The January 31st Snowstorm

A short seven days after our massive sleet storm, we found ourselves in winter's crosshairs again. That's how the final day of January played out, with another deep plunge into arctic temps that occurred in symphony with a massive system of moisture coming up from the southwest and giving North Carolina its first full coverage—from one end to the other—of snow in almost 50 years.

Sumner does not love the snow as much as Scarlett does, but they were both pretty cute getting out into it. We still had accumulation yet to occur when I caught Sumner pausing on the covered parking lot (above).

I mean: 17°F at around 3 pm in the afternoon? That doesn't seem much like what I'm supposed to endure as a resident of this southern state. The polar vortex, made weaker and less organized by the warmer waters in the arctic region, keeps spilling its cruel contents in a huge splash down across many lines of latitude unused to this sort of nonsense.

But maybe it was cold enough that the pooches' return to the back door was more than their usual scurry and race:

Perhaps the husky and shepherd within Scarlett helps explain how naturally she takes to the snowpack.

It's a moment like this one that earned her a fresh nickname: Cold Belly Jones.

When the snowstorm was tapering off Saturday night, very gradually, I brought out my trusty Raleigh Paint & Wallpaper yardstick and found we were almost up to 8 inches of pure fluffy light dry snow.

The accumulation looked dramatic with the almost-totally-hidden legs of the deck furniture up on the second story porch:

And bright and early that Saturday morning, there was the team from Budd Services ready to go. I do not know if they had again spent the night up there but I've no doubt about their diligence.

The Saturday evening supper was simple: sous vide herbed chicken breast on spring mix with the last of my latest batch of Thousand Island-style dressing. This was Meal No. 4033, as the ongoing count continues for all meals made since the new kitchen was completed in 2009.

The first day of February followed, and that Sunday dawned bright and sunny but brutally cold. (That's when I took the photo at the top of this blog post.) The official measure out at the airport was 13°F (check out that RealFeel of -2°F!!) but my home monitor was a nudge colder: 12°F.

February 1st was also the occasion of the full "Snow" moon, and we were certainly prepared to celebrate it in proper fashion. I always enjoy the beauty of the rising full moon over the city:

Key Lime Pie Bars

It’s been on my radar for a while to produce a pan of key lime pie bars. Well: lime pie bars, at least, styled on par with how the official KLP is made. Persian limes take the place of Key limes (or the famous Nellie & Joe’s Key Lime Juice); I sub out the graham cracker crust, opting instead for pulverized Biscoff cookies; and I prefer an enhanced stabilized whipped cream atop once it’s all set up first in the fridge. Sometimes I make too much of that whipped topping.

Also: you cannot ask someone whose nickname in 8th grade was “Mr. Precise” to successfully work with the determined imprecision of quality parchment paper that must be fitted into an 8x8 non-stick pan. It cannot be done and there is a price to be paid regarding mental health. But when it is time to cut and serve, and the whole of it has been freed from its bakeware, the unpanned brick of beauty does offer up much cleaner slices. Then again: I think there are plenty of YouTube and Instagram recipe bloggers who have made a million reels about how to cleverly snip and cut a sheet to properly slip into the pan. I guess I have some self-schooling to do.

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Adapted from "Key Lime Pie Bars," from Christina Marsigliese of ScientificallySweet.com. [Published 17 July 2023 / Modified 28 May 2024]

"Stabilized Whipped Cream," from Alyssa Rivers of TheRecipeCritic.com. [Published 02 November 2023]

Meal No. 4032: Creamy Chicken Francese

Sometimes I have to remind myself that I remain unskillful with chicken cutlets, but the temptation to make a pan of creamy chicken francese last Friday night for a Holly Avenue neighbors dinner was a reminder of how much practice is still needed. Nonetheless, it was still all pretty good, and while the recipe stands well on its own, some Cabernet-Madeira mushrooms and a bed of spaghetti to set it all on did their part to make the outcome a qualified success.

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"Creamy Chicken Francese," from Karina Carrel of Cafe Delites.

Vanilla Bean Pudding Cake

After our bucatini carbonara had had a chance to settle in a bit last Thursday night, a dessert seemed necessary in order to make the evening complete. And I went with vanilla pudding cake, which I probably over-rely on when I’ve not made better or other plans for a sweet conclusion to any small dinner gathering. But what’s the harm in serving up so tasty a treat? Plus: I need to keep working on my technique with it until I really nail down how to get perfect ratios of cake and pudding...an elusive goal still.

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"Vanilla Bean Pudding Cakes," from Susan Reid. Published by King Arthur Baking. Recipe printed July 2017.

Meal No. 4031: Linton Hopkins’s Bucatini Carbonara

The pickings at the grocery store last Thursday were understandably slim, following our intense and enduring winter weather event from the previous weekend. It was my first time of venturing out, and apparently the same could be said of many of my fellow shoppers (plus: it was senior discount day, so there’s that). Although I was able to add a salad to our dinner plates, I had to fall back on something I could produce from pantry staples that night: Linton Hopkins’s bucatini carbonara. Lordy, it’s so silky and wonderful, rich and pleasing. I still had a version of Thousand Island dressing to help along the future prospects of the spring mix I’d grabbed fresh. Jonathan, our guest at dinner, very thoughtfully brought along a really nice red wine, which paired perfectly. Good company, good food, good wine, good conversation. Oh, and maybe a dessert also manifested before the evening got away from us, so more on that in tomorrow’s blog post.

Please note: It's outrageous to this summer-loving senior that 20°F that morning was an improvement.

And while it wasn't as much about the weather as it was distance when I needed to have a virtual meeting that morning, I was reminded that that's what school has been like for a lot of students across our area since schools were closed all week. Weather-related interruptions to the school calendar always cost us, but we all know ain't nobody coming to school on Saturday, on spring break, or after the posted end of the year.

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Adapted from "Bucatini Carbonara," by Linton Hopkins. In Food & Wine, July 2009.

A Sheetload of Ice

The grand sleet event of late January that offered us an accumulation of close to maybe three inches of mostly sleet, which compacted down into a 1.5-2 inch sheet of ice all over every ground surface (yard and driveway and steps and sidewalks!), had a lasting impact because temperatures remained very much below normal. Schools were out the whole week and I was lucky that I'd had no scheduled work trips. I thought I'd let a standalone blog post capture a piece of this story...or should I say a kazillion pieces?

After initially carving a path to walk more safely from the street to the back door, and clearing off the front steps and sidewalk as well, I wanted to get as much of the driveway cleared as I could.

The bright sunshine of last week helped even while it was still too cold for my efforts to get boosted by any rapid melting. Instead, I had to rely on gradually chipping away with a flatblade shovel, wedging underneath where I could, and hoping that a large enough section would break up or lift up. The wheelbarrow helped but unfortunately the tire isn't holding air for very long.

Digging in the front edge, pushing in gently, lifting a bit, waiting for the rewarding sound of cracking ice, and either happily grabbing up a huge chunk or aggressively shoveling the bits and fragments...

I mean: I did finally get the car out, and I reckon not quite half of the parking lot was freed of its icing.

One of four massive piles of these ice slabs is pictured here, tucked behind a dead cherry tree but easily accessed from the upper lot area. Another sizable pile of this icy debris sits in the kitchen herb garden; a couple of smaller piles are nearby. At the street, on one side of the driveway entrance is a similar pile of these chunks and on the lower side is a pile twice as big. Here's a shot of that taken once the snow had begun last Saturday morning:

Meal No. 4030: Ultimate Cream of Tomato Soup & Grilled Cheese Sandwiches

As our inch-and-a-half (or maybe two?!) of accumulated sleet from the weekend's winter storm remained fully in place everywhere, and while the city seemed mostly shut down, we took a real plunge Monday night very nearly into single digits. With four planned for a fine Holly Avenue gathering of neighbors for supper, I was pretty set on having soup. This time, it was cream of tomato soup, along with grilled cheese sandwiches on either homemade Japanese milk bread or peasant bread. We certainly had our fill and seconds proved to be a powerful temptation to make it so.

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"Ultimate Cream of Tomato Soup," from Cook's Illustrated, November 1999. Recipe can also be found online at Cookography.com.

"Easy Same-Day Peasant Bread," from Jenny Rosenstrach of the CupofJo.com blog. [Published 02 February 2022] Adapted from Alexandra Stafford of AlexandraCooks.com. [07 November 2012 / Updated 15 November 2025]

Meal No. 4029: Beef Cheddar Melts on Milk Bread

Our heavy sleet day last Sunday meant there would be no shopping excursions, and as few ventures outside at all except for what the pooches required. It was a fine day for baking up a loaf of Japanese milk bread but also for tossing a couple of prepped vacuum-sealed filet mignons into the sous vide immersion circulator. I'd already prepped the special cheddar melts sauce. All that remained was to slice that bread, butter it up good, adorn it with sliced of cheddar, slice the cooked beef after giving it a good pan sear...and let's not forget the caramelized onion slices as well. This was one of those dinners where the talking tongues were silenced while the tasting tongues reveled in gustatory glory.

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"Japanese Milk Bread Recipe (Hokkaido Milk Bread)," by Dini Kodippili of The Flavor Bender. [Published 01 July 2020]

"Beef & Cheddar Melts Sauce," a Roediger House creation. [Published 14 October 2022]

Eggnog Cinnamon Rolls for the Sleet Day

We were stuck with such a winter weather mess last weekend, and what form it was to take or how much damage it might do proved impossible to predict. But it sure put me in a mood to make a batch of eggnog cinnamon rolls before my final holiday carton of it reached its unusable state.

