Manhattan does Brueghel

Fort Tryon Park at the northern tip of Manhattan yesterday, in waning light.

We had a beautiful, snowy walk.

More to come.

Terrace in the snow

We woke up to a morning of plush white. I popped the hatch on our landing and climbed up to where the wind whistled through a snowfield, formerly the summer farm.

The roofs, formerly a messy collection of patched tar and silvertop are now a unified and extravagant white. Stunning.

I looked across the street and noticed the hatch was open on our neighbour's roof, below, from which I took a picture of our terrace at the beginning of winter. We had said that I might come over to take some snow pictures today, but when I emailed him to ask if they'd be around, the email in response, with picture, explained that they had had a fire in their apartment early this morning. We had no idea. Heard nothing.

They have just renovated their apartment, and an old beam beneath the floor caught alight. The floor has been ripped up and now there is hole between them and their downstairs neighbours. So not everyone one is having a good snow day. Uncannily,  the same thing happened to friends of ours years ago, in the East Village, also in an old, but newly renovated building. It is heart breaking.

So, appearances can be deceiving. I thought the popped hatch signaled come on over. Instead, it said, Fire.

Keep your smoke alarms primed.

And now we will explore our snowy world...

The storm arrives

By the time I'd returned from a quick errand to buy candles and long life milk, the snow had started to fall. Such beautiful, floating stuff. The wind turned my umbrella inside out, but I was smiling.

The terrace is an easy place to chill this evening's drinks. 

The herbs hibernate.  

                                      Even this first feathering of real snow turns the street pretty.

I umoulded the terrine - a success, and pretty heady with garlic and herbs and cognac. I had a slice for a late lunch, with the first of the korrelkonfyt (grape preserves) bought in summer at Oep ve Koep.

We look forward to snowy adventures this weekend...

Terrines, while we wait

As an afterthought, I made a rabbit terrine.

Tonight, if they make it through the snow**, we'll feed friends on the rest of the rabbit, in mustard sauce. But my very limited experience with the, ah...bunny, is that there are many annoying little bones. So this time I reserved just the legs for dinner and then cut the meat from all the other bits, to spare us the toothpick size problems. I have frozen all the stripped bones for making stock. The meat I chopped up with the liver and kidneys (did I just hear a vegetarian pass out..? I'm sorry)...

The terrine is a hybrid of Patricia Wells' recipe in Bistro Cooking and Richard Olney's in Simple French Food. Haha. Simple. He was a funny man. I suppose simple is relative. I messed with the seasonings, as usual - cognac, juniper, lots of thyme and a heavy hand with the salt and pepper. And I added, at Olney's suggestion, a paste of breadcrumbs and garlic.

I'll only know how it tastes once I've unmoulded it. It cooked in a low oven in a bain marie. Hot water bath. As I type is the terrine is weighed down with one jar of grape jam, a can of beans and a bottle of artichokes, with dry black beans as ballast. This will compress it a little and also press the meat layer below the fat that melted from the applewood-smoked bacon. I've made a similar terrine before, for a dinner over a year ago, and, like an idiot, I did not write that one down. It was very good. This one will be different, but at least this time I took notes. My newer habit. I have a little black book of untranscribed recipes, now...

Otherwise, we wait. For the promised - or threatened snow. I am very excited. If you have a warm bed to sleep in, and a roof over your head, snow is very beautiful. I'll never grow tired of its magic.

**...well, we now have five courses of deliciousness to last us through the weekend! Snow is coming down, and, so far, it's gorgeous.

Life above Henry Street

All through dinner a car alarm on the street below goes off, intermittently. Eventually we figure out that it does so only when another vehicle drives by. At least we learn this after I hang over the edge of the terrace to watch the street below, wearing Tshirt and jeans in the light snow.

Later, long after dinner, all hell breaks loose on the street. Like a meerkat I pop my head over the side of the terrace again to see what's going on. The owner of the very same car is there and is now standing beside his car, pressing on his horn, for ten seconds at a time and waking the neighbourhood. A woman wrapped in a bathrobe appears at a window across from us, phone in hand, her elegant apartment backlit behind her. The man on the street walks up and down and shouts up at the brownstones. A couple on the sidewalk passes. He returns to the car and presses the horn again - a sort of bedlam of bent steel and exploding trumpets. It's awful and shatters the night. The couple on the street notice an approaching police van and wave it down. They gesture at the man. I am delighted. Karma on wheels. I turn from the show on the street and climb down from the cold stone table, onto the chair, step onto the gravel quickly, bare feet cold, and catch my knee on the sharp edge of the field stone slab, a jolting pain down the bone, and hop inside to explain the whole drama to Vince, who seems unimpressed. Vince is tired of New York. In the night my patched knee bleeds on the white sheets; a tiny, deep cut.

It's not a very noisy neighbourhood. And by New York standards Henry Street is fairly quiet. Because we are sandwiched between a hospital (under threat of closure, now) and a nursing home, unnecessary ambulance sirens are not unusual, and, always, the business of the street continues. Nurses and doctors park, and unpark after their shifts end, home owners circle like hawks, watching for a parking spot. Young, late night drunks weave home loudly on the sidewalks under the oaks at weekends. We hear them  because this is winter and our small bedroom window stays open to the cold air, which we like.

Our architect friends, Eric and Mimi, remarked that the bedroom-division within our apartment is in fact illegal - its window is too small. Inhumane, in short. These are the same nArchitects who just won the competition to design microunits for the City of New York. I hope their dinners in this impossible space had some influence. In summer, the inhumane window whose reflections of overlapping and melting squares of bright sunlight against the white walls in the mornings, that teach me to tell time through the changing year, shuts, and we return to a silent cocoon, cushioned by the white roar of the air conditioner.

But now it has been open for months, to the street, the sirens, the voices, the wind, the rain on the roof outside, and, if we are lucky, the soft patter of a promised Friday snow storm.

Winter reading in Martha Stewart Living

Here, page one of a two page spread of really stunning books: carefully curated suggested winter reading for gardeners, appearing in this month's print issue of Martha Stewart Living. I think I have enough books and then I see something like this and my mouth begins to water. Where to put them? Stacks on floor. Only answer. On this page Amy Stewart's earthworm book, Latin for Gardeners and the gorgeous Ken Druse book (we share a publisher) speak to me.

(Also in February's issue, garden photographer Marion Brenner's own garden with her tips for capturing your garden at its best...)

Go, buy some paper!

Flowers and lemons

I am late. Like that rabbit. I chose to stew in my publishing juices yesterday (...also a little like a rabbit, but a less active one) and so failed to hook up with the flowerathon hosted at Small but Charming.

But, like that actress I knew who would arrive an hour late and make her entrance just as everyone else's sobriety was teetering on the edge as they drank to fill in the time, Here I am: Flowers! In the house.

I know. Tulips, February. But I have been loving them.

The books. Claudia Roden's is an old favourite, The New Book of Middle Eastern Food. I have begun to investigate The Lebanese Kitchen - a beautiful book, with some mistakes in the recipes, but very interesting ideas, some of which are new to me. I have not yet dived into Naomi Duguid's Burma, but can't wait.