Mar 14 2009
Food To Fit the Weather
Do you plan your food around the weather? I try to sometimes. Recently, we’ve been eating a lot of soups, stews, one-dish hot pots. It’s been really cold and these dishes warm you up. Plus you can put them in the crock pot and everytime you walk in the house, it smells great. It’s a homey, winter thing to do.
So, when it did a little spring tease and turned warm last week, I thought I would do the spring food thing. We were going to grill out! We were going to eat outside! We were going to put a pot of marigolds on the picnic table and enjoy the season!
BBQ ribs - we hadn’t had those grilled out in a long time. And steak! I marinated the ribs all day in a pineapple juice marinade, and planned to brush them with a rub. No icky BBQ sauce or anything, like the pre-cooked “oven ribs” we’d been eating all winter! No, we were going to have sophisticated, spicy ribs, grilled dark to perfection.
And so the day came - but the weather didn’t. I don’t know about your weather people, but ours get it about half the time, maybe. Like last week we were going to have INCHES of snow in north GA. We were excited, had been to the grocery store to stock up, had the sleds out. And we had a few flakes, maybe. Come on guys!
And this day that was supposed to be warm and spring-like - just like the snow day - WASN’T. Dan was very chilly outside grilling our ribs. We huddled by the fireplace as he was cooking. The ribs were yummy, but we did not enjoy them outside on the picnic table with our marigolds. We were inside at the table, in our sweats, as usual.
A couple of days later, we were to have cold, rainy weather, where a “wedge” sets in and it stays dreary for a few days. “Ah ha!” I thought. The perfect weather for a hearty taco soup! My guys love this, and we hadn’t had it all winter. Sauteed ground turkey and onions, black beans, ranch beans, Mexican corn and salsa cooked all day in the crock pot. Hearty! Meaty! Warm you up food! Try some, you’ll love it!
And it would have smelled good all that cold day in our house…except we had the windows and house open all day because it was so WARM. I mean, 75 degrees warm. Shorts, sweaty run warm. Uncommonly warm for the time of year. The refreshing cold Mexican salad we had with the taco soup was much more popular than the soup that night.
So we took our soup and salad to the picnic table on the deck and ate our hearty winter meal al fresco that warm spring-like night…!