Ooey gooey sweet and sensational, the fluffy cinnamon rolls produced from this particular recipe are consistent winners. I certainly didn't realize I'd left these aside for almost two years. They are heavenly bundles of sugar and spice, fully adorned with an irresistable eggnog and white chocolate glaze, and then raised to excess by a cream cheese icing.

This last picture (above) is how the rolls looked straight out of the oven, before they were amply doused by that afore-mentioned sugary glaze. Also: in my incessant disposition to count unimportant things, I'll call this the 25th batch of some sort of cinnamon roll that I've made since I started this blog in 2008.

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"Easy Fluffy Eggnog Cinnamon Rolls," from Tieghan Girard of Half-Baked Harvest. [Published 24 November 2020]

Winter’s Late January Sleet Smack

Oh, with giddy anticipation, once the cackling imprecision of breathless long-view predictions had put in our minds the slimmest glimmer for a foot-high snowfall fever dream, did we all hustle and bumble into dedicated preparation last week. But a complex convergence of multiple systems and fronts made it hard to know what all those models were promising. And we all should understand and be forgiving of the floundering meteorologists: the models are playing catchup to the shifted landscape that comes with climate change uncertainty.

When I woke around 4:30am Sunday morning, it was 14°F and we had mostly gotten sleet, in abundance. The barest incidence of light snow flakes and occasional pelting by fat cold rain drops were nothing compared to a couple of inches of those rough tiny granules of ice. Sumner hated it, finding it to be terribly disconcerting. Scarlett, true to her shepherd, husky, and Saint Bernard lineage, was ready to seek a cliff face for ice rappelling.

Reports around the state and region made it clear we were lucky in terms of damage but we missed out on what would have been an enormous gorgeous snowfall had the precip been otherwise. Just around the corner from the house was what appeared to be the command center or staging hotel for one huge crew that never had to go out since we didn’t get all the ice that was so fearfully anticipated.

Our power stayed on even if elsewhere fortunes were much less bright. To have this much sleet coverage was a bit of a wonder but it also really was coming down for a good part of the day. Imagine if it had only made it all the way down as snow! I still got out and trudged my 3.5 miles while the sidewalks and streets were stompable enough as long as the boots were steady and sturdy...that's when I spotted the linemen's trucks behind the hotel and was sure those crews didn't mind never getting called out.

Speaking of crews: a team from Budd Services (the company that provides groundskeeping for the neighboring office building) spent Saturday night in their trucks on the parking lot behind us. We get to see these gentlemen regularly through all seasons, always impressed by their diligence and focus.

After daybreak Sunday, they emerged into the brutal cold and got busy spreading ice melt and running the scraper blades. But yeah: tell me again about the immigrants who don’t work but who are taking our jobs…?!

The Monday that followed all this was bright and sunny but still cold and breezy. As is so often the case, the house looked lovely in that early morning light but I also knew I'd have to get the flatblade shovel in hand and get to work clearing off the front steps for the postal carriers and some sort of path across the parking lot down to the street.

And a task like that is a sore and painful reminder that I have entered my seventh decade on this earth.

An even colder arctic push invaded overnight Monday so that by the time I got up Tuesday morning, it was 11°F on my Tempest weather station, and the nearby Smith Reynolds Airport was registering 9°F. Current projections are that our area will continue to experience below-normal temperatures perhaps into the latter part of February. You can count on me to keep you posted, especially if bellyaching results.

Notebooks, Galore!

As my work schedule slowly eased up as we got closer to the official start of last spring, I utilized some of my extra time to tackle my two huge ongoing notebooks collections: observation notes from the various schools and districts I work in, and the collection of printed recipes that seems to grow ever larger. The work-related observation notebooks include every observation I've done since I started doing this work as a consultant, and in some school districts that became a years-long process or involved a large number of schools. Knowing how small I write anyway, coupled with the dependence on narrow-lined notepad sheets, you might correctly assume that I've really done a ridiculous number of observations over the last 20 years. It takes a 6-inch binder to contain the work I've done through the High Point University Leadership Academy or in Guilford County; Virginia Beach City observation notes require two notebooks to contain them all.

The other notebook project related to my collection of (mostly) printed (mostly web-sourced) recipes. Originally converted into notebooks in 2017 to organize what had once been tucked into folders in a milk crate, and next reworked and expanded in 2022, I had been finding some of them overstuffed and also realized some organizational and categorical shifting was called for. As long as I was on a notebook kick as February rolled over into March, I refreshed my inventory especially of the extra large binders and set to work on once more improving the management of all those many, many recipes. It took a while to finally file away the stack of backlogged recipe printouts, and that dragged on through the rest of the year: Sunday December 7th was when I finally finished! I figured you'd want to know.

