Blizzard Bread

Well I don't think anyone is making any official estimates yet but my guess is that at least in our part of Philadelphia we've gotten about 48 inches of snow over the last 5 days. Today we both stayed home from work due to 'blizzard warnings.' I'm not sure I've ever even seen a blizzard warning in my 25+ years here. Blizzards occur in Chicago, where I used to live, or Ithaca, where I also used to live, but not in Philadelphia. I've forgotten what snow and winter really are due to my 25 years here.

But no more. This is real snow!

I don't think I've ever shown food on this blog before, and unless you can squeeze the wild yeasts of sourdough bread into the nature category food isn't really art, birds or nature. Sourdough needs to be fed in order to be used for baking. So you can't just say: hey I'll make some sourdough bread today! You need to feed your starter for a day or two.

I had been doing that and it was ready today. And I was home all day. So time to make some sourdough bread. In this case I decided to make foccaccia, loosely based on the recipe in my bible of sourdough baking, "Nancy Silverton's Breads from the La Brea Bakery." The day many years ago when I decided to buy that book and learn to make sourdough bread was a life-changing experience. It took about 2 weeks to nurture my first starter so that it was strong enough to make bread. That was probably 10 years ago or so. Since then every winter is the time for sourdough bread.

But today I wanted to do something special: not just bread but foccaccia. Our cupboards are a bit bare so smoked turkey replaced anchovies, and cheddar cheese replaced Parmesan. Leftover broccoli raab, the last of some oil-cured olives and a lot of sesame seeds topped it off. A beautiful bread for the day of a blizzard.

Earlier in the day I worked on some dunlin sketches. I did live field sketches of these same birds at Bringantine NWR last October. But I had tremendous trouble with the slant of the bill in those sketches. Today I attempted to get a better sense of the bill and their overall structure. This is an exercise in learning as much as it is in art. Finally I turned to books by Charles Tunnicliffe, Eric Ennion and Roger Tory Peterson so see how the experts handled dunlins.

Finally a few photos of the snow. Just last weekend I posted a photo of our back yard and the snow on the lawn chair. Now the snow on the chair is almost twice as high and you almost can't see the chair!

Needless to say our birds are having a very hard time. The strong wind and snow instantly cover any food put on the ground and the feeders only hold so many birds. Hopefully tomorrow will bring better weather for the birds.

As for us I'm sure it's going to be one long, slow drive into work, if I can find the car in the snow.

Do You Miss the Snow?

There are thousands and probably hundreds of thousands of blogs that are full of photos, some ordinary, some extraordinary. But I very consciously try to avoid them and present something more unusual, like drawings and paintings.

Nonetheless I don't always have time to render an interesting scene in pencil or paint. Today we're finishing the dig-out of our second 2 foot plus snowfall this winter. The accompanying photos show our backyard. The 3 foot drift on one of our lawn chairs gives you some idea of the size of the drifts. The other photo shows even taller drifts though they might be hard to see. The clean bird feeder and paths through the snow are thanks to my wife Jerene who is always quick out the door to take care of local animals.

In any case I realize that not all readers of this blog are currently living in wintry areas. So for those who actually miss snow I offer these photos. I should add that I love snow myself. It is a bit of a pain in the city but that's a small price to pay for the beauty that it brings to a landscape, not to mention the quiet it brings to a landscape, something always quite rare in a large city.

I'd love to include some bird photos or paintings but they've been rare. I think the combination of tree loss in our neighborhood and an increase in the number of our neighbors who feed birds has lowered our number. Normally we'd see some unusual birds in weather like this. But this hasn't happened for a number of years. I was however treated to some blue jays while digging out my car.

Perhaps later some birds will present themselves as subjects. But for now these will have to do as illustration of Huge Snow Number Two.