The Kitchen is Closed

This morning — the coldest morning of the year and maybe of my life — I dropped E off at daycare and came home to a power outage.

No heat, no internet, no cooking apparatus. Even our water comes from a well with an electric pump.

I decamped to my parents’ house for the rest of the day.

The power is back on now and I’m back at home but the house is still cold. My kitchen thermometer says we’re hovering in the mid-fifties. Despite the cold temperatures, both inside and outside, Paul reports that everything in the freezer began thawing out. I’m afraid to go and check.

I managed a relatively productive workday at my parents’ kitchen counter (thank goodness for laptops), but one thing I didn’t get to do was remake the dish I had hoped to share here today. I made it last week but ate it before taking any photographs. Sorry.

So, in lieu of a recipe, I’m passing on a few recent favorites from the internet instead. Baring any more catastrophes, I’ll be back next week with a recipe. Stay warm….

dishes on fireplace mantel from https://test.pleasepassthepeas.com

So far, the only casualties of our move have been one shattered serving bowl and a crushed box of pastina, which left teeny, tiny star-shaped pasta all over my canned goods, like so much semolina confetti.

But it took me an entire week to locate the knives (why so long? I have no idea), so we haven’t been eating much in the way of home-cooked food lately. Instead, our meals have consisted of frozen burritos, big wedges of the key lime pie my mother dropped off one afternoon and lots and lots of tomato sandwiches.

Slowly but surely, the kitchen is coming together and I’m looking forward to cooking real meals again, in a space that isn’t full of half-empty cardboard boxes. I’ll be back with a recipe next week.

In the meantime, here’s a peek at a few corners of the Internet I’ve been enjoying lately. I hope you enjoy them too.

~ Who knew cucumber tendrils could be so fascinating?

~ China produces lots of apple juice, but the Chinese aren’t the ones drinking it.

~ Looking forward to this and this.

~ Did you know the Queen Anne’s Lace you see along the roadside can be used as a dried spice?

~ Gems from the New Yorker to read now — while they’re still free. To which I would add Katherine Boo’s look at marriage as a cure for poverty.

~ And lastly, eating “white dirt” in Georgia.

Baby, It’s Cold Inside

Settling in