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One of my least favorite things about winter is the constant chatter of vox pops on the local news, in which people express the novel notion that it’s very, very cold out, and they don’t like it. I don’t like cold weather either, at least not this kind of cold, but I find it necessary. I am a big believer in seasons, and to me a fierce winter is the price you pay for a gentle spring, much as a baking-hot summer is the price you pay for a brilliant, crisp autumn. I grew up in northeastern Pennsylvania, in the Poconos, and I learned early to mistrust that warm snap in February, when the temperature would near 50 degrees, the ice would turn into little tributaries, and the dirt would feel soft underneath my boots. I knew that this was a debt we were incurring, and within weeks we would have to pay up. Sure enough, we would wake up one morning to 7 degrees, with a 15-below wind chill. When Stephen King wrote in his novella “The Sun Dog” that it was the debt that hurt you but the interest that broke your back, I thought immediately of those winters.

I am even more leery of winters that never get very cold, 50 degrees and wet all winter long. Not only is it dreary—too warm for snow activities, too cold for much else—but once spring arrives, there is a sameness to it all; that soft mud, that gentle air, it becomes status quo, rather than the marvel it should be. It should be a marvel, to walk around the city, or sit in my parents’ backyard, or troop through woods and meadows, feeling warm air on my face and arms like a gift, feeling loved on this earth, all of us rewarded for our patience during those long dark fierce winter months. Because I am descended, on both sides of my family, from peoples of cold dark northerly green countries, I can’t have one without the other. So the Arctic cold front currently grinding the East Coast under its bootheel should fit right into my plans. Only...Jesus, it’s cold. I had forgotten how strenuous and draining it is, living in this kind of cold, how every gust of wind feels like an assault. I had forgotten the dread of waking up and seeing frost on the windows, knowing that that was the harbinger of a particular brand of cold, the kind that made you feel that you were being eaten alive. I had also forgotten how LuthorCorp loves to overcompensate in extreme weather, leaving us bluelipped in the dog days of August, and dry-roasted on a day when the wind chill hit 30 below zero. It is enough to make a girl run shrieking, or at least dream of escape. My dear friends who live in balmier and more temperate zones have graciously invited me and/or Lloyd to head southward or westward until all of this arctic nonsense blows over.  Fresser that I am, though, there is only one place I want to go right now: anyplace in Australia, or New Zealand, where I can get my hands on some finger limes.

When the weather turns cold, I deal with it in two ways. One is to make a lot of rib-sticker foods, one-pot dishes: the famous braised chicken and chestnuts from Land of Plenty; beef with carrots and prunes, covered with stout and baked for hours in a slow oven; the wonderful Gran’maw Peacock’s Chicken and Rice from The Gift of Southern Cooking by Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock. This is one of the best chicken & rice dishes you will ever eat, and it is also one of the easiest things you could ever make. (Since this is a copyrighted recipe, I will not post it, but if you are keen to try it, e me.) The other way is to turn 180 degrees from the baked and stodgy and embrace the warm and zippy. This year I have backed down from my normally strict insistence on eating with the seasons, simply because there are only so many baked parsnips one can eat without screaming. This year I have fallen back on chile peppers, haricots verts, broccoli, mustard greens and black kale. I have come back to cabbage, loathed in childhood, adored now that I know the proper way to eat it (raw, pickled or very lightly cooked). And I find myself giving thanks every day that I was born in a time where limes are cheap and plentiful.

