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I was in the checkout line at Whole Foods on Saturday, and the woman ahead of me in line noted that I had two bags of brussels sprouts. “Do you ever roast them?” she asked. I replied that I usually did the same old boring thing — steamed them, then seasoned them with olive oil and butter. She declared that, when brussels sprouts are roasted, people who normally wouldn’t dare touch a brussels sprout find that they like them. Ken likes brussels sprouts, but he said that the roasted brussels sprouts were the best he’s ever had.

It’s good to remember that many vegetables like to be roasted. It’s easy to do, and it’s healthy, because it keeps the vegetables out of water.

Brussels sprouts are not a fashionable or well-liked vegetable, but that’s a shame, because they’re delicious. They’re also inexpensive. They ought to be a staple in the winter kitchen. Buy them fresh. Frozen brussels sprouts have been drowned in water.

I enjoy cooking during the winter more than I do during the summer. The summer produce is wonderful, but I love winter produce — root vegetables, cabbage, brussels sprouts, onions, cauliflower, broccoli. Maybe it’s my Irish genes. Given a choice between eating fresh tropical fruit on Maui (fantastic), or winter vegetables in Ireland, I’d choose Ireland.

The other thing that’s nice about cooking and baking during the winter is that the warmth of the kitchen is comforting rather than oppressive. Winter cooking makes me wish that I still lived in a house with a wood-fired cook stove. There’s nothing quite like it.

Quartered, tossed in olive oil with garlic, and ready for the oven

The choir’s final rehearsal in the empty church before the congregation arrives

For years, I had wanted to do choral music. But, before I retired, there wasn’t time. Not only are there rehearsals to attend, but learning the music takes time. A friend of mine who sings in the choir at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Winston-Salem invited me to sing with the choir for their Christmas “Lessons and Carols” service.

I was terrified at my first rehearsal a month ago when I first saw the music. There was about 45 pages of it, some of it quite difficult. A rhythmically complex arrangement of “Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day” was particularly daunting. Luckily, computers have made the job of learning choral music much easier. A member of the choir made MIDI files of each of the carols, and one can learn the music by playing the MIDI files on the computer and singing along. That’s much easier than having to play it yourself at the keyboard. I probably spent a total of 40 hours working on the music at home. I sang bass.

The final performance came off great. Maybe I’ll do it again next Christmas. It’s good for the aging brain to take on new challenges.

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Winston-Salem

The dark blue area can expect cold weather through Dec. 19. Graph by NOAA Climate Prediction Center

Newspapers used to do a pretty good job of covering the weather. Today’s lazy, downsized local newspapers don’t bother much anymore. Even with the Internet today, you have to search long and hard to find out what might be causing unusual weather. Meteorologists on local television stations may provide more information, but I don’t watch television.

The cold snap that brought last night’s low here of 14 degrees is affecting a large area of the East Coast, from Florida up through Pennsylvania. I finally found a story in a Florida newspaper for which the reporter bothered to call someone at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.

It seems the data is too scant to know for sure, but one theory is that this is caused by the melting of the Arctic ice, which leads to cold air being pushed farther south. It’s counterintuitive, isn’t it — the idea that global warming actually can cause colder weather under certain circumstances.

And, by the way, I can’t recommend the Climate Prediction Center too highly for those of you who are weather watchers. I find their 10-day, 14-day, 30-day and 90-day trend forecasts to be quite reliable.

In the mailbox today I found an envelope from Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina. In red letters across the front were “Open Immediately.” This was terrifying. My health insurance is the biggest item in my monthly budget, even though I have one of those high-deductibule policies. I, like most people, am accustomed only to being knocked around by health insurance companies.

But inside was a a check for more than three hundred dollars. This refund was announced back in September, but I missed that news at the time. The insurance commissioner in North Carolina, it seems, did some math and found that North Carolina Blue Cross had overcharged some of its customers by $156 million. Blue Cross agreed to refund it before the end of the year. This USAToday story explains it.

Let’s hear it for regulations on corporations and regulators who do their jobs. That’s the only thing that protects us from gouging.

The regulators must still be watching, because my premium increase for next year is only about $6 a month.

