A "Cookery" Day

Unless you like to cook or are a foodie you might want to skip this post.... By the time I entered high school I had taken over the cooking of the main meals and loved it to my mother's delight and once she was widowed at a young age she lived on fast food from A&W and MacDonald's. She lived to 96 so that diet couldn't have been that bad for her. So I 've been cooking for  well over 65 years.. You would think I'd be bored with it but I'm not.  It helps to have a husband who is a enthusiastic eater.

Since it is too cold to garden and I can't stitch. I pass a lot of time in the kitchen and my favorite is to get up in the morning, find the appropriate apron for my tasks, and cook the day away....what I call my "cookery" days.

Tomorrow will be such a day.  I have all my ingredients out and/or thawing,  I made a yeast riser for starting dinner rolls first thing in the morning while DH is showering and then I am fixing him latkes with salmon, sour cream and poached eggs.

We had that breakfast in Norway but they used either gravlax. caviar. or smoked  salmon. Having none of these I use some of the salmon in the freezer that son sent to us.. It was one of DH's favorite breakfasts.. Since he took a bad fall on the ice the other day I have been pampering him a little bit...maybe more than a little bit.

Then I will proceed next to making lasagna with meat sauce I made last summer and simmered it for hours.  I  have about a quarter of a large fennel bulb in the fridge and I will add that as well.  Fennel is one of my favorite vegetables and is often in Italian recipes,  Many of their recipes  for lasagna call for fennel seeds and some call for fennel as well.

I will top off my cookery day by making Rugalach, a Jewish holiday pastry that  is wide open for every kind of filling.  I will spread them with fig butter and add walnuts, chocolate and cinnamon. The dough for these can be resting while I do the lasagna.

I love it when I can find different ways to use up leftover ingredient.  When I bought the squash raviolis at Costco recently it was a large bag and I wanted to do something different with them this time and found a recipe for squash raviolis with caramelized onions and a cream roasted red pepper sauce.  It was delicious with halibut.  And an added plus was I found the first of this season's Caracara oranges at Trader Joes and made a salad of them, sliced fennel, almonds and greens....hence the left over fennel. Not only will my "cookery" day pass one of the last long dark winter days tomorrow, it will have passed today with finding recipes, ingredients, and supplies,  And as an added bonus the house will be filled with delicious aromas all day tomorrow...  a great way to celebrate the lengthening of the days and spring around the corner.