WE SPRING FORWARD early again this year, changing the clocks pre-dawn on Sunday, meaning officially that every day after that is a hop and a skip toward spring. But I don’t wait so well. Margaret, Zen to the point of annoying, waits well in her tidy house. Me, I pace, butting heads with any impediment, strewing the flotsam and jetsam of my confronting behavior in a churning wake as I go. Strangely (or not), we have one thing in common in this season: the food we spoon into ourselves as we wait.

The Roach sisters have never met a comfort food we don’t love, and even though Margaret, a vegetarian, and me, a bloody-steak-loving-omnivore, eat as differently as might winter and spring, when it comes to the nourishment of comfort/the comfort of nourishment, we converge. In fact, it’s not unusual to find we have the same thing in bowls in front of us on the same day. The difference is when we made it.

Last week I made applesauce. Heretical, I know, since we are supposed to eat in season. But I am the cricket if, as I suggested in a recent post, we can all be divided by popular-culture icons (in that case she is Kanga and I am Tigger). She, of course, is the ant, in my alternate Aesop-frame of mind, making all her winter/spring/summer-eating applesauce, appropriately, in fall. And it lasts. I could make 150,000 gallons in fall and it would not last until Halloween. My tomato sauce lasts only until then, and last year I grew 28 tomato plants. Yes, I know, I know. Don’t lecture me. I have an older sister for that.

Are you a cricket? Then you need my help restocking your crock. With TSP Sister Paige’s posts on Sisters in the Kitchen, we’ve grabbed that old Crock-Pot from the back of the pantry shelf, renamed it the slow-cooker, plugged it in, and are following these three easy steps.

That is unless you are an ant, at which point all you have to do is enjoy the fruit of your previous labors.

• Quarter and remove seeds from 10 organic apples
• Add ¼ cup water
• Cook on high for 3-4 hours

Enjoy.

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ALLENE DIDN’T COOK. To be more specific, our mother was something of a spectacle in the kitchen, cooking a few things, always as dramatically a possible. The simple stuff eluded her: a chop, a steak, a baked potato. Instead, we got such offerings as Beef Wellington and once, memorably, reindeer meatballs.

And so I have no collection of her recipes. Instead I’ve collected the recipe boxes of women I have loved who have gone on to what I hope is the great big (clean) kitchen in the sky. Unique bequests, these files reveal a culinary laying on of hands that reaches back generations, though reading through their stained index cards, I not only see who fed what to whom, and which of these dishes I’ve delivered to my own family’s table, but also what I’d like to pass along. There is no word in English for the uniquely delightful emotion cooked up by plucking a recipe from my preacher-wife-mother-in-law’s modest South Dakota kitchen and digitally hotpadding it (with a tweak and a cinch) to another sister’s table. Keeping this food on our tables is a form of tribute the sisterhood understands.

While most of my contemporary sisters-in-the-kitchen relay their recipes online—my friend Elizabeth is learning to bake, for instance, which means that I can now cadge recipes off her website; Paige is cooking it up here on TSP—some few continue to write out their recipes by hand and deliver them to me on the proverbial index card. Any way is fine by me, as long as we keep the food coming and—for me, at least—that I have the provisions in the house, or at least don’t have to travel by tramp steamer to get them. Despite that second proviso, I do read the recipes of The New York Times religiously, particularly since Mark Bittman has gotten the paper to run things like his recent list on how to update our kitchens.

My recent kitchen update is the slow cooker Margaret gave me for Christmas, in which I made the bison chili for the Super Bowl. And so, slow cooker plugged in, and Bittman’s reminders firmly in mind, I offer this, a recipe passed along to me by a woman I love, converted for the slow cooker, using only what I already had on hand. I call it Busy Sisters Curry Lentil Soup. It’s adapted to the Crock-Pot from a recipe in the 1975 cookbook Vegeterian Feast by Martha Rose Schulman.

Busy Sisters’ Curry Lentil Soup (for 4-quart slow cooker)

4 Tablespoons olive oil
2 onions, chopped
4 garlic cloves minced or put through press
1/2 teaspoon chili powder
2 teaspoons turmeric
4 teaspoons curry powder
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon coriander
4 cups dried lentils, rinsed
2 teaspoons salt, preferably sea salt
3 quarts water, vegetable stock or chicken stock or some combo of those

In frying pan, sautee onions, garlic and spices until onions are tender
Transfer to slow cooker
Add lentils and water
Put on high for one hour, then lower to simmer for however many hours you have
Remove half the lentils and blenderize
Return to soup

9-10 large servings

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