Tag Archives: snow

Laura Ingalls Wilder, Where Did I Go Wrong?

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syrup and snowThis time, I’m afraid, there’s simply no hope of convincing the neighbors that I’m not completely insane. This morning at 7 a.m., I was outside in the swirling snow, shaking snow from a shrub into a cake pan, a bottle of maple syrup clamped tightly in one armpit. I am thirty-one years old, but the vestiges of my Little House on the Prairie fetish are still on display for everyone on my block to see.

When I was very young, my sister read the entire Little House series out loud to me, and man, did I love it. Sure, Mary was kind of a bore, but Laura was clever and charming and brave—all things that wee Shannon aspired to be. And I was enthralled with the idea of pioneer life. If my family ever had to move into a sod house for some reason, I was prepared to milk a cow, knit some mittens, and whip up some corn pone in order to help us through the long winter. I went so far as to insist that my parents buy me the Little House on the Prairie Cookbook, which explained how to make delicious treats like hardtack.

Laura and MaryFast forward to a few weeks ago, when New York was on the cusp of getting its first real snowstorm of the season; a scene from the first Little House book came back to me in a flash. Hadn’t Laura made maple candy by dripping syrup on fresh snow? Wouldn’t it be a hoot to do it myself? Alas, the timing of that storm was all wrong, and by the time I was out and about the next morning, it had turned to rain and slush. So this time, when I woke up to a couple of inches, I was determined to make it happen. Mind you, I haven’t read the book in question, Little House in the Big Woods, in well over two decades and my copy of the cookbook is probably still in a crate somewhere in my parents’ house, but as I remembered it, they just packed some snow in a pan, drizzled syrup over it in snazzy designs and—Voila! Candy!

In actuality, this is not what happens when you put maple syrup on snow. Continue reading →

Historic Blizzard: Dairy Queen of My Heart

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dairy queen blizzardI grew up on the edge of the Great Lakes Snow Belt, so impressive snowstorms were no rarity. Any notable storms of my childhood, however, only caused my parents and elder siblings to reminisce about THE storm, the one that had wreaked havoc in the 1970s before I was born. “Remember when Dad shoveled a tunnel through the eight feet of snow on the porch after we’d been stuck inside for three months?” they’d sigh, with nostalgia and, one hopes, some measure of exaggeration. “Now that was a real blizzard.” This weekend it seems that I narrowly missed another historic storm, New York now a slushy, melting mess while our neighbors to the north are still shoveling themselves free. Even so, it has put me in mind of another blizzard, one that I know very well.

It is my firm belief that even people who are largely devoted to healthy or carefully prepared meals have a few fast food skeletons lurking in their pantries. One of mine is the Dairy Queen Blizzard. Dairy Queen opened their first shop in 1940 in Joliet, Illinois (just a hop, skip and a jump away from where the original Ray Kroc McDonald’s would descend fifteen years later), and they first coined the term “blizzard” for their ultra-thick milkshakes. It wasn’t until 1985 that they introduced the Blizzard as we know it today—candy or other sweets crushed and mixed with soft serve ice cream into a cholesterol-laden sludge so dense that it will not slide from the cup when a Dairy Queen employee turns it upside-down. (At small outposts of the chain, they will still enact this ritual for you, unbidden). I love them.

I don’t think I have ever eaten a Blizzard without feeling slightly nauseous afterward, but that’s not important. To me, Blizzards are sacred totems of the open road.

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