Diary of My Country Life-December 27th, 2025

The original source of this blog: https://www.lotusandmichael.com/blogs/diary-of-my-country-life

12/27/2025 Saturday 22-33F Cloudy

It snowed last evening. This morning we checked the ground, found that it is impossible to clean the snow—in fact there is no snow, but a thick layer of ice caused by last night’s wintry mix.  

Ok, we’d better let it be and stay indoors. Today and tomorrow will be cloudy and the high temperature will be in 30s; next Monday it will raise to 50s so I suppose all the ice will be melted at least by then. With two days sequestering at home, lucky that we have enough food storage, part of which actually was from Christmas.

This winter I tried something new—dry vegetables. It wasn’t difficult at all to do it, just needed some efforts—every sunny day I hung them out in the sun, then took them back to the garage in the evening. I did daikon, mustard greens, yu choy, and bok choy. It would take about one week to dry if the weather was good, then I stored them in the baskets hanging on the ceiling. Different from fresh vegetables, the dried ones have a unique fermented flavor. Soak them well in hot water and braise them with lamb or beef, they turn soft and very umami. In winter on icy days like today having the dried vegetables is like a blessing.

Another thing I like to do in winter is make napa cabbage kimchi: Buy fresh green leafed but yellow cored napa, hand tear the leaves, brine them with tequila, green peppercorns, and sea salt, then stuff them in a pickling jar. The problem with my kimchi is, it needs to ferment in the jar for thirty days, while it only takes us less than a week to finish all of it. So most of time, I have to watch my pickling jar wishing the days could pass faster. Two weeks ago, we gifted a small jar of the kimchi to my husband’s friend, whose wife is Korean. They commented that my kimchi was like “Mul” kimchi, which means water. That’s true. Since the ingredients are simple (In my latest version I cut a Fuji apple and added it into my kimchi), the taste of it is very clean, unlike typical Korean kimchi which has too many things involved. I love to eat my kimchi as is, or cook it in soup noodles, or make kimchi tofu soup to pair with our homemade pizza—it’s versatile, can play both leading roles and supporting roles. 

My husband says “There are two types of people in the world: One eats to live, the other lives to eat.” I disagree because I myself belong to the grey middle: When I can make free choices, I prefer simple, clean, and healthy food, I am not really a foodie; while if the situation doesn’t allow me to do the above, I don’t mind compromising and eat whatever I can. I guess nothing in the world is absolute. In most cases our tolerance can surprise us.

To me, winter is a season for feasting. In the rural days, as a reward for the whole year’s hard work, our ancestors perhaps purposely selected winter days for the major festivals. They indeed wouldn’t have time in other seasons for celebration: Sow in spring; cultivate in summer, harvest in fall. Starting from Halloween, the pumpkin festival, then to Thanksgiving, to Christmas, to New Year which is always followed by Chinese Lunar New Year and Lantern festival. After that, time to sow crops. 

We grilled a fresh turkey for Thanksgiving; this Christmas we had grilled leg of lamb; yesterday we used the leftover grilled meat and leg bone to create a pot of delicious braise. For New Year, we plan to grill a duck, one of my favorite dishes.

Because we are an American-Chinese family, it’s hard to define our food. We often call it “Fusion”. Bruce Lee said, “The only limitation is no limitation.” This definitely applies to us. As long as something interests us, or inspires us, with my imagination and my husband’s wide knowledge about food (he is more like a real foodie), we can always create a version tailored to our taste and based on our availabilities. For example, our rice dumplings.

Recently we fell in love with rice dumplings, which I hadn’t eten for many years and my only memory about them was the ones my mother made when I was a small child. On a snowy day, I suddenly thought of them, and couldn’t let my eagerness go. Lucky that I still had a bag of sticky rice flours which I purchased last year and which had never been touched. The typical filling of rice dumplings is red bean or sesame paste, or like my mother did, plain sugar. But instead, we used our leftover cranberry sauce from thanksgiving, then apple sauce, then the shrimp and lamb filling of our regular dumplings. All three versions tasted great, and we will use ham for the filling next time.

Thanks to my husband’s open mind, which makes my “why” be followed by his “why not”, and promotes us with more possibilities. He likes food, cooks well; I like bringing my new recipes to a reality. No doubt that we fit.

I just had hot corn/sweet potato grits as my breakfast; the icy street is deserted; under the ice and snow, the feet of my plants are covered with fallen leaves… Everything looks serene and content, the way a snowy winter is supposed to be. After writing this diary, I will make my ginger afternoon tea, then I will continue to read my “Anna Karenina” until time to prepare for dinner. 

Thank God for offering us this beautiful season. Every day is a blessing.