Cooking Plans

Just batch it tonight, a can of soup and a grilled cheese, but I'm going to cook tomorrow as it's supposed to get down to ten degrees, so the stove will be hot. Ruled by my lifestyle. I went through a great many pork recipes, in the book from Barnhart's mother, but I'd already decided to cook the whole tenderloin so I could have the left-overs with beans. Fried potato rounds finished in the hot oven with Gorgonzola cheese. Hot tea, curled up with a book (Lescroart), the stove making small noises. Drift zone. I have the large new book opened at the island, and whenever I go over to feed the stove I stop and look at a few pages, read the prep. Most of them are too complex for my rustic abilities, but a wealth of information about combinations. I pretty much spent the entire day thinking about combinations. The word itself, and then the connotations. I didn't write anything, didn't edit anything, until late in the afternoon; I'd spent the day rubbing small quantities of dried herbs between my fingers, and smelling them. I could taste them, paired with the tenderloin, which I actually plan to cook in a green chili sauce, with rosemary. Good timing on the fire, as it is pumping maximum heat just when it needs to. I've got a couple of gnarly pieces of wood for overnight, and I've set out a complete kit to start another fire if I should happen to sleep through the night. Quite cold and getting colder so I suited-up and went out for a wheel-barrow load of firewood. When I got back inside, it was so warm, the air perfumed with wood-smoke and bacon fat, that I immediately made a pone of cornbread. In my experience it's never a mistake to make hot bread. In the interest of which, I'd read several different places about cooking cornbread on a bayonet over an open fire. Civil War journals. Decided I needed to try that, but I didn't have a bayonet. I did have a garden trowel, a good one, thick steel, missing its handle, which I tricked out with a green hickory stick, and, in fact, if you make a thick batter and smear it on with a wooden spatula, on a pre-heated and oiled trowel, you can make an acceptable corn cake. They were probably cooking left-over grits on their bayonets. It's pretty much the same thing. I put on a batch of grits, in the baby crock pot, for breakfast tomorrow; coldest night of the season, and the house is warm, listening to Miles Davis, crumbled cornbread with cracklings in a mug of warm milk. Life is good. Right on time, having drunk a glass of water before I napped, I woke up at two in the morning, peed off the deck, and it is frigid cold, a little less than ten degrees, I catch the fire and put on a couple of logs. Life is so much nicer if your cave is warm. I stay up for a while, get a wee dram and roll a smoke; the silence is like a blanket. I have a list, I'll get out, sometime soon, it's a dry wind now, sublimating the snow; I'm so comfortable I beg the question, whatever the question was.