I am a mad fool for tart, sour flavors. Much as a normal person’s mouth waters at the thought of a perfectly roasted prime rib, a bowl of buttery peas or a coconut cake with seven-minute icing, so does mine at the thought of a green tomato pickle, or the little rose-colored Greek pickled onions known as volvi, or the biting tamarind candies that I sometimes find in Asian markets. At this time of year I envy my British friends with access to forced rhubarb, as over here we don’t see the best and affordable stuff until May, and so I must wait, tastebuds humming in anticipation. To my mind, though, the best taste in the world is to be found inside a passion fruit, so unpromising at first glance (that wrinkled shell! those spooky seeds!) but so brilliant and sunny and tart and loaded with promise. Every time I share a passion fruit with someone, the reaction is the same: a look of trepidation, a startled “oh!” at first taste, a smile. This lovely fruit has two big drawbacks, though: it lends itself better to sweet dishes than to savories, and, at least where I live, they are expensive. The market where I find them charges $1.75 a piece for them; this for a single fruit that yields about a tablespoon of pulp. There are few things more dispiriting than to open up a cookbook and see “passion fruit, about two dozen” in the ingredient list. I keep hearing rumors of passion fruit being cultivated in Florida and California, cheaper by far than the pricy imported Pacific Rim fruit. I am still waiting.

No, what I really need to get me through the winter is a fruit that is cheap and plentiful, can be used in sweets and savories alike, and makes me feel like a little ray of sunshine, inside and out. Lemons do the trick beautifully. Limes do it even better.

As part of my overall January post-holiday, pre-spring dietary housecleaning, I have been cooking my way through Sally Schneider’s A New Way to Cook. Ordinarily I have no truck with low-fat, or even lower-fat, cookbooks; I have no patience for regimes and I have never embraced, in Nigella Lawson’s words, the way, the truth and the lite, but into every stubbornly-held crotchet falls an exception, and A New Way to Cook is mine. Some of the recipes are more high-maintenance cookery than others; for every brown butter/balsamic vinegar sauce, there are about ten recipes with long ingredient lists and very specific cooking techniques. Tonight I will be making hummus, the fodder for a dozen brown-bag lunches, and thus I will be toasting spices, grinding them, chopping garlic, blending them all together with tahini and lemon juice and then zizzing them in the food processor, along with the chickpeas I soaked on Monday and cooked last night. It is all worth it, I tell myself, because when I am done I can have a fruit salad dressed with Greek yogurt, brown sugar, cardamom and lime juice.

I have been eating insane quantities of limes, in seafood salad, in Thai hot and sour soup, in “brick chicken” (chicken marinated in lime juice, garlic and rosemary, pressed under a foil-wrapped brick and cooked in a cast-iron skillet). Normally there is no better way to roast a chicken than with a lemon up its bottom, but every once in a while I use a lime instead, and the result is a familiar yet exotic flavor. I’d always known in the back of my mind that lime juice + fish sauce + chile + ginger + rice vinegar + a little pinch of sugar was a workable combination, but I never realized just how gloriously all these flavors mesh together, particularly when you heat them for a few minutes. And I won’t even begin to discuss desserts—well, okay, I will begin to discuss desserts. The best cake I know how to make, the closest thing to a signature cake that I have, is a basic buttermilk cake, the kind you can find in cookbooks from Maida Heatter to Gale Gand, flavored with a lot of cardamom (do you sense a theme here?) and lime zest, soaked with quantities of lime syrup when you pull it hot from the oven. I made baked apricots last night, dried California apricots (so much bigger, brighter and more tart than their Turkish counterparts) soaked to plumpness, dressed with some of the soaking liquid, sugar flavored with cardamom and the inside of a vanilla bean, and several squeezes of lime juice. I ate those sticky, warm apricots with a little blob of full-fat Greek yogurt, and trust me, there was not a part of my body that wasn’t happy when I ate it.

You would think that I have a bit of an obsession with limes, those unprepossessing little handballs in the supermarket, nice enough for a gin and tonic but little else. Until last week I would have disagreed with you; I would have said that limes are greatly underappreciated, their propensity to flood the coldest, most arctic days with warmth and sunshine vastly underrated. I would have said, hopefully not too meanly, it’s not my problem, it’s yours, you philistine, you. Then the New York Times food section ran an article (since archived on their web page, damn them) about exotic limes, such as the Thai cuisine fixture makrut lime (never kaffir lime, not on this page, at least). On the front page was the most amazing thing I had ever seen, the cross section of an Australian finger lime. The little elongated juice sacs that make up a section of citrus fruit, those that are so lovely when your fruit is fresh and sweet, and so nasty when it is old and dried out, are called vesicles. The vesicles in a finger lime are perfectly round and large, about the size of fish roe, or large-pearl tapioca. Apparently Ferran Adria, the chef at El Bulli in Spain, was moved to tears when he tried one, and Daniel Boulud, a very snappy piece of cheese in the New York restaurant world, is aching to get his hands on finger limes for his restaurant. We cannot get them here, at least not yet. And thus my obsession is fostered. I imagine cutting a finger lime open, tipping the vesicles into my mouth, crunching them between tongue and palate, feeling my mouth fill with intense sunshine, and I know, I have to go wherever I can go to find those, right now.

Dear friends,

I am gobsmacked.  I’ve been back online for about 24 hours, but since my nice little return post turned into another honkin’ behemoth, I decided to wait until I was close to posting it before checking to see if anyone had come to visit while I was away.  Come to visit you did.  My golly.

I still have trouble believing that these little nonsenses I issue in this space are interesting to anyone else, but I will not protest too much.  I have no idea what good deed I did in history to deserve such kind, excellent and funny friends.  Thank you, each and every one of you.  Glory be.  (The funk’s in me.  We want the funk.  This is nineteen seventy-fiiiiiiive...okay, I’ll stop.)

So is that it?  That’s the best you can do after more than a week, slacker girl? No, no, of course not.  Give me some time to do my edits and links, and prepare to be bludgeoned.

Dear friends,

Rest assured, this is not a case of blogbandonment.  I will be offline for at least a week, hopefully not too much more.  It’s nothing scary, nothing dire, but nothing that can be encapsulated without boring you all into a coma.  Suffice it to say that I will be back, hopefully with good news, and just itching to talk foodstuffs with yinz guys.

Dear friends,

I know what you’re thinking:  is our Bakerina a flash in the pan?  Two days’ worth of recycled prose, two days’ sabbatical, now just a bunch of crappy interstitials?  I would not blame you for thinking such things, but stop thinking such things.  It seems that the past week’s arctic cold front (three degrees in NYC this weekend! Three degrees!) brought some mysterious and malevolent bug with it, because said bakerina has been feeling ill.  Symptoms include fever, fatigue, malaise, ennui, gloom, a fruit-fly-like attention span, headache, dropsy, impetigo, low blood pressure, high blood pressure, acid-reflux disease, fear for the future, lack of interest in the future, sore throat, insatiable appetite for navel oranges, anthrax, housewife’s knee and nymphomania.

As you might suspect, all this has hindered my ability to string two or three thousand words together, but rather than just take a little sabbatical, maybe say “hi, friends, I’m taking a little sabbatical” first...nooooo, I have to share it all with you. 

Until I am on the mend, then, I will probably just throw a few nuggets of love your way.  (If you think I’m throwing nuggets of something else, well, then, thank *you* for sharing.)

A moment of silence, for seneca has shut down All is Vanity.  I was so looking forward to his return from his own winter sabbatical, and I’m sorry to see that he’s making it permanent.  I’m still too shy to beg him to return, but seneca, if you’re reading this, won’t you reconsider?

The Universe Has a Sense of Whimsy, Part MM: On December 4, the very day that I posted my love letter to Petits Propos Culinaires and The Wilder Shores of Gastronomy, the Guardian ran Alan Davidson’s obituary.  I had no idea he had died until I picked up my new copy of Saveur, where he is listed in this year’s Saveur 100.  Davidson was the founder of PPC and its publishing arm, Prospect Books, as well as The Oxford Companion to Food, not only a peerless resource book but the best food writing you will read anywhere.  Please, please do read the obit, which was written by his successor at Prospect and long-time friend Tom Jaine.  Alan Davidson was a singular guy, and I will spend the rest of my life singing his praises to anyone who will listen.

