What would Friday night's mealtime be like without being prefaced by a steaming hot bowl of chicken soup and rice? Impoverished mightily. So as usual after breakfast clean-up and newspaper-perusal, I put on a chicken soup to cook. At this time of year we cannot anticipate snipping fresh parsley from the garden to garnish the soup, and I find that thinly sliced green onions do the job very nicely indeed, scattering them atop the soup just before serving.

I decided yesterday also to bake Chelsea buns, since my husband so loves yeast-raised sweet breads. When preparing the dough I used honey as a sweetener, and used a cup of milk and two eggs along with unbleached all-purpose flour (hard wheat), and the raised yeast, a dash of salt. After rising the dough it was rolled to a rectangle, brushed with Becel, and brown sugar, cinnamon, large Thompson raisins, and both pecan and walnut pieces scattered over. Rolling it up, I cut it into sections and placed them inside an aluminum springform baking pan to rise, then bake. (The results are never as good using porcelain or a glass baking dish; the bottom of the buns don't crisp sufficiently.) The results, as anticipated.

Yesterday was overcast, with light snow falling throughout the day, although there wasn't much of an accumulation. When we entered the ravine for our daily walk, it was delightful to see the trees once again being embroidered by falling snow, outlining them with delicate white and the entire scene utterly transformed; lighter, brilliant, even without the appearance of the sun.

We came across a neighbour walking a new little dog, which is to say one we weren't familiar with. She had lost her own dog to age and illness a dozen years earlier and had taken, since then, to walking other peoples' dogs. One of which was a lumpy little friendly schnauzer. The reason for the appearance of this unknown dog was that the little schnauzer had succumbed to cancer; it surfaced suddenly, evidently, even though its owner is an oncologist.