Surviving Below Zero Winter Days

With the last few days being below zero I went to my survival kit for help. There are no hand warmers or candles or blankets or hot tea in that kit. There's actually no kit. But there are memories of my grandmother's Johnny Cake recipe and my mother's recipe for a soup that came to be known as her Witch's Brew. Both recipes warm a below zero string of days and nights.

So yesterday I got busy.

A main ingredient in the Witch's Brew is acini d'pepe. Those tiny little balls of macaroni are what my kids most remember and most enjoyed. That's probably because, to them, those little balls resembled little eyeballs in the Witch's Brew.

They were eating eyeballs!

Lucky for me I had a few boxes of the eyeballs in the cupboard so out they came along with whatever else I needed. With the soup in the works, I brought out the cornmeal for the Johnny Cake which I turned into little muffins.

As the wind howled and the furnace went nonstop and the music played and the Witch's Brew kept simmering and the corn meal muffins baked, I thought of the generations that came before me and how they endured the below zero temperatures of Northern New York.

I thought of my grandfather harvesting ice from the St. Lawrence River, heading down Black Lake Road with a team of horses and flat-bedded sleigh before daybreak. I thought about my mother and her siblings rushing down the backstairs of the farmhouse to get dressed for school in the kitchen in the warmth of the woodstove.

We have it easy. And some days, like today, we have Witch's Brew and Johnny Cake to warm us up.