Oh, my readers! I have been suffering from writer’s block. It’s not that I haven’t been cooking lately. People have to eat even when they’ve lost their creative abilities. It’s just that what I’ve been cooking are not foods that are particularly interesting to photograph or write about. What I’ve been cooking is pasta.

Most of the winter foods I enjoy are these incredibly long cooking stews and things: au vins and gratins and meat and potato meals that have been simmered for hours. There’s nothing wrong with these meals. In fact they are pretty wonderful. They pack a fantastic flavor from all the reduction and broth making that occurs during those long cooking times, the actual hands-on work time is normally short, they keep my house and belly warm, and they’re pretty healthy when I resist the temptation to throw in a stick of butter. The problem I’ve been having with them is that I need to start them so darn early in order to have them ready for dinner.

Like many people I finish my work day at 5:00 when I’m lucky and 6:00 or 7:00 when I’m not. Nick and I enjoy eating around 7:30. Most of my wintry dinners take about three hours to cook. Are you seeing the problem? Sure, we could push back dinner to 8:00 or 8:30, but that reduces time for other things like writing blog entries, reading books, and watching American Idol. It also makes Nick really, really grumpy. The other option I have is to run home during my lunch break, prep all the meat and vegetables and throw them into a pot before racing back to work. This is totally possible, and I do it about once a week, but sometime I like my lunch break to be used, you know, eating lunch.

So what’s a girl to do? Well, this girl’s solution is to use up all those jars of tomato sauce she made this summer. Think about this: with a jar of good, spicy tomato sauce, a pack of dried mushrooms, a jar of dried beans, and a bag of frozen spinach I can have a nutritious, tasty, and almost entirely local dinner ready in just 30 minutes. The only thing that takes time is rehydrating the beans and that, my friends, can be done the night before so that it takes up none of your precious evening time. I call it my Italian Stew with Balsamic Roast Chicken. You can make it with or without the Balsamic Roast Chicken.

The other great thing to do with those cans of tomato sauce is to make winter pizza. There must be endless topping combinations that can be put on pizza and if endless is an exaggeration then I’m sure that there are at least enough for me to work with that I’ll never get bored of pizza in this lifetime. I used to think that winter pizza would have to depend entirely on frozen and dehydrated foods and therefore be something of a “cheat” recipe for the purposes of this blog. However, here in North Carolina there are many interesting winter foods available that can be turned into unique and tasty pizza. How about these for ideas: sauerkraut and sausage pizza, sweet potato and blue cheese pizza, potato and cheddar pizza, or garlic kale and Parmesan pizza. Sure, none of them is your regular mozzarella and tomato pizza, but those are really best left to summer. And these have a fantastic winter tang all their own.