Meal No. 4028: Meatloaf Minis

Last Saturday night brought to Winston-Salem a massive winter weather event (more on that to come in a blog post to follow), and once all had been done to get us as ready as possible, there was still a dinner to make. A fun recipe that has never fallen short of delighting the household came to mind, since I still had a couple of leftover containers of terrific homemade sour cream-and-chive mashed red potatoes as the ideal side item. The central feature: mini meatloafs with a sweet and tasty sauce. It's easy enough to put together but a fine variation from the norm here, and I'll boast that supper satisfied quite perfectly that evening.

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"Mini Meatloaf," from Lauren Allen of Tastes Better from Scratch. [Published 20 February 2023]

Meal No. 4027: Teriyaki Steak Skewers on Caesar'd Spring Mix

My recent extravagant purchase of a whole beef tenderloin netted me some incredible filet mignons to grill over the MLK Jr. Holiday weekend, and then I also saved out some fresh cubes of beef to marinate and then skewer and grill on the actual Martin Luther King Jr. Day itself. These perfect tender morsels sat atop a spring mix salad, with a choice either of creamy Caesar dressing or a souped-up Thousand Island dressing that I created as a special sauce for beef and cheddar melts sandwiches.

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Based on "Easy Lemon Caesar Salad Dressing," by Kim Hardesty of lowcarbmaven.com.

Based on "Beef & Cheddar Melts Sauce," a Roediger House creation.

Meal No. 4026: The 2026 Chili Cook-Off

When I was on faculty at Wake Forest University, I built into the calendar each year a series of events that were simply reasons to gather: a dessert and decaf in May, a brunch in the run-up to Easter, and each January a chili cook-off gathering. The most consistent continuation of those, albeit with an evolving or shifting guest list because of different directions that life takes us, has been the January chili affair. These troubled times are the very reason we must stay connected, so last Sunday night the chili cook-off came back to life at the Roediger House.

The pandemic put a true kink in the ritual, and the only year since that I made an effort to at least time a chili gathering to its usual spot around Martin Luther King, Jr., Holiday Weekend was in 2022. Deviled by a nostalgic impulse here in 2026, I wanted this to be a bigger deal: that meant a guest list and an invitation card to be mailed, adapted from the graphic I'd used back in 2010. The weather worried us a bit that day: we were in the mid-30s with precip moving through and a promise of a frozen mix. But for the hearty souls who turned out, it was a great night with a delicious variety of chili to sample.

With it being the first attempt at resurrecting this event for a few years, I didn't have a good measure of how available folks on the invite list might be. Still: better to be prepared, right? So I made a couple of appetizer options for us, including my version of South Carolina-style pimento cheese (above) and my own divination of Virginia-style Mexican restaurant white dipping sauce:

Of course, there had to be a pan of Granny Wilson's honey wheat cornbread. Since this delicious variation makes a full sheet pan's worth of sweet cornbread, the chili cookoff was perfect for bringing it out. I must've missed something in its preparation, though: it wasn't quite as on target as I'm accustomed to. No pictures are available, which is probably for the best.

Let's not leave out the dessert options for that chili winter's night, starting with Ina Garten's marvelous lemon bars on shortbread cookie crust. Well-glucosed and super lemony, these bars are marvelous to the max, each and every time.

Before we no longer had the recent holidays out of sight in the rear view mirror, I also wanted another go at eggnog tres leches cake. Alas, the version I've been most dependent on makes a thicker sponge cake than seems prudent—it can end up with unmilked dry portions that I find problematic. So I skimmed down the cake layer with some clever mathing, but kept the milks and topping amounts constant.

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"Simple Beef Chili with Kidney Beans," from Cook's Illustrated, Number Sixty-One [March-April 2003], p. 10-11.

"Vegetarian Chili," from All About Vegetarian Cooking. By the editors of Joy of Cooking: Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, and Ethan Becker. New York: Scribner (2000), p. 82-83. Cookbook was a gift from former student Alison Pomeroy.

"Granny Wilson's Cornbread," a recipe shared with me by Linda B. Dunlap.

"South Carolina-Style Pimento Cheese." Recipe worked out by me, based on Sharon's Palmetto Pimento Cheese. [Published 23 October 2009]

"Mexican Restaurant White Dipping Sauce," a recipe worked out by me, sampled by Spring Street, and approved of by all.

"Lemon Bars," by Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa. Published in Barefoot Contessa Parties!, Clarkson Potter Publishers, 2001.

Modified from "Eggnog Tres Leches Cake," from Michele Feuerborn of FlavorMosaic.com. [Published 13 December 2015]