So it was -20 when I went to bed last night, and it was -22 when I woke up this morning. it was -21 when I nearly fused the skin of my palm with the gas pump, and it was -15 when we scuttled off to dinner. Now, it’s -7, and guess what, it still feels fucking cold. So hey.

With weather like that, is it any wonder here that people eat food like this?

Let me introduce you to knoephla (pron. NEFF-luh), a gelatinous soup that is hard to pronounce, confounding to spell, and impossible to resist. I had it for the first time last April and was thoroughly offput by the mysterious potato dumplings: gnocchi-esque in texture, but about three times as large. April, perhaps, is not the month for knoephla.

January, however, most certainly is. I’d say that roughly 73% of my lunches this shoot have been knoephla-based. Knoephla may have saved my life, on more than one occasion over the last 16 days. It gives me sustenance, it gives me strength. If I don’t got the knoephla, I got nothing. And when I go back to Boston, I may need to enter a knoephla detox clinic.

I get my fix at Mom’s Diner (someone else’s pic of the interior is here), on Main Ave just before you hit downtown. They have great bacon, says Pusser, great club sandwiches, says Buckethead, great liver and onions, says Kimmer, and a fucking fantastic all-you-can-eat soup-and-salad-bar-combo meal, says I. After a morning running around in subzero tundra, there’s nothing like all you can eat soup bar… especially when the spread includes both knoephla and…

pepperoni pizza soup. Did you get that? PEPPERONI. PIZZA. SOUP.

WTF, AWESOME.