Last Friday, your humble Y&H servant spent some time compiling a working  list of restaurants planning to brave the winter storm that, at the time, was already dropping a serious load on us. I then promptly went home and didn’t see the inside of a restaurant until….well, last night, when Carrie and I went to our local steakhouse and tied one on at the bar.

We blamed it on cabin fever… that, and Elliott the bartender.

Massive snowfalls might bring out your inner cocooner (or inner drunk), but it brings out my repressed desire to cook, cook, and cook some more. This past weekend, I practiced what I preached (or, more precisely, practiced what I bitched about). I avoided the grocery store and cooked from only the ingredients we had on hand.

I produced this little beauty, made from those Portabellas that I’ve been wringing my hands over for a few weeks now. Carrie then one-upped me the following day by producing this sweet-and-savory omelet made with date-and-hot-pepper-infused duxelles.

OK, I must admit that on Sunday, I did sneak to the local co-op to buy ingredients for a homemade chili. But at least I didn’t rip some old lady’s head off just to get the last four-pack of toilet paper.

The good/bad news is that we may get a chance to do it all over again today and tomorrow. It’s “S’now joke,” as the Capital Weather Gang puts it. We have another major snowstorm coming. Forecasts are for 10-20 more inches on top of, what?, the 300 inches we got this weekend?

Do you have your kitchen ready for long, lazy cooking sessions for you and your family/significant other/random bar pick-up? You might even consider, as Y&H’s pal and baguette champ Samuel Fromartz suggested in an e-mail this morning, to bake bread. He thinks this no-knead recipe from Mark Bittman is the perfect starting point.

I hope you dig deep into the kitchen over the next few days. Because I want to hear what you’ve been cooking. Send me an e-mail and let me know what dishes have come out of your kitchen during Snowmageddon ’10. (With pictures, of course.) I’ll compile the best of them so we can all have a stock of cold-weather recipes for the coming storm — if not today’s, then the next one.