With Portland in the clutches of the best cold snap in a decade, I should have thought of it myself.

Every mild Northwest winter I mourn the lack of ice for skating. There are rinks in Portland, of course, where you can pay to shuffle around in a maelstrom of children and inexpert adults on ice that’s barely frozen because it’s conveniently located inside a mall. I suspect if you pay more you can gain access to a more serious rink with more serious skaters, but the skating I love is the free skating from my days in Maine, the night skating on the town green flooded by the fire department, or the open and mostly deserted hockey arena where I could squeeze in an hour between classes after lunch.

When the skating bug bit me my freshman year, I was sometimes skating three or four times a day, first on borrowed skates, then on cheap figure skates from Play It Again Sports once I knew I was hooked. I passed the wobbly stage, learned to keep my center of gravity low and my knees flexible, grew faster and bolder. One afternoon the girls’ hockey coach spotted me practicing hockey stops. He shook his head in dismay at my footwear and told me that if I got some real skates he’d teach me. I found a nice pair of CCM hockey skates on sale, and teach me he did, several days a week, just because he had some spare time in the afternoons before the team practiced and he liked seeing a girl hooked on gliding over the ice and eager to practice back crossovers and edge changes.

So last night: a phone call from our neighbor Carl. Carl grew up in Maine, and although he came late to skating as I did, he got the same bug. Earlier in the week Carl and his wife had tried to go out kayaking to look at the snow geese visiting for the winter on Smith and Bybee Lakes, a couple of wetland ponds north of the city. (The ponds are surrounded by industrial complexes, port terminals, and a freight railroad, but they’re the largest wetland preserve within an American city and they draw all kinds of birds and other wildlife. They’re also on one of our main cycling routes, which is why I really should have thought of them.) The ponds were mostly frozen, which didn’t deter Carl and Kate; they scooted their kayak along until the ice was thin enough to break through and went for their paddle anyway. But the temperature had stayed well below freezing ever since, and Carl wanted to go back and see if the wetlands were skatable. It would have to be now or early in the morning, as the temperature is forecast to rise today and through the weekend.

Turtleneck. Fleece overshirt. Norwegianish wool cardigan from L.L. Bean. Down jacket. Windproof neck warmer. Fleece headband. Hat. Long johns. Jeans. Ski socks. Ski mittens. Snowboots. Skates. A backpack with emergency dry clothes and a length of rope. A couple of long, stout sticks to feel ahead for irregularities or thin patches in the ice. Headlamps optional. We piled into Carl’s ancient VW Rabbit and we were off. The “closed at sunset” gates to the preserve were open; the place was still and quiet but for the occasional clank and belch of some industrial equipment and the gabble of the geese nesting on an island far across the pond. The northern constellations glimmered dimly through the mauve haze of the light pollution: Orion. Casseopeia. Auriga. The Dipper.

We laced our skates at the pond’s edge, laughing at having forgotten how stiff skates are. We skated cautiously at first, prodding and tapping with our poles, finding the shallow places where reeds poked through and the rough places where wind or current had rumpled the surface. At least twenty yards from shore the ice was sound. Carl triggered a crack or two farther out, so we kept to the shoreline. A small cove beside the bulk of a beaver lodge seemed to have the smoothest ice. We scribed figure eights and spirals, carving tracks and curlicues and enjoying the run and scrape of our blades for an hour. I was tentative at first, but worked slowly through my old exercises, finding my balance, finding my edges (sadly dull), feeling the ice. I did my back crossovers with something less than my old fluidity, but I did them: gliding backwards at medium speed, shoulders turned to the center of my circle, weight low, trusting the outside edge of the inner blade to free the outer foot for the step over and in. I didn’t fall. I wasn’t cold. The park rangers didn’t find us and make us get off the ice.

Afterward, after we ate cookies and satsumas around the stove in Carl and Kate’s kitchen, I slept more soundly than I have in weeks.

Or, why there’s no picture of my new pair of socks today. Apparently I also need to clean the gutters.