Previously, on Prepare to Meet Your Bakerina…

Wednesday, May 7. Carla picks me up and before saying good morning, says, “Go inside and ask them how to get to I-89. If we take I-89 to I-91, we can miss all of the traffic through Hanover.” This is like saying that the shortest distance between two points is an angle, but I tell her I’d be glad to try it tomorrow morning, i.e. not today, when we have five minutes to get to class. En route, she tells me that her boss is not taking her news well, and wants her to work for them for one more week. She doesn’t want to say no because she doesn’t want to burn any bridges, but she can’t, just can’t work with those people for even one second more, so what she has decided to do is tell them that she will be back next week, then the day before they’re expecting her, she’ll call and tell them that she has car trouble and is stranded in Vermont, with no way to get home. What do I think? You can probably guess.

Woo-hoo! Puff pastry day! We take our fully turned, sheeted dough and start baking it for napoleons. We cut more puff into circles for apple galettes and Italian kerchief turnovers. We also - and this is big fun - learn how to make marshmallows, which will top our s’mores tarts tomorrow. (S’mores tart consists of a graham-cracker tart shell, a chocolate diplomat cream and a marshmallow garnish, which we will toast with the blowtorch.) We take our rugelach dough, which is similar to puff even though it is not puff, and make big, gorgeous rugelach with them. I am a fan of tiny rugelach, about the size of cockle shells, but I will make an exception for this rugelach here. We also make a 5” flourless chocolate cake that we will decorate on Friday. This is a lethal cake - nothing but chocolate, butter, eggs, sugar and Chambord, which you need to keep the cake from curdling.

The day proceeds like ballet, where I work so fast and so hard but with such concentration that now I know the true meaning of flow. There is a moment of nerves when the time comes to assemble, decorate and cut my napoleons, but in the end I manage to conjure up half a dozen saleable, if not perfect, little napoleons. The desk crew at the Rezz will fall on these, too, and on the apple galette, and the kerchiefs, and the cream horns. We taste them, and I marvel at how light butter can be. Not that I’m saying that it’s a diet food, not by any stretch, but that when you handle butter properly, at the proper temperature, how light and non-greasy it bakes up. I bite into a cream horn and it shatters against my canines. I want to go home and make a new batch of puff and use it for pithiviers, the French cake made with puff and almond cream, a cake that is nasty if you get it wrong, but amazing if you get it right. I reward myself by going to the KA store and spending $70 on a French textbook on decorative bread techniques.

Thursday, May 8. When Carla picks me up - after I tell her that there’s no way to travel on 89 and 91 in less than 20 minutes - we have no way of knowing that today will be an adventure day. We are preparing genoise for the cakes we will fill and decorate on Friday. Each of us has been given our own butane-fired burner, over which we will whip our whole eggs and sugar to 120 degrees and then immediately put it on the mixer and beat at high speed until we have a stable foam. Because all of the cakes have to go into the oven at the same time - sponge cakes will not stand - we all synchronize our burners and start beating together. As I am beating, I notice a piece of hazelnut sponge batter that I apparently forgot to clean out of my bowl. Tim, the Verizon guy, announces that he has hit 120 degrees, then cries out, “Wait! The eggs have scorched!” I look closely - that wasn’t hazelnut batter in my bowl - that was scorched egg. All six of us have scorched our eggs at precisely the same moment. We throw out our rapidly-curdling eggs, get new bowls, and try again, this time over a bain marie. Genoise progresses without incident, at least until they come out of the oven, where we discover that all of our cakes, including Chef’s, have fallen. He vows to try it again tonight, to see what went wrong.

