I’m writing this on a January afternoon and there’s a bright blue, cloudless sky outside. Weird, but in a good way, right? I never would have expected anything but grey snow during this time of year, but with the sun shining I feel energetic and inspired. 

If you feel like we’re heading into the New Year in survival mode, you’re not alone. These are wicked times, dear readers, and it’s hard to keep yourself from worrying about whether you ought to stockpile canned goods or raise chickens in the backyard. I’ve thought about both. The chicken idea got nixed when I saw a possum the size of a Smart car strolling along the top of my fence one night.

When I was growing up, my dad insisted that on every New Year’s Day we eat sauerkraut and knockwurst. He’d cook a giant roasting pan full of it. Jumbo sausages, bursting with fat, surrounded by kraut, apples and onions and god knows what, and we had to dig in or else.

What’s cooking in December? For a start, there’s the new cookbook from Chef Todd Kelly of Orchids at Palm Court. Kelly, the American Culinary Federation’s 2011 Chef of the Year, teamed up with local food blogger/Midwest Culinary Institute graduate Courtney Tsitouris of Epi-ventures to share recipes from one of my favorite restaurants in the city, scaled down to prepare at home.

My dad graduated from UC’s engineering college in the early 1960s. A poor kid from the South, he lived at the YMCA and regularly found himself at the dinner table of his soon-to-be in-laws so he could get a square meal. Today’s students face many of the same problems — high costs and low wages — but these days they have an embarrassment of cheap, good food choices.

I am having a seasonal panic attack. November? How can this be possible? I just finished thinking about bug spray and sunscreen, and now I’m supposed to be thinking about wrapping paper and tinsel? Something is wrong here. Maybe the melting of the polar ice caps is speeding up time! We’re hurtling into the future without experiencing the present! 

I’d learned through an accidental slip of the lip that pastry chef Summer Genetti left The Palace this summer. She’d been a star at that fine-dining restaurant, and leaving was a tough decision. But for a young woman who’d started soaring ahead in her career soon after she started at age 18, the focus it had taken to get to the top was taking a toll. She’d grown up at work, in the kitchen, putting in an incredible number of hours and missing her twenties almost entirely.