Feeding People

I’m looking forward to tomorrow when another couple plans to join us lakeside for the grown-up equivalent of grandkid sledding and snowball fights (winter playtime). We women-folk may hike the road if it isn’t too icy, and then we intend to knit facecloths and talk over books of interest beside a roaring fire inside.

Meanwhile, the men-folk will tromp over the frozen lake to ice fish.  This means standing on the ice (or sitting on overturned buckets) in the frigid wind, holding a string with a hooked wormy thing on the end so it dangles through a little hole. As polar icemen, they’ll be in serious need of a warm-up after several hours in hot (cold?) pursuit of all things slimy and scaly.

After our gender-specific adventures, we’ll all share a soup-and-salad dinner. Fortunately these friends are interested in sampling our anti-inflammatory diet, which makes things easy for me. I thought hot soup might thaw out the men, and be easy to heat up at the last minute.  This afternoon I got a start on preparing a soup-and-salad-bar:

Kale Salad (lacinato kale with pine nuts, lemon juice, olive oil)

Purple Slaw (purple cabbage and other veggies, featuring homemade mayonnaise)

Harvest Soup (lentils, split peas, rice, various veggies, homemade turkey meatballs)

Borscht (a complex, one-of-a-kind creation, too involved to go into here)

I’ll bake bread and dessert in the morning: soda bread (made with almond flour and studded with raisins), and gluten-free, sugar-free blueberry pie (there is nothing I can say about this here to convince you, but yes, it is possible).  We’ll add some fresh fruit, goat cheese, and homemade gluten-free crackers, and voila – dinner!

Food prep has been an ongoing focus for much of my adult life, and I’m still at it in retirement, only with a healthier twist.  These days I’m often asked to share recipes from our current anti-inflammatory experience, and as a result, the cookbook I’ve threatened to author is becoming more of a serious objective.  I’m already well on the way to a good start, and hope to continue enlarging and tweaking the collection until it is ready to be at least copied, or better yet, published. It feels like a volume of this kind could be a sort of culmination of my life work in regard to food prep, a way to continue feeding people even after I am no longer here.