Keeping Warm and Making Soup

January. The warm glow of Christmas is a distant memory. That wonderful festival which brings light to the darkest days is over for another year. And it will be some time before spring arrives. There will be cold wet days and nights, many weeks of darkness, and colds and sniffles to survive, before we feel the warmth of the sun on our faces.
There's not much to be said it January's favour. True, it's the start of another year, a time for looking forward, for planning, for hoping, for resolutions and good intentions.
But, mostly it's cold and miserable. Money is short after Christmas expenditure and spring, let alone summer, seems a long way away.

There's a bonus, however, for lazy photographers like me who are adverse to setting their alarm clocks earlier than absolutely necessary. The late sunrise means I've been able to see some wonderful skies although rushing to work means I can't capture them apart from a quick snap taken across the fields before de-icing the car on a frost morning.

For me, January is all about keeping warm. Hibernating. It's about staying indoors in front of a warm log fire, cosying up with a book and a glass of red wine. Our cat Toffee has the right idea. He picks his spot on a favourite chair and sleeps for hours.
I also like to cook warming food for my family, traditional dishes likes stews, casseroles and soups.
One of my favourite soups is easy to make from store cupboard ingredients and is ready is around half an hour.
It's tasty and its Mediterranean flavours remind me of holidays to Italy, eating delicious simple food in small trattorias with red and white checkered table cloths.

What You Need:
A little olive oil
One onion, finely chopped
One clove of garlic, crushed
One tin of chopped tomatoes
One tin of mixed beans
One litre chicken stock (I use a Knorr stockpot)
A good pinch of mixed herbs
Some broken lengths of spaghetti or pasta shapes for soup
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Grated parmesan to serve

Fry the onion and garlic in the olive oil in a saucepan until soft and translucent. Add the hot stock, the tomatoes, beans, mixed herbs and seasoning. Bring to the boil, turn down the heat and simmer for 20 minutes. Add the pasta and cook for a further 10 minutes or until the pasta is cooked. Serve with grated parmesan. It's also delicious with a handful of baby spinach leaves or fresh basil added at the end.

Dark Days

I for one will be glad to turn my back on January.  It's been a pretty dreadful month.  Cold weather, snow, rain, storms and floods.
More doom and gloom on the economic front with shop closures and job losses.
And then, the terrible, shocking, heart-breaking murder of Detective Garda Adrian Donohoe, gunned down as did his duty in the community he loved.

These have been dark days for us here.
If there's been any solace to be gained, it's been from the out-pouring of love for his family and colleagues, from the support for the Gardai, and for the total condemnation of those responsible for this murder.

Welcoming the Light

'As the day lengthens, the cold strengthens' my parents were fond of saying of the early days of the year.  I am more than happy to trade a bit of colder weather for brighter mornings and evenings.
Although we're not yet even a month past the solstice, the days are already slowly lengthening, most noticeably  in the evenings when there's still an afterglow of light in the sky as I'm leaving work. At least that's the case when it's not raining, but the past week has been so wet, dull and dreary that it was impossible to tell.

I finished work earlier today and got home in time to go on a dog walk up the road to the shore.
The sun was already starting its descent and it was a race to get to the coast in time to see it sink
below the horizon.

As the sun disappeared behind the houses, shops and factories of town, a lonesome fishing boat returned to port.

The mudflats were deserted, save for a symphony  of feeding birds.

We turned for home, my quest for light satisfied.