A Recipe to Cure Winter Doldrums

Doldrums is a mariner’s term for windless conditions that becalm sailing vessels. For many, icy Januaries trigger a metaphorical emotional state. To help the winter-bound outlast every new year’s first two months, weather-induced blahs require creative solutions.

A friend inadvertently brightened this normally dreary season when she gifted me a copy of our church’s 1971 cookbook. Afterwards, I spent hours examining old recipes and familiarizing myself with  cooking preferences of women I’ve recently met as well as their mother’s who’ve passed. In short time, wimpy spirits vanished. Instead of longing for spring, exploring new ingredients and ways to cook familiar ones energized me. 

Decades ago, churchwomen in Meade gave me my very first hometown cookbook as a shower gift. Sorting through it to plan meals for my new husband taught me much about these friends’ culinary practices. In addition to following their instructions to bake irresistible breads and savory casseroles, I discovered a sour cream blackberry pie so delicious family still requests it at holidays.   

Over time, my collection multiplied. Favorites include worn books with spidery handwriting noting someone’s Aunt Gertie’s favorite meatloaf and similar comments. Despite loving these tried and true treasures, I don’t ignore brand new editions full of gastronomic delights.

 I find amazing batter-spattered texts while attending garage sales and auctions. Online ads offer the best avenue to seek specific titles. It took patience to find an out-of-print People Chow copy, but one eventually turned up. Newspaper ads and church bulletins highlight newcomers hot off the press.

Local collections display favorite regional foods with recipes unique to ethnic settlements. Area books frequently include instructions for making homemade sauerkraut, pickled chicken feet, blood sausage, or bean and noodle soup. A treasure I bought in Wilson contains familiar bierock recipes but also suggests a half-dozen ways to make kolaches and tomato noodles unique to Bohemian cooks.

A New Mexico purchase intrigued me with recipes requiring beef stomach as well as 1000 uses for red and green chilies. An addition from a mining town in Idaho offers pasty (not pastry) recipes to make meat pies that miners carried to work inside the nearby mountain. It’s also clear that huckleberries are the fruit of choice for jelly and pie makers in that town.

Speaking of fruits, few prairie cookbooks fail to include more than one way to make sandhill plum and chokecherry jellies or fruit leathers. Cooks can also find guidelines to prepare pheasant, venison, and occasionally raccoon, possum, or rattlesnake. Good local cookbooks explain how to make indigenous ingredients edible.

Ironically, recipe ingredients may be the same from one town to another, but titles can vary. A nearby village listed the same ingredients and instructions for concocting a dish residents called party potatoes. A burg down the road labeled the same item funeral potatoes. Guess it relates to when you eat it.

For a month that began uninspired, it’s a wonderland of possibility now. More than a dozen new recipes beckon. First, I’ll explore a locally favorite butterhorn roll formula. The tidy note written next to a previous owner’s favorite promises “A delicious batter for sweet rolls as well as dinner rolls.” I can’t wait to find out.

Blasting the Winter Blahs

I don’t know about you, but for me, January is the longest, dreariest month of the year. Daylight hasn’t increased enough to improve my outlook on life, it’s cold, and it’s either brown or white. I have to self-talk my way through this 31-day marathon with adages like “spring is around the corner, and days are growing longer.”

If those pep talks don’t inspire me, I resort to a baking spree. That adds to my depression when I realize I have to lose added pounds because I self-medicated my doldrums with a pan of brownies or chocolate chip cookies.

A third low-calorie solution is to take mini-vacations to banish these post-holiday pity parties. You might think that’s expensive or impossible when you work. Nope, this part of Kansas has wonderful and free or inexpensive museums and galleries a short distance from your home. You can clean house, do laundry Saturday morning, and still find time to check out a local historical society or art collection.

A previous Dane G. Hansen Display

Anyone living near Hays can visit the Hays Historical Society, Sternberg Museum, Moss Thorns Gallery on campus, or the Hays Arts Council exhibits. Hays Medical Center and the library also display outstanding art for public viewing.

Stay on I-70 and drive to Russell to investigate the Oil Museum or head west to Wakeeney to learn more about homesteading on the High Plains and then to  Oakley to view the Fick Fossil Collection and the Buffalo Bill Statue. If you have extra time, tour Main Street for a peek at the past and maybe sample an old-fashioned sundae at a real soda fountain.

Those who live north can explore their community stories as well. A trip to Phillipsburg to check out Fort Bissell Museum with its Kingery Gun collection and Rock Island railroad memorabilia housed in the old Glade Depot won’t disappoint locals or visitors. A lively business district invites attention as well. 

The crown jewel in Phillips County is the no-fee Dane G. Hansen museum with its permanent gun and Asian collection and traveling art exhibitions. It’s easy to think we’re too rural to see famous art, but that’s not true in Logan. Several times a year, the small museum hosts exhibits on loan from major institutions, including the Smithsonian.

The current display from Ohio’s Springfield Museum of Art is Associated American Artists by Subscription. Sketches of every day American life by artists including Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, Grant Wood, Mabel Dwight, Lawrence Beall Smith, and other early and mid-20^th century artists will sweep the winter cobwebs from the corners of your brain. If you want to see this exhibit, hurry to Logan in the next couple of weeks. While you’re in town, tour the charming downtown and the historical society displays.

 If you’re feeling clever, turn one of these mini-escapes into a scavenger hunt or funny photo shoot with inventive backgrounds. It might take extra work, but the memories will be worth it.

Some of us are bound to suffer from winter blues, but we don’t have to give in. With a little effort, we can banish them with dinosaur days, pioneer times, oil boomtowns, or excellent art. Plan a blah-blasting holiday soon.