A cure for the winter blahs

I am a Prairie girl at heart, I guess. I love clear blue skies and bright days. I love having four distinct seasons, each with its own weather, its own colours. I don’t like being cold, but I don’t mind bundling up if there is sunshine to warm my soul. In the grey, wet days we have so often here in January, bundling up alone does not take away the blahs.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

I am not particularly fond of grey. Perhaps it is connected to my love of food. There are no grey foods. (The closest I came was trying to mix frozen blueberries into biscuit dough; the result was a weird sort of mauve-grey that was not appealing, but at least still tasty.) I prefer plenty of flavour and colour, in all aspects of my life.

When I say I find solace in food, I don’t mean like eating a tub of ice cream in one night. I prefer to savour things…

• A cup of tea on a damp day is just the thing to warm one’s bones
• A cookie can make one forget sadness, even if just for a moment
• A bowl of soup really does help one’s soul, and it doesn’t have to be made with chicken

All of these things are a way for me to guard against those winter blahs, or to celebrate another day of having survived them.

I am grateful for a fully stocked pantry, and a companion at the table. I am grateful for my cabinet full of cookbooks, like old friends who can regale me with stories of the good old days. I am most grateful for my health; that I can still reach to gather ingredients, get down the stairs to the pantry and back up, bend over for a peek in the oven… even with all the groans from me and creaks from the joints, I realize these are blessings indeed.

In the age of Covid, having my sense of smell and taste are gifts I celebrate more than ever. Is that why I am even more conscious of savouring flavours and aromas? Or perhaps it is the lack of ability to travel that makes me search the spice cupboard for exotic options.

We cannot visit foreign lands or even visit a friend or relative for tea, but we can still eat. The direct connection of our olfactory system to our memory means that we are hardwired to remember experiences when we smell things we have smelled before.

So, my cure for the blahs is to feed my hunger. My hunger not just for food, but for flavour and excitement. It is harder to sustain in the bleakness of winter, especially in these times of lockdowns and restrictions, but I will keep cooking and keep eating, and keep toasting to everyone’s good health. Cheers!

“It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it… and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied… and it is all one.”

― M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating