Chicken Soup for the Snowbound

Lake-effect snow: I know what this means now. What it means in this town is huge out-of-nowhere dumps of white, drifts higher than your head, cars slipping and sliding and nosing head first into the giant lumpy piles on the side of the road. We spent Sunday holed up in the apartment after one white-knuckled foray down the street to the gas-station store. Frozen pizza was our friend that night, as was the Sunday Times crossword.

But I was finally able to cook for real last night, using the blade on K's Leatherman tool to chop onions, garlic, parsnips, and carrots, whenever K. wasn't using it herself to put up shelves or do other useful tasks around the house following our afternoon in the lumber and screws aisles of Home Depot. The chopped veg and a couple of chicken thighs and drumsticks all simmered in the one beat-up enamel saucepan that I'd brought with me from the Old Country, meaning Brooklyn, to make a batch of cold-fighting Jewish pencillin, aka Matzoh-Ball Soup. Apple crisp in the oven, and toast and butter on the table. We were sated and happy, and somewhere, so is my round little Jewish grandma, whose own soup can never be surpassed.