Thanksgiving is a big deal with Mr. G’s family. This is not only because his mother loves to gather in the family and feed them within an inch of their lives, but also because it’s always near the day that brought us Mr. G and his twin sister. This year, eighteen guests demolished a monster feast of turkey and all its traditional American accessories. Rather, seventeen of them did; the token vegetarian cooked her own entrée and was delighted when there were leftovers.

It’s always a challenge producing a satisfying vegetarian main dish for these big meat-and-potatoes holiday meals. Do you go with the fake meat? (I tried Tofurkey once; it was disappointingly dry and rather more processed than I like.) Do you go all devilmaycare and deviate from the traditional foods entirely? (We made an Indian feast one Christmas, with two families cooking for two days beforehand. It was delicious, but it definitely works best if you teleport the entire menu rather than just the vegetarian food.) Or do you try to blend in with a riff on the traditional by substituting veggie ingredients? (I had good success a couple of Christmasses ago, inventing a portobello mushroom version of Yorkshire pudding. Marika helped me pull it off.)

This year, the answer dropped into my lap. A friend and colleague told me she’d spotted a savory bread pudding recipe in a new issue of Bon Appétit that sounded incredible. She brought me the recipe — Butternut Squash and Cheddar Bread Pudding — and I quickly saw it was from Molly Wizenberg, the blogger behind Orangette, which you should really read if you like food. Get this: day-old crusty bread torn into bite-size pieces and drenched in an egg custard with cream, white wine and mustard, then layered with sautéed kale, cubes of roasted butternut squash, and sharp cheddar.

(You can’t see the bread layers in this photo, but they’re under there. I didn’t think to get out the camera until I was almost finished with the assembly. The squash is a mixture of butternut and buttercup, both grown by my friend Betsy at our school.)

It was amazing. Cousin Sarah’s meat-eating husband said it was his favorite dish. This Sarah and her parents and husband had it reheated for birthday dinner the next day. (I know it seems criminal to feed your man leftovers on his birthday, but they were really GOOD leftovers.) There’s more in the freezer, oh joy. And lucky all of us, Molly’s article and the recipe are online here.

What makes this dish, for me, is the kale, which doesn’t get a mention in the title. Mr. G sautéed it just right (I love the merry crackling it sets off in the pan) — tender but not limp — and the top layer got crispy and flavorful in the oven without charring or turning bitter at all. I can’t get enough of kale these days. We substituted it for lettuce in burritos on Saturday, sautéed it with garlic and lemon juice on linguine Monday night, and I was thrilled to see more of it in our farm share this week. Our neighbors planted beautiful lacinato kale (that’s the one with the dark, tongue-shaped leaf, not curly except at the very edges), but rogue caterpillars chomped most of it. Their purple kale is surviving better. I’m advocating for even more of it next year.

Next up: New gloves for Mr. G!

As I scheme and sketch towards this big design project I’ve mentioned, I’m thinking about favorite knitting techniques and visual effects I’d like to incorporate. There will be colorwork and cables, of course (possibly together!); a more recent addition to my toolbox is the twisted stitch knitting that originated in the Styrian Enns Valley. I’ve played with small twisted-stitch motifs before, most notably in the Twisted Tree pullover I designed for my dear friend’s nephew. (Leif has just become a big brother! Abbie will have to let me know if she thinks baby Maren needs a special design of her own.) Now I’m delighted to have added Schoolhouse Press’s new translation of Maria Erlbacher’s Twisted-Stitch Knitting, the seminal work on this particular tradition, to my library. I swoon for the beautiful stockings in particular. Alas, my calves are rather too scrawny to merit a special increase panel with beautiful twisting knotwork, but if I could ever convince my husband to wear a kilt (even a Utilikilt!), I do think some glorious twisted-stitch stockings would be in order.