After our baptism by fire, we are relieved to see that that will be the worst of it. Our tart shells are baked and ready to go. We also spend a few hours with the head pastry chef of the KA Bakery, who teaches us a neat trick for putting a fast woven lattice on our torti di ricotta and our linzertortes. We bake the t.d r., the linzertortes and a lemon meringue pie that has the tartest, lemoniest filling I have ever tasted. We also make a fresh fruit tart filled with diplomat cream, an apricot/frangipane tart, the vaunted s’mores tart and something called an “extreme chocolate” tart, which is filled with an extra-bittersweet ganache that is like a truffle, but more so. It is a wondrous day, marred only by my need to physically turn away from Carla because I can’t bear to watch her hold a pastry bag. At some time in her life she taught herself to use a pastry bag, but she did not know how to place her hands to get maximum leverage from the bag, so as a result her hand is always in an upside-down position, so she has no leverage or control over what she is piping. Both Chef and I, at her request, have showed her how to hold the bag, even physically taking her hand and placing it where it needs to be, but she can’t retain the memory of it. As I feared, her dustup with her boss has broken her concentration for the week, and she cannot hold information for more than five minutes. I know that she has dreams of running her own shop, and I want her to succeed, but what I have seen of her this week indicates that she has a long learning curve ahead of her, and I am worried for her. On the other hand, she did raise four children while working full-time, so I think I just haven’t seen her in her element.

Friday, May 9. Today is my brother’s 25th birthday and, slacker that I am, I have forgotten his birthday present. (Later I call my mom and she said he told her that he had forgotten until two days ago that his birthday was coming up, a far cry from his childhood when he used to plan for his birthday weeks in advance.) Today is our day to wrap it all up, fill and decorate our cakes, say our goodbyes, marvel at the speed with which the week progressed, and go home. Except for me, because at 5 p.m. I am going to the Norwich Inn to attend a reception for Peter Reinhart, who will be teaching a demo class at the school the next day. Peter Reinhart is the head of the bread program at Johnson & Wales, the former owner of Brother Juniper’s Cafe in California, and the author of six bread books, including the truly wondrous Bread Baker’s Apprentice. He also has a loyal following of breadheads who have taken his classes repeatedly and will travel hundreds of miles to see him, much like Deadheads. Deadheads...breadheads...heh.

I get a tremendous sense of deja vu on Friday morning, as it shapes up much like Monday. Carla can’t pick me up because she is waiting for a call from her husband (long story, one that I will not share, for once!), the taxi service is booked, the hotel shuttle is unavailable...so at 6:50 I head out, arriving in Hanover an hour later. Because I have some time to kill, I stop at the Dirt Cowboy Cafe, order an iced chai and a biscuit, and think quiet, pleasant thoughts. The Dirt Cowboy is a really neat little place, one that no college town should be without.

By the end of class, we have produced a hazelnut torte filled and iced with praline buttercream, one of the best substances in the world. We have made a raspberry mousse cake, genoise filled with raspberry mousse and iced with whipped cream. Chef makes an alternate mousse cake which he ices with white chocolate ribbons. Chef is a genius. He breaks my heart. (He has also cracked the code on the genoise; the pans were too small for the amount of batter produced, so we all overfilled our pans, causing the sides to set up too quickly and the middles to collapse.) He also saves more than one of our lives; as we have our cakes on turntables, piping the rosettes on which we will place our hazelnut decorations, he walks by, watching us, complimenting us, giving us pointers. He stops in front of our bench and says, kindly (much more kindly than I would have), “Carla, this is something you’ll want to work on when you get home. You’ve been holding the bag wrong all week, which means that it’s become a habit, but I know that it’s a habit you can undo.” What a man. We make a torta meringata, an orange/olive oil cake filled with that amazing puckery lemon filling left over from the pies, iced with Swiss meringue, toasted with the blowtorch and showered with edible glitter. Mine gets a wee bit too toasty, but it is still beautiful. We taste, we evaluate, we are done by 3 p.m. Since I am not going back to the hotel, I give one of my cakes to the retail staff at the KA store and the rest to Chef, who regularly donates cakes to a charity that provides rooms for the families of hospitalized children receiving care at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. I have two hours to kill, no plans to go to the hotel, no real inclination to walk into Hanover or Norwich...so I sit down on my rock next to the pond, take out my notebook, and proceed to write this letter.