Winter warmth

Bitter cold seems to have seized most of the nation, with wind chill reports of negative 40F coming in from Chicago, Minneapolis, and parts of New York. For our part of New York, the thermometer dipped to negative 25F over the weekend, and we experienced today a low of 3F and a high of perhaps 9F, along with a biting wind.

I pulled on the layers of clothing like so many others, and ventured out to my office. Later, I went to the Y and then came home to comfort food. As my husband and I warmed up our leftover venison chili, and cooked up some greens, beets, garlic, and opened a couple of boxes of organic macaroni and cheese, my inner temperature felt noticeably warmer. We sat by the wood burning stove and ate dinner, marveling at the lovely mix of reds, oranges, greens, and browns on our plates. Since so much of what we were eating had come from our garden -- brussels sprout leaves picked before the -25F plunge, beets, garlic, and beans in the chili -- it seemed as if the sunshine from summer had found a new warmth in the form of food for our souls.

Our meal was largely leftovers, something for which I've gained a new appreciation over the past couple of years of living closer to the land. In the past, leftovers often sat forgotten in the refrigerator until the mold started to form. These days, they are a source of future meals: lunch the next day and sometimes the day after, a side dish at a dinner one day or two days after being the main course. I was ecstatic tonight to discover that while we both ate heartily, there was plenty of our meal leftover for a sizable lunch tomorrow.

Enjoying the warmth of a home-cooked meal in my office is a pleasure, as well. There are very few eating-out options in the immediate vicinity of where I work, and take-out food in this small rural community often costs quite a bit more than I want to pay. Plus, as my consciousness of what goes into the food preparation process rises, my willingness to just trust anything has dropped. Plus, because my time in my office is limited, it often is more expedient to hand-pack a home-cooked lunch than lose thirty to sixty minutes of time eating out.

What makes the warmth of winter foods so inviting? For me, the warmth stems from an odd paradox. So much of what we eat when the ground is covered with snow that is then coated with ice comes out of a storage freezer or peat-moss-packed bin, or has been canned for winter use. Even relatively fresh items like squash are fresh only because their hard outer shells protect their innards from deterioration, and in order to access the edible innards, one must cook the squash for several hours. To put it mildly, nothing is fresh from the ground crisp and delicious. Everything requires some sort of cooking -- and usually some additional spicing -- to make it palatable.

That's where the warmth comes in. Winter foods are braised, simmered, baked, stewed slowly. The idea is not to eat something that is fresh but rather something that has been cooked in a slow, low-heat manner that allows both its inner warmth and its full flavor to come out. I used to shy away from foods -- particularly vegetables or fruits -- that were frozen or canned, thinking that they had been processed. I was correct in the assumption, of course, but home-canning changes the meaning of processed. Most of our foods were washed before they were frozen, topped of greens or other sprouts before being placed in makeshift root cellar bins, or cooked down (as in the case of fruit and tomatoes) with a minimal amount of sugar, spices, water, and lemon juice added in. They were processed with an intention of being eaten through the winter before a new round of planting and harvests begins to occur by May.

If I were to divide food into seasons, I would do so by cooking styles. The spring styles are stir-fries, salads, and as the days lengthen and the snow melts grilling. Summer is predominantly about grilling, quick steaming and quick sautés. The quick is often less quick than quick appears to suggest because so much of what we eat comes directly from the garden. So part of the process of cooking is gathering the food, washing off the garden dirt, trimming stem and root tips, and slicing and dicing it in the way that you want to ultimately eat it. The actual time over heat is what's quick -- often I'll steam fresh greens or sauté beans and carrots for less than one minute. The quick heat flash of summer starts to give way to slower and longer cooking times as the days shorten and the nights become cooler in August and September. Freshness is still a premium, but often the produce is larger and heartier. To bring out the flavors that reside within the later fresh harvests, one needs to lower the heat and lengthen the cooking time. Which leads ultimately to the long, slow simmers of winter. These foods scent the air with their fragrances and warm the body as a result of their long, slow cooking processes. Processes that will quicken as spring returns and the days lengthen.