January was a busy month. Winter finally arrived with bitter cold, snow storms and beautiful sunsets. We were lucky enough to see Louis and Julia for a second time in two weeks and I finally had my first eye surgery.
January was eventful from start to finish.
Cataract Surgery
It didn’t matter how many people told me that cataract surgery was very straightforward. I was nervous. I wasn’t a wreck, but my stress level was certainly elevated.
The surgery was a simple process, at least from my end of the experience. I’m sure that from the perspective of the surgeon, nurses and technicians, that description does not do justice to the complexity of the procedures. Everyone was so friendly and kind and skilled at their jobs. Heated blankets were a bonus.
In the days following the surgery, I couldn’t believe what I saw out of my right eye. Colors popped. White was brilliant and it had bright blue/violet hues. My surgeon explained it as my brain seeing colors that the cataract had gradually blocked as it developed over years.
I’m now walking around with glasses that have the lens removed out of the right eye and looking forward to having the left eye done soon.
Reading and Walking
I finished reading Libby Delana’s book, Do Walk (Indiebound). She’s such a committed walker! I was fascinated about how she uses her walks to brainstorm work projects and to work through tough emotional issues.
I’d hoped to increase my walking in January. The month started out well, with lots of lunchtime walks during the week and slightly longer weekend walks. Bitter cold arrived two days before my eye surgery, at a point when I was feeling a bit emotionally fragile and I needed to get a little extra work done before I took time off. I allowed myself to bail on the walks. A few days after the surgery, we got back to our lunchtime walks, but we haven’t done much on the weekends. Of course, we shoveled for hours last weekend and we counted that as a substitute for walks.
There is a common saying, “Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.” That sums up my walking plans. It will happen soon enough.
Movies
While I was taking it easy, we watched a couple of movies (I watched with one eye). I didn’t know anything about The Lost Daughter (YouTube trailer), except that Olivia Colman and Dakota Johnson starred in it and Maggie Gyllenhaal directed it. That was enough for me to want to see it. In retrospect, I wish I knew more about it before I watched it.
Spoilers ahead!
On the first pass, I didn’t make it through the film. From the start it felt like a scary thriller. When Leda steps into her rented apartment in Greece, the ominous sound of the fog horn and the lighthouse’s bright light invading her bedroom foreshadowed something terrifying. The same for the cicada on the pillow in her bed. A fruit bowl full of fruit that was all rotten on the bottom, yet looked fresh on top. A child violently biting her doll.
I reached a point where I couldn’t take the creepiness and we called it quits.
There was more to the plot. The film depicts Leda’s exhaustion as a working mother of young children and her husband’s expectation that she would sacrifice her work to take care of the children, so that he could do his job. We see Leda’s frustration with him dumping the childcare on her and her fear that she couldn’t properly take care of her daughters. There was a clear message about women’s roles and how hard it is to meet society’s demands that women be nurturing, caring mothers and that they put their careers in a secondary position.
After watching the first part of the movie, I discovered that everyone was writing about it. I learned that it was based on Elena Ferrante’s novel of the same name and that it is part of the Neapolitan series that I am currently reading. I’m working on book number two and haven’t gotten to The Lost Daughter (Indiebound). In light of that information and what we read in reviews, we finished watching the movie.
I have mixed feelings about the film. I think that the main messages of the film would have been better served without the feel of a thriller and I didn’t like the ending, which seemed improbable. I need to read the book for a better comparison.
If you’re interested, here are some of the reviews and articles I read about the movie:
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Lost Daughter” Is Sluggish, Spotty, and a Major Achievement (The New Yorker)
The Movie That Understands the Secret Shame of Motherhood (The Atlantic)
The Lost Daughter Has a Mysterious Ending. The Book Can Help. (Slate)
The Perpetual Rage of Motherhood (The Cut)
Cooking
January cooking has been all about warming comfort food. I’ve been feeling cold a lot and in the evening I want to eat things that take the chill off. We also stayed warm by eating our weekend dinners in front of a fire in the living room.
A batch of creamy, cheese polenta was the highlight of January’s cooking adventures. The warm and soft polenta was the base for sautéed mushrooms in a sherry sauce.
I scooped the rest of the polenta into loaf pans and chilled it in the refrigerator. It had several iterations, all in the form of pan-seared slices with different toppings. The first topping was sautéed Swiss chard (harvested from the garden in January) with garlic, onions and grated carrots. The next topping was a chickpea, tomato, onion medley with fennel and paprika. For the final topping, I slow-roasted cherry tomatoes in the oven on high heat with olive oil, salt, pepper and dried rosemary and thyme (a Christmas gift from Julia’s and Louis’s garden). For this serving, I coated polenta slices with bread crumbs and seared them in a skillet, then topped them with the caramelized tomatoes. Delicious! One of my favorite things to make is a food that can be served on repeat and easily transformed to provide variety.
Here’s the polenta with the slow-roasted tomatoes.
Sourdough starter wound up in a loaf of Parmesan and basil bread. I used some of the leftover bread to make a strata with pieces of prosciutto, chopped sun-dried tomatoes, a little wine, milk and eggs. We had strata a few times, with a side salad for a little crunch.
My personal version of chicken cacciatore, which I make at least once a year, fed us for a few nights. It was full of peppers, onions, artichoke hearts, olives and capers. I threw in some sliced Italian chicken sausage this time. We ate it on different types of pasta each time (bow ties, spaghetti and cavatappi) and they were all great! There wasn’t quite enough stew left for the last round, so I quickly sautéed more peppers to stretch it for a final meal.
Pasta with breadcrumbs has been on my radar for the last year and I finally made a batch on a Friday night. It was savory and crunchy and fantastic! I hope to share the recipe soon.
I ended the month with a big batch of Slavonian-Style Shepard’s Stew (Milk Street), which I heard about on Milk Street Radio (Chartable). With lots of grated parsnips and carrots, a surprising amount of paprika, stew beef, fresh parsley and dill, it filled the house with the best aromas as it cooked for hours and hours. The meat was so tender and the sauce was delicious! We had it with the dill dumplings suggested in the recipe and they were excellent.
Blizzard
We ended the month with a blizzard that brought almost two feet of snow. Luckily it was light and fluffy, but it still took hours to remove. We did the cleanup in two shifts: one in the evening while the wind was still blowing and a little snow was still coming down and the next shift was the following morning on a brilliantly sunny day. It was beautiful outside!
Here’s a shot of our backyard during the storm.
That’s it for January. I’m looking forward to February, starting with my second cataract surgery this week.
I hope that you have a good February.