Winter wonderland

The inevitable has come. Yesterday's snow storm is today's winter wonderland.

This is the view from one of the back rooms. (Is it the library, the TV room, the room with the deck access? Hmmm. We are stifled with the usual indecisiveness when "things" hardly matter.)

Well, it is rather pretty to look at. This is the moment when I can look at the landscape to see if there is enough winter interests amongst the perennial beds. There is one stick between the deck posts in the middle of the picture. That is my native Eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis) that I planted last summer. It is nothing to look at now but it has the potential of being the focal point when it matures. (in 5 years)

While the snow slowly filled the landscape, I was indoors having a cooking marathon. I had a 2.5 kg of turkey breast thawed out & I had a mission!

There are 4 dishes in this photo. top L>R : turkey pasta with Thai basil sauce, veggie chili with tempeh, jambalaya; L corner: turkey barley soup. Still in the slow cooker & not shown is the turkey savoury stew.

I had a coworker who did this batch cooking with 2 other friends. The menu for 4-5 dishes & shopping were planned ahead. They met each Saturday when the spouses minded their small kids; they cooked everything from scratch. Then they split the fruits of their labor into 3 ways with each person packing her share according to her family size.

Cooking in large batches make sense for us because now that there are only the 2 of us, I don't feel like cooking all the time. Of course, I do this almost every week, snow storm or not.