Soup After Skiing

Winter is coming to a close. Truth be told, there’s not much of a winter season in this city on the sea, unless you count cold rain. We did get a few blanketed snow days which shut the city down, and they were welcomed in my house with opened arms. Winter offers a serenity rarely found  in the hustle and bustle of spring, and now that the weather is turning and the sidewalks are filling with tourists, I start to yearn for the winter I didn’t quite take full advantage of.

You see, I’m the type of girl of  donned her first pair of cross-country skis when she was 4 years old. My mum spent her ’20’s holed up a on the pass in a ski lodge in Washington, working during the day and sunbathing at the top of the run on her days off, so it’s no surprise that almost as soon as I could walk

like an actual human I was plunked on a set of smurf skis and set off on a groomed track. In the snow I stayed, every winter, eventually making my own tracks until I moved to the south and began my hiatus of cross-country skiing.

One of the things I promised myself when we moved back to the northwest was I would ski this winter. Well, it was a wet dreary winter, but I did get up to the mountains once this season for a short reintroduction to the snow. I relished the time with my father and friends K and M in the frozen white, listening to the snow compress and crackle as our skis glided over, even if it was drizzling the entire time and our clothes were a little more than soaked at the end.

Image by 427 via Flickr

When our excursion had ended (mostly because we hit an avalanche crack in the path and had nowhere to go but from whence we came), we bundled into our dry clothes, we warmed up with a shot of peaty single malt and trucked back into the city. The four of us gathered in my friend’s apartment, around a simple, worn wooden table, lit the pint-size oil lamps and settled down for a hearty after-skiing soup. I ladled the smokey Portuguese bean soup, full of fire roasted tomatoes, cabbage, and cranberry beans into our individual, delicate white china tureens and K poured wine and broke a loaf of crusty french bread for us to share. after a day of cold and rain and quiet beauty, the soup warmed us to the core, a perfect finishing note to the day.