Snow, sun and salads

It is winter here in the southern hemisphere, and yes it does get cold and windy, but nothing like the awful winters I experienced in Denmark, where you could go for weeks with below freezing temperatures and snow.  As a snow hater, I was delighted to read before we moved here that it only snows here in Wellington around once every forty years, and as they had had a little dusting a couple of years before we moved here, I felt pretty sure we had escaped it.  So imagine my horror on leaving a local hostelry last night to see some of the white stuff!  Well, it wasn’t exactly feet deep, more like a dusting, and it was crunchy, wet and more like a hail that had landed and not melted.

Little snow balls made by my friend Anne (picture by her too)

Naturally, it was all gone by morning, and as I type, the sun is trying to come out.  In fact, if we hadn’t been out, we probably wouldn’t have even known there had been some kind of snow.

Meanwhile, with it being summer in the northern hemisphere, bloggers I follow and friends on Facebook are posting pictures and recipes of summer foods, and looking at all these pictures has made me crave salads. In the search for ideas for winter, I really like the idea of Alessandra Zecchini’s “Crunchy Bean Sprout Winter Mediterranean Salad” in her recent blog post, which sounds really good and healthy as well as full of flavour.  I’m certainly using aduki beans and other sprouting seeds quite a bit at the moment in my lunch box, and using sun dried tomatoes to almost but not quite deal with my sudden longing for tomatoes.

Still, this is much more soup and stew than salad weather, and time to dig out those recipes and ideas in the weeks to come.