dance you snowflakes, winter is almost here

Yes, its officially freezing up here. Today I bought vegies and all I can think of cooking is soups and curries. Arrgh me hearties. I have started wearing thermal leggings and jumpers under things.

If you are keen for a bit of frostbite and festival fun, the wintermagic festival is happening soon. First 2 keen beans to book my spare room win themselves free festival accomodation.

Click here for more info (aboutthe festival, not my spare room).

What is beautiful about this time of year is the autumn leaves, dusting off teddy bear jackets from depest darkest wardrobe depths and cooking, cooking cooking.

The food co-op has a remarkable selection of lovely things at the mo: eggplants, all orange vegetables, broccoli, a zillion kinds of potatoes including those great pale yellow waxy kinds, sald veg, fresh chestnuts, fresh walnuts, wild Chinese garlic..and more. Tonight I was admiring a particularly shiny, hard, lovely onion just (before cutting it and slowly cooking it in very nice organic spanish olive oil and a dash of balsamic...) A simple brown onion, but such a nice specimen, so fresh. Aaaah, winter cooking.

I think it calls for:
- anything with tomatoes, chilli and capers
- anything baked and stuffed with other things
- anything swimming in a clear soup and featuring udon
- baking with yeast (and here I defer to Merirsa and Mermaidgrrl as I suck at yeast cooking)
- anything with pumpkin

I might be getting carried away, but last week I took a bunch of (gently plucked) small branches of Japanese Maple and other leaves to work and made a bit of an Autumn ikebana corner. My pod mates were surprisingly pleased, and even the one who I recently told (nicely) that his corner needed joozhing was happy with the leaf extravaganza being perched on his shelves.

You see, otherwise you don't even feel the seasons in our laminexish office environ. Day in day out: nice moderate temperature, typey type, cups of tea, meetings, phone hook ups, the sneaky personal email, the spontaneous pause and chat, the lunch at the table over the newspaper, typey type, cup of tea, guilty look at the to do list, a quick but more typey type, the email flick, shut down, gather belongings, home time. Repeat ad nauseum. No gales, no sunshine, no autunm leaves...

Next perhaps it will be the haiku poetry comp for the pod or rousing a team of snowflakes for the office winter pantomime('no, I just don't *feel* it - you're meant to be cold remember? Try it again'). Or perhaps planting out the library area with bulbs so we can all feel spring arrive. Aaah.