enough shrugging

Enough shrugging!

I'm currently in the middle of that clarity of being over a week's distance from a work-week. My ast day in the office was November 15. On November 17, Puck and I boarded a plane and moved to our new home with J. and his dog, Clyde. And in the days between the move and today, I have been baking, sauteeing, roasting and braising. J and I took a sausage-making class together - from which we came home with over 30 homemade elk bratwursts (which made for a fine, fine Thanksgiving meal - all cooked on the "hotdogger" attached to the muffler of the snowmachine when we celebrated the day of Thanksgiving by making our first long-distance voyage to a village down the frozen river). Next week I'm taking a mask-making class. J and I are thinking about doing a weekly radio show on the one local radio station. I'm motivated to unpack, if only to clear space to bring out my sewing machine and start finishing up years-old quilting projects and to sew some Christmas stockings. I make my grocery shopping a daily adventure, and in doing so am slowing improving my snow-machining wherewithall. I guess my habit of losing the trail is also contributing to the fact that I'm learning new snowmachine trails each day. I'm bundling up and taking the dogs out to romp around in snow drifts. And I'm reading. And thinking. And, oh!, I love this: I'm free and available and motivated to socialize and to listen to the local band and to attend the local fiddle dance and to 'machine to the houses of friends for dinners and to meet people and to talk about things. Any ole' things.

In other words, the day-to-day thoughts of "work" seem a world away, and the world seems at my doorstep!

Don't get me wrong, I have much professional items on my to-do list. And I am thinking about how I should go about such professional items as being able to pay my bills and keeping my health insured. But the difference of thinking about these things in my current situation, as compared to thinking about them while I'm in a mental escape from my tasks of perusing contracts or researching briefs, is that the potential for "something different" feels exhilleratingly viable. A breakfast cook? A home chef that delivers soup? A manager of a radio station? A cashier at the grocery store?

It's all possible. It could all be done!

But, here's what I'm committing right now to do: start recording again what I'm cooking! and start recording the stories and sources that are making our meals so memorable.

I can't catch up from the past week and a half, which is quite a shame as J. and I have been dining on some fine recipes. But I can promise to start recording them going forward.

As a bridge, here's a pantry recipe for baked apples:

Half an apple, and core each half. Drizzle lemon juice over each half, and sprinkle the center of the hole with a spritz of cinnamon. In a separate bowl, mix together cinnamon, brown sugar, chopped walnuts, chopped dried apricots, and butter. Put a mound of the mixture into each apple half. Drizzle with birch syrup. And bake in a 350 degree oven until the perfume has filled the house (approximately 30 to 40 minutes).