Winter

February 3.  The charm of winter is over.  It is COLD outside and, honestly, we are ready for spring. 
But it's too soon to admit that.  So find the goodness in winter awhile, because it isn't leaving yet.

My freezer is getting empty.  That is good.  Four months ago it stored 60+ quarts of green beans, lots of strawberry jam, about 12 chickens, and say, 25 lbs. of beef.  Plus a few more miscellaneous items. There is still a lot of applesauce in there.  I guess we'll eat applesauce when everything else is gone.  I'm not a good cook; but we ate, we are eating, and the freezer is getting empty.  The canning shelves are holding more and more empty jars too.

So here's the problem.  I already said I'm not a good cook.  I CAN cook, but I can think of a lot of things to do that I think are much more enjoyable.  So we eat whatever I start throwing together at 3 or 4 o'clock in the afternoon.  You can guess what we've been eating - a lot of ground beef and green beans. How many ways can you prepare ground beef and green beans?  Well, if you like to cook the possibilities could be endless.  But if you don't care about cooking, what you come up with in 1 or 2 hours' time isn't very interesting much of the time. 

I set out to remedy this situation about three weeks ago.  I picked up six recipe books at the library and started reading.  And guess what? Not very many recipes called for ground beef and green beans.  I forgot to mention the 50 lbs of potatoes in the root cellar.  The recipes don't call for a lot of potatoes either.  They call for red bell peppers, torillas, capers, anchovies, pineapple, a lot of things I don't buy.  I don't buy them because I have green beans, ground beef, and potatoes that I need to use up.  And applesauce. 

So I rebel against all those cookbooks.   I like my green beans, potatoes, applesauce, my homemade bread, my grassfed beef.  I know where they came from and they are a lot cheaper than those glossy red bell peppers and other things.  But I'm still bored with my stuff. 

This week I am going to buy a bag of dried pinto beans and I'm going to can them in my empty pint jars.  I won't have time to do this next summer when I'm canning and freezing everything else.  And then I'm going to look for some recipes with beans in them.  I suppose that will break up the boredom a bit.

 Mostly, I think I will just have to hang in there until spring comes.  I can think of two spring foods - asparagus and spinach.  Bye, bye green beans.  And with the potatoes gone or over their prime, I will be freed up to buy pasta again.  And then strawberries and raspberries will begin to ripen - move over applesauce!!