletide-ending meets a wicked winter storm named Ember.

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Snowed-in Soup

I had actually started roasting the butternut squash on Saturday with no clear intentions for it other than butternut squash is good when the weather is cold and wet. It sort of snow-balled from there (ha…).

To make this recipe, you can either roast a medium-sized butternut squash or go get 4 cups of roasted squash purée out of the freezer. Which, of course, you have because that’s what happens in autumn. (Or is that just me?) I didn’t use my frozen stuff because I had this squash that I didn’t use over the holidays. I don’t even remember what I was going to do with it, but I’m glad I didn’t get to it. As I said, I roasted this one on Saturday and then put it in the fridge overnight.

The next day, in the middle of bread baking and yogurt making, I got the idea for soup.

I had some potatoes that needed to be used, so those would go in the soup. I also felt in need of beans after a week of eating not much of anything. So I washed 1 1/2 cups of dried cannellini beans and put them in a saucepan with about 8 cups of water and a few small bay leaves. I brought them to a boil and then set them on low heat to simmer and hydrate.

Next, I peeled and cubed the potatoes (a five pound bag). I also minced two small bulbs of garlic. I mixed this all together in a baking dish with about 2 Tbs of olive oil and a bit of salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Then I covered the pan with aluminum foil and put it in the oven at 375°F for about an hour.

While the beans simmered and the potatoes and garlic roasted (which made the house smell fantastic!), I cut up two small onions, four stalks of celery, and six small carrots. I melted 4 Tbs butter in my dutch oven (using about 1 Tbs to brush on the top of the bread that was rising). I softened the veg in butter over medium high heat, then added about a quart and a half of the turkey bone broth I made after Thanksgiving and brought it all to a low boil.

I next added the flavoring herbs and spices. I used about a Tbs each of rubbed sage, thyme, parsley, and ground cumin. I didn’t add any more salt since the potatoes would bring enough and there was some in the broth. I did add a mounded teaspoon of chipotle chile powder.

I got the butternut out of the fridge along with a 10oz log of Vermont Creamery soft goat cheese. After removing the rind and the seeds (and the squash snot), I creamed the squash and the goat cheese together. Then I scooped this into the soup.

The beans were nice and plump by this point, so I rinsed them again and added them to the soup.

And then the potatoes and garlic came out of the oven and went into the pot as well.

The soup smelled and tasted really good, but it was a rather unappetizing shade of not-quite-orange. (Sort of like certain bodily eruptions that never should be eaten…) So I added about two teaspoons of turmeric to the pot. This gave it a much better color and a more complex flavor. Also, I need turmeric in the aftermath of COVID. It is one of the best natural anti-inflammatories I know, and it’s much easier on the stomach than ibuprofen and other NSAIDs.

I left the soup to cook on low heat while I did more cleaning and baking and shoveling and so on. I think it was about an hour, but the time doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it was thickened slightly and had turned an even richer shade of orange — and all the flavors had melded together.

I served this soup with a toasted slice of this week’s bread — a multi-grain sourdough. If you want true decadence, you can add a scoop of yogurt or sour cream to the soup bowl as a pretty garnish.

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I am not up to decadence right now. In fact, all this busyness — though much needed and very much appreciated — sort of wiped me out. I ate dinner to the rumbling sounds of the renewed efforts of the plow guys — and Ólafur Arnalds‘ album, Some Kind of Peace — and went to bed early…

…so I could be ready to go back to wage work in the dawn-light of Monday morning.

And unfortunately all that activity reminded my body that it was fighting off an infection and generally losing. I tested positive again last Tuesday.

So, yes, very glad for the long weekend!

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©Elizabeth Anker 2024