I enjoy cooking. And baking. And I particularly like casseroles, both making them and eating them. My husband? not so much, unless it's something like a Shepherd's Pie, which I don't often make. I prefer vegetarian casseroles and that speaks volumes about our differences in taste. I wanted to make a casserole on Tuesday because we'd had a meat dinner the night before. I would prefer to use pasta but my husband isn't fond of pasta - unless it's spaghetti and meatballs in a thick tomato sauce.

He suggested helpfully that I might consider replacing the pasta with potato, knowing I could be flirting with the idea of making a macaroni-and-cheese casserole, my favourite. I don't mind at all thinking about variant combinations, so I decided to take his advice. I parboiled a few medium-sized Yukon Gold potatoes, and sliced them quite thinly, placing a layer on the bottom of a casserole dish, then added a cup of frozen green peas to scatter over them. I prepared a white sauce with butter, flour and milk, adding lots of pepper, a teaspoon of dry mustard, and a cup of shredded old cheddar. I poured half of the resulting thick sauce over the green peas, added a tin of pink salmon which I had chopped into pieces, then another layer of potatoes, topping that with the remainder of the sauce, and sprinkled the top with Parmesan Cheese. I enjoyed it, my husband dutifully ate it, prefaced by a fresh vegetable salad and capped with raspberries.

I planned to make spaghetti and meatballs the following day, but my husband expressed a yearning for corned beef. I knew I had one, bought months ago at his bidding, in the freezer. So I cut it in half, then prepared it for Wednesday dinner, along with mashed yam and fresh, sweet asparagus, neither traditionally eaten with corned beef, but I hoped their nutritional goodness would offset the questionable gut value of the corned beef. And then we had strawberries and peaches for dessert.

Today, it'll be a side of baked salmon, again not his favourite fish, but I sprinkle it with a very savoury spice combination to entice his appetite. That, and oven-baked potato chips, and another vegetable salad and sliced peaches for dessert. Usually when we have a fish dinner we cap it off with chunks of cheese (my husband had just bought a large piece of Emmental) , which I really look forward to.

It's still frigid outdoors; when we came down for breakfast this morning the thermometer read -16.7C. But sun was streaming through the house, lighting up the south-east-facing front of the house in a blaze that always makes me think of a theatrical set with frantic overhead lighting. The snow we were supposed to get overnight hadn't materialized. Which, had it fallen, would have helped mitigate the icy conditions underfoot on the road and in the ravine on the forest trails.

When we went out for our daily afternoon hike in the woods with Jackie and Jillie yesterday though the winds lacked their usual bursts of bone-chilling energy and frostbite threat, it seemed even colder than the day before when we were out and it was -16C, while yesterday was supposed to be -11C, but it was overcast and perhaps that made the difference, even at this time of year.

We considered making it a longer walk, but decided against, since by the time we were out a half-hour our faces felt stiff with cold. Jackie and Jillie, though wearing adequate covering and their boots didn't seem to be in much of a bounce-about mood, not much running about for either of them, which is a little unusual, so we decided to cut our ramble short given the frigid conditions.

We came across ample evidence of the force of wind in the forest at one point, where an old dead tree trunk had been toppled just beside the trail. One of its branches had broken off in the fall where the main trunk was off the trail and the branch had hit square on the trail, an obvious mortal threat had anyone been passing by there at the time.

As usual, once we return home and they're comfortable in our nice warm house, they share a boisterous run-about and tussle, then assemble in the kitchen patiently waiting for us to remember to give them their anticipated treat.