Raspberry Currant "Pop Tarts" and a Winterlude

Pop tarts. Toast pastries. Jam pies. Whatever. These were emphatically good.

We are now in the deep freeze part of the winter, and the feeling of it is like being in a submarine and slowly dropping lower and lower into the dark ocean. Or what it looks like in the movies when the sonar is going blip blip blip and it gets dark and the actor's brows furrow because they know it is only by some miracle that they are going to escape the deep without the great squid attacking them or something like that. What I'm trying to say, it that it feels pretty bleak right about now, and it's not even February. We've had quite a bit of snow and the cold has been constant and brutal. We had an ice storm this week. Ice storms are completely useless, destructive even, but they are gorgeous when the sun comes out.

This is about as precise as I get.

I'm not trying to complain about the weather here. I know there are colder places, and that there are warmer ones as well. My mother is always telling me how warm it is in Florida (where she is, naturally) when I complain about the cold. But the idea of living in Florida is anathema to me. You see, the cold is horrendous, but winter has its special beauty that I'm not immune to. What I really love, though, is the change of the seasons. There is nothing better in the world than when spring comes. When the wind tosses your hat, and the mud is endless, and thing swell. That, my friends, is what makes winter so tolerable. And honestly, though it feels so far away, it's there. The days are getting longer, have you noticed? We are on our way back to spring.

A crostada for the leftover bits of dough and jam.

A fine thing about winter is the space is allows you to go deep, as it were, into your brain space and try to figure out what all you were chattering on about for the rest of the year. Right now I don't feel an urge towards talking about anything in particular, and a real feeling of hibernation has come over me in which I have taken a few steps back from the computer (just a few, obviously) and returned to the world of books. I'm reading a novel. Gasp! (Cordelia Underwood by Van Reid, if you're curious.) I'm sort of exhausted by cook books, and cooking magazines, and all sorts of cooking things. I like to draw, even if it's silly things that I draw with markers on cardboard. I also like to play guitar and write songs, so I'm doing some of that now too. And going for very cold walks.

Some of my favorite apple trees.

It's not like I'm not cooking, though. These pop tart thingees were amazing. If you google it you'll find a ton of homemade recipes, but I just used pie dough and some raspberry currant jam. I ate them verrrry quickly. And I make a jam or jelly every week. But I'm slowing down a lot. How about you?