Back to winter

 Although winter storm Xylia hit with windy fury about 1:00, it didn’t amount to much here.  We might get a little more snow tonight. It is disheartening to see the ground turn white again, but it’s not really a bad thing. We don’t want the fruit trees to get any big ideas about blooming when we have a good 8 weeks before the frost-free date in May. I was glad I didn’t have to go anywhere or be outside long in such a cold, fierce wind. Brrr. A good day to sit inside under a lap blanket and drink tea.

Wind-blown snow of winter storm Xylia

I filled my bird feeder and am enjoying the visitors. I saw this downy woodpecker today.

Downy woodpecker

Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal stopped by this morning. A house finch hopped around the periphery trying to get a chance at the birdseed on the ground.

A pair of cardinals and house finch interloper

A robin and a mourning dove were having a tiff about who got the optimal foraging spot directly under the feeder when a flock of about two dozen brown-headed cowbirds descended and scared them away. Unlike the redwing blackbirds, which are all males right now, the cowbirds seemed evenly split between males and females. The blackbird males arrive before the females to establish their territories and get ready for the ladies to arrive. Cowbirds, being nest parasites, have no need of territories and nesting sites. I do think their arrival is premature. There won’t be any nests to parasitize for a couple of weeks yet.

A flock of male and female brown-headed cowbirds

Over the weekend, I tried a new recipe for orecchiette (“little ears”). The recipe came from a celebrity chef featured in a general-interest magazine. Danger, danger, Will Robinson! I have made pasta enough to know that a recipe calling for 4 cups of flour will make enough to feed the threshers (to borrow a metaphor from my grandmother). My usual pasta takes one cup of flour, one egg, and a bit of water, and makes enough for two meals. (The egg is the limiting factor. Who wants to make something with half an egg? Not me.) This recipe was just flour and water. I made a ¼ batch. In addition to picking a probably-not-rigorously-tested recipe, I didn’t read the recipe carefully prior to starting the recipe at 4:15 p.m. Imagine my surprise when I found that the dough was supposed to rest an hour. That didn’t happen. The chef selected orecchiette because this form of pasta can be made without any specialized equipment. It is an awful lot of hand work, however. Each “ear” needed to be squished in the palm of one hand using the thumb of the other hand. If a person made a full recipe, it would definitely require either a team effort or all day.

So many orecchiette--and only 1/4 of the recipe!

I swapped out broccoli rabe in favor of spinach that I had on hand. I used our homemade pork sausage instead of making chicken sausage. I followed the recipe’s white wine/chicken stock reduction, and it tasted fine. The orecchiette were more like dough balls than pasta. I’ll be sticking to my specialized pasta machine in the future. No more dough balls for me.

Orecchiette with sausage and spinach