I am writing from the cellar, about twelve feet below street level, but I can still hear the high winds and the crash of boughs.  The two dogs dig restlessly against the compacted earth walls and floor and who am I to stop them?  Maybe they know something I don’t.  Change that to probably.  A way out?  Probably.

We stocked up on birds, fish, greens, dried fruits, chocolate bars, wine (white and red), and gin (Plymouth).  Last night I cooked a version of David Chang’s genius approach to chicken: Steam, cool in refrigerator for hours, and fry.  Bonus: The dripping chicken fat while steamed goes into water and with the backbone and neck already immersed?  Chicken soup, voila!

So that is tonight’s “Storm Special”: Chicken soup with matzoh balls, pan seared sea bass filet with an anise seed crust, and Indian eggplants in black bean sauce.  Sort of Mr. Markovitz meets Zhang Manyu by way of Ace Clay.

Meanwhile, the overarching theme inculcated by reading Nate Silver’s wonderful book, “The Signal and the Noise,” of which I am about halfway through, is the connections between things.  I love the way he finds some ties to be false, other ties true that were thought to be false.  In the chapter I am currently immersed in, he notes a rise in certain diagnoses, such as autism or flus, in relationship to the amount of news coverage provided to them.

Hold on.

There’s knocking on the cellar door, and it don’t sound friendly…