In Your (Cold and Rosy) Face!

The February edition of "Food and Wine" magazine is on my kitchen table, opened to an article about winter food. The article highlights wonderful cold-weather dinner ideas done up by a Madison, Wisconsin chef. There are the expected gorgeous photographs, lovingly crafted by talented photo stylists, of fennel and grapefruit, pork and pears, burnished endive and.... lovely rosy-cheeked girls eating plates of this fare in the great (Wisconsin) outdoors on a blanket-covered block of ice.

Say what?!

Oh, sure...they are wearing hats, gloves, and thick woolen stockings, but still....

Now I've done a few brave and outdoorsy things in my time:

I've skied off a cliff, because I thought I could "land it".
I've tried to catch my own crayfish dinner by hand in a remote mountain stream.
I walked the "Cave of the Winds" north of Buffalo on a blustery Christmas night. I think a good half of Niagara Falls blew back onto me.
I've sailed a boat on an ice-floe-laden Lake Michigan in December.
I've even had cocktails in the middle of an African plain, surrounded by hungry hyenas.

But I've never had the guts to dine al fresco in the middle of a Cleveland winter.(I am not counting the times I wolfed down a Polish Boy on a snowy Euclid Avenue while running to the Terminal Tower to make the 5:15 rapid transit.)

I know the "Food and Wine" photos are for effect. They are rather charming in a Norman Rockwell/Winter Wonderland kind of way. But the photos got me thinking. I have never plated up a really nice dinner, then plunked my fanny down on a snowbank to sup. The hyenas were kind of adorable, looking on with baleful eyes. Jack Frost, on the other hand, is a dangerous animal. I feel...well, challenged.

I hear about these polar swimmers, who celebrate the New Year, or a birthday, or whatever, with a dip in Lake Erie's mid-winter icy depths. So who am I to whine about the cold? I always claim that everything tastes better al fresco, plus, I am guilty of falling into the bad cultural habit of eating too fast, so it won't kill me. It might be fun. It might pass the time on these dreadfully long and boring winter nights. It might make me tough...like an Inuit or a Laplander. (Right now, Cleveland is about as cold as their native stomping grounds, anyway). Plus, no wimpy magazine editors are going to out-do ME.

I bought some gorgeous beef to stew for a weekend supper. I think I'll eat it a steaming bowl of homemade stew outside. In the snow. So I can say I did it. In your face, "Food and Wine"!

Stay tuned.