Twisted stitches were the first thing I wanted to swatch with my 3-ply from Island Fibers. This yarn begs to be given some intricate stitchery, and it wants a fairly tight gauge or it tends to go sprawling all over the place. I knew this from having seen a swatch in plain rib at the Island Fibers studio, but I suspected that if those ribbed stitches were twisted they’d leap forward and command a three-dimensional space. Here’s my first little play-swatch.

The effect of those beautiful tight braids all over a garment is stunning, but I’m playing with the idea of using them minimally to achieve a quiet, elegant effect that owes as much to Japanese influences as to Austria. Stay tuned to see what comes of my experiments.

Yarn and stitchwork haven’t been the only domains in which I’ve been experimenting. We’re entering one of my favorite culinary seasons (okay, each one is my favorite when new seasonal delicacies become available). When the rains and chilling damp decend, I always want the cozy foods: velvety risottos, colorful roasted vegetables spiked with rosemary and thyme, steaming cornbread, and curried soups. Butternut squash and apple soup is a long-time favorite, and I’m ashamed to say butternuts were the only squash I liked for many years. They were certainly the best of what used to be available in the grocery store; acorns and spaghetti squash are the only other winter squashes I remember encountering in childhood, and I found them unpleasantly stringy, watery, pasty, or some combination of those attributes. In more recent years I’ve been drawn to the arresting display of varieties in the farmers’ markets—gorgeous red-orange or ghostly blue orbs; zebra-striped oblongs; deep green spinning-tops. But I let my ignorance of what on earth you’d DO with such a big, beautiful squash once you got it home stop me from trying them.

Last year’s winter CSA share changed my attitude, thank goodness. I discovered delicata: what could be easier than to lop this tender squash in half and bake it with butter, drizzle it with a little maple syrup and spoon it right out of the shell? It’s like butternut, but even sweeter. And the real challenge came one day in March when my share included a Chioggia heirloom. It must have weighed twenty pounds. My biggest knife was no match for its tough hide. A machete might possibly have made a dent; a table saw really would have been the carving implement of choice. I went to my cook books for advice. Fortunately, Farmer John told me I could stick the whole monster into the oven and wait for the heat to soften it into submission. I did, and then I sliced up segments to roast further. It was several hours before I had the entire squash roasted and spooned into plastic containers for freezing, but there was a break in the labor while we went next door to tuck some of it into pouches of homemade pasta for a ravioli dinner with the neighbors.

This past week I took out a container of frozen Chioggia squash and thawed it in a pot on the stove while I sauteed an array of peppers, the kernels from two ears of corn grown in the school gardens, and some frozen cubes of roasted garlic (my mother-in-law buys these for us and I’ve been letting them languish because we always have fresh garlic, but they’re very handy in soups) with paprika. I added the squash and some vegetable broth, and later some salt and pepper. The result was a thick, sweet, spicy soup, better yet with a dollop of sour cream stirred in and garnished with fresh parsley. The corn was a late-season survivor, very starchy and chewy. I don’t know whether it would have been good eating right off the cob, but in the soup, as my husband commented, it was almost like a chewy grain. We had the leftovers with roasted brussels sprouts from the farmers’ market last night.

So now that I’m not afraid of giant squash anymore, I went out and bought some more:

These are from Kruger Farm on Sauvie Island, just north of Portland. Their bins weren’t marked, but the one on the left is a Blue Hubbard and I think the one on the right might be a Rouge Vif d’Étampes. The Blue Hubbard is about the size of the hinder end of a large cat:

I loved this squash. I was able to cut it without pre-baking; it yielded up its seeds and pith with ease; and once I’d roasted the halves it produced a big pot of curried soup, a pie (yes, a pumpkin pie made with squash—you really can’t tell the difference), and the delicious love child of a pumpkin pie and a cheesecake. (Also thanks to a Farmer John recipe. This last went to school, where it was gobbled up by my colleagues.)

I highly recommend you try a giant squash of your own this autumn if you haven’t already. My husband didn’t think he liked squash and now he’s the first to dig in the freezer for the makings of another pot of soup.