A Welcome Home

When everything seems... just right

Cozy fall is here, and I feel full, happy, and, somehow, more real, more of this place I now call home. Today marked the first day of true autumn for me, and not only because of the chill.

This morning, after a very long sleep — the previous week had been a grueling one on my tour for Borderlands — I woke up, threw off my freshly-installed set of flannel sheets, padded upstairs from the nest of a bedroom I’ve created in my basement, and looked out my back door. It had rained overnight, just enough to refresh the little green world of mine that is slowly settling into its winter slumber.

Outside, it was 40 degrees. Inside, 65. I’ll keep the house at this most of the winter, and chances are it won’t see 70 degrees for another six months. I am comfy in an old Hunter Angler Gardener Cook hoodie and a pair of gray sweatpants. It’s not quite cold enough for wool socks in the house yet, but soon.

I heated up water in my favorite pot for coffee, then decided it was time to restart my winter morning tradition of multigrain porridge, laced with dried lingonberries, sunflower seeds and sweet cream.

As it simmered, casting welcome steam throughout my house, I fed my rye sourdough starter. It’s finally time to bake again, after a long summer off. My starter sits happily perched on my counter, and I think about rye breads past. A light loaf shared at a picnic near a lake with tinned fish, apples and lots of cheese springs to the forefront. That was a good day.

I plunk a big pot of beans on the stove, which will become my first chili of the season; if you’ve never made my chili, you really ought to. No matter the meat (I’m using venison), the recipe has won nearly a hundred chili cook-offs over the years. Make it and you will not be sad. I promise.

Setting the oven to 400 degrees, I sliced in half my first Hidatsa squash of the year, making sure to cut the first one that had ripened, back in early August. First in, first eaten…

Autumn is when I start to feel Minnesotan, or, probably more accurately, more of this place, the Upper Midwest. I am certain I’d have the same feeling were I in Bismarck or Bad Axe or Belle Plaine. I live in a place where heat is a visitor. The White Queen of Winter rules here.

Hoodies and sweaters and felt-lined jeans and parkas and heavy gloves and very much yes to those wool socks. This is how we dress. And because of this, it is why we wear tank tops in 60-degree weather, shorts in 40, and wilt when the mercury climbs too much past 90. As much as I love the steamy sensuality of summer, the sheen of sweet sweat on the neck of a lover, it is the coziness of the cold that excites me. Then, the sheen is of our own making.

Our foodways reflect this. Now is when we eat game, and lots of it. Pheasant thighs or deer backstrap, roast grouse or a homey venison hotdish. These are the flavors of our fall. And all winter the stew pot sings softly, her scent — beans, herbs, root vegetables, simmering meat or fish — lingering in unexpected corners of your house even days later. More than once I’ve caught that scent and smiled.

It was the opposite in Sacramento. There, where we were children of the sun, winter seemed an unwelcome visitor. It snowed only once in the 20 years I lived there, and that lasted barely two hours. Try as I might — and try I did, for decades, I never could convince the cells of my body that it was truly cold enough for a carbonnade or giant pot of Polish bigos.

There, cooking fresh, seasonal and local has always been child’s play. Something wonderful comes into season every month of the year in Sacramento. I hit peak NorCal one December with a recipe for Dungeness crab salad with pomegranates, persimmons and avocado — and caught flak for it from bascially the rest of the country. Justifiably so.

Here, I have dried, fermented, salted, pickled, and frozen what I hope is a winter’s worth of both staples and specialities, treats and snacks. We’re not quite done here in St. Paul yet — there are still green tomatoes to make into chutney, unripe peppers to pickle, the last volunteer green beans to pluck from the vine, a pair of final Hidatsa squash. And the gigantic Jerusalem artichoke patch I won’t even begin to dig until Halloween, at the earliest.

But we’re all settling in. My nighttime ritual of washing the day off, pouring myself either a nip of mezcal or a hot cup of mint tea — the mint grown in my garden — tucking into my nest and reading, reading, reading, has just begun. I welcome it.