Ken in Durham

Ken Ilgunas will soon return to Acorn Abbey. He’ll arrive on Dec. 17 or 18 and remain all through the next semester at Duke. He doesn’t have any classes next semester. He only has to write his thesis, and Acorn Abbey is a nice, quiet place for writing.

We’ll also have some outdoor projects to blog about. We’re planning a big vegetable garden next year, new wildflower patches, and we may even get started with beekeeping. The beekeeping project just depends on how much the start-up costs add up to. I’ve bought and read Beekeeping for Dummies, and frankly it all seems rather complicated. But Ken joined a beekeeping club at Duke and has gotten a bit of experience with bees. We’ll see.

Having company also is the only excuse I need to decorate the house for Christmas. And having just read his most recent post on his blog, it’s clear what I need to get him for Christmas — some laundry soap and extra clothespins.

We’re having the first snow of the season, and it’s only Dec. 4. Amazing! A winter weather advisory is in effect until Sunday morning.

The photo was taken from my front porch.

I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone who didn’t like sausage. It’s a miracle that someone figured out a way to make the nasty bits of pig taste good.

Lots of people don’t want to eat those nasty bits, though. Morningstar’s vegetarian sausages are very good. Like the real thing, I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone who didn’t like them. But they’re also very expensive.

Many vegans make their own homemade sausages. If you Google for recipes, you’ll find many of them on the web. The ingredients vary a great deal and usually include a legume in some form mixed with wheat gluten (also called vital wheat gluten — same thing). I haven’t seen a recipe which, like mine, uses cooked soybeans.

Here’s how to do it. As usual, this is an outline, not a measured recipe. Improvise according to your own taste…

Cook some soybeans in a slow cooker until they’re soft and turn a medium brown. This probably will take 18 hours or more. Drain the beans and put them into a food processor. Don’t process them into a puree. Leave some texture. Mix your sausage spices into the beans. I prefer a breakfast sausage — sage, red and black pepper, dried garlic, dried onions, and other spices in smaller quantities. Add some salt and some olive oil. Stir all that really well. Then add the wheat gluten (it’s like a flour). Stir that well, then add water until the mixture is moist, like bread dough, and holds together pretty well. Mix it all very well. Today I used about 3 parts soybeans to about 2 parts gluten. Half of each would work fine.

Make logs of the mixture and put it on a square of aluminum foil. Wrap it up in a log shape and twist the ends of the foil. Then steam the logs for 30 or 40 minutes.

When the logs are cool, you can slice them into sausage patties and brown them gently in olive oil.

The organ at Acorn Abbey is getting up in years. It’s a Baldwin HT2, built around 1966. It has its aches and pains. The speakers sometimes pop because of dirty potentiometers that seem to need another cleaning with Deoxit, and that low pedal B-flat is clicking noticeably and needs new felt. I finally made a video, mainly to preserve the sound of these old Baldwins. There aren’t many of them left.

I’m an amateur organist, and I play only for my own fun and to annoy my friends. I had good teachers, though, and such limited technique as I have is correct organ technique.

If you listen to this with nothing but computer speakers, you won’t hear all the sound. Organs produce high and low frequencies that small speakers can’t reproduce, so unless you use good speakers or good headphones, I’m doing that pedal work for nothing.

The fall colors are not very bright this year. This is Hanging Rock from Moore’s Spring Road. These photos were taken yesterday on a trip to Yadkin County.

This is Pilot Mountain from Bowen Road near Pinnacle.

This little woodframe gothic church is in the little town of Dozier in Forsyth County. I love its design, with the three stepped windows and the three-step steeple.

After two rainy days, two dark and stormy nights, and a total of 3.7 inches of rain, I went on a little outing today to southern Virginia to buy apples and cabbage. It’s not really very far. Acorn Abbey is only 13 miles from the Virginia state line.

It’s nice living near apple country, but it’s disappointing that most of the orchards grow only the top-selling and less interesting varieties such as Golden Delicious and Stayman. It’s going to be a few more years before the little orchard at Acorn Abbey (with eight varieties of apples) kicks in, so I’ll take what I can get. The apples were four dollars a peck.

Ayers Orchard also grows grapes. They don’t make wine, but they sell the grapes to winemakers.