You Give Me Light, You Are My Day!

This is the year I really embraced the one pot casserole meals.  But when you take cheese, pasta and white flour products out of the equation it can be a little challenging.  You can still find your flow because almost anything braised and roasted will be right.

I was walking up from the subway station, it had snowed just enough to make me too paranoid to ride home.  There is this temperature when the snow looks like it melts but instead develops a slushy thin icy suicidal course for a biker.  I couldn't form intelligent thoughts on the subway because I get way too distracted by being in a closed car with strangers.  Instantly I begin accessing each of my fellow riders.  Friend or foe in an evacuation crisis?  Who would I trust to get us out of the tunnel alive should it all go south? Then, further down the slope...why would anyone buy those shoes?  Why don't I ever look put together in winter like this girl with her awesome perfectly wrapped scarf and matching cashmere mittens.  Am I super old?  My neckwarmer has snot on it, I can smell it.  No one even looks at me anymore. This guy over here wouldn't be attracted to someone like me I think.  This women thinks its okay to take up two seats with her damn bags.  I am not okay with that and if some old lady gets on at the next stop she bess be moving them bags, s'all I can say.  Why does that kid keep looking at me weird?  Am I some sort of freak to him?!  Thank goodness, my stop.  I exit with the urgency your cat gets when he needs to get to the litter box.  So walking up, I now had a block to come up with a dinner idea.

Turning the oven on would be incentive to warm up and get something good in my belly.  I ran through options, Italian, Mexican, Indian, American, Thai, Chinese.  This was not a night to get all fanciful.  I thought how I'd actually just love a huge antipasto platter, two valiums and possibly a rope.  But instead I opted to brown some thighs then added chicken stock, quinoa, roasted red peppers, pepperoncini peppers, marinated artichoke hearts, cannellini beans and mushrooms, lots of garlic and lemon, fresh oregano.  Put the lid on it, 45 minutes and it was so right. Just enough of a pickley brightness to feel light.  Just like the snow, wintery but not full blown heavy.