You can’t go wrong with hearty soups and stews in winter. They make any snowfall feel like the best of snow days, they restore your body and relax your mind, and they simply and deliciously warm you up from the inside out. My family doesn’t eat pork all the time. But when we come across a really good spicy pork sausage, we immediately find a big soup pot to put it in. Allowing the thick coins to soften and infuse a light broth with their rich, spicy, fatty goodness can change your whole outlook on cooking in winter. There must be a group of people out there who have devised recipes that showcase turkey and chicken sausage, but this soup is not one of those recipes. Furthermore, I am not one of those people. The fat and spice is what gives peasant-like soups their umph. It’s why you find yourself leaning in over the bowl and breathing in deep. And fat certainly puts the soul in good ol’ chicken soup.

The farmers’ market here, while quite small in the winter, is rightly so quite proud of its produce. We recently bought some sweet, purple garlic from friends of Matt’s Teague and Kosma Channing, who founded Gemini Farms outside of Santa Fe. We also brought home these two huge, beautiful ruddy beets.

I sit two feet to the left of our fire. It sputters and pops and burns and desires way too much wood due to its intense updraft (we’ve gone through a full carload – truck, seats, and all – of wood in one week). But it is fire and its flames lick high up towards the chimney. I’m sure all kivas were not created equal and this one definitely serves the decorative gods not the heat gods, but we love it and tend to it just the same. Its heat radiates just enough to touch the right side of my body and all the way up to my cheek. Sometimes I walk over to it and stick my butt out to get it a bit toasty before sitting back down.

It’s freezing in here. Is it freezing out there? Time to build a fire. Outside our window the trees twist and bend and blacken against the first clouds I’ve seen since we arrived. Yet somehow it’s still light and warm outside. In this filtered light the adobes across the street are a beautiful sienna. I remember loving the name, and by extension the color of burnt sienna in my fourth grade art class. If you squint your eyes here, it’s as far as the eye can see, this deep, ruddy, rich color. The earth, buildings, food, and sometimes the sky all bleed together. If you look closely, this land has gradations of all colors of the wheel, some more saturated and some just hints and flecks.