When a blizzard dumps more than two feet of snow on your doorstep, the only logical thing to do is curl up with the Sunday paper and a cup of cocoa. We heard that a big storm was coming, but who knew it would be the biggest winter storm in New York City history?

Normally we'd be upstate on the weekend, pretending to renovate our old house while getting sidetracked by the siren call of our six burner stove (no wonder it's taking five years to get the walls sheetrocked).

Afraid we might get snowed in, though, we stayed in the city. As the “remarkable and relentless” snowfall began to pile up outside, our thoughts turned to hot cocoa. We keep a box of Valrhona 100% cocoa powder in the house at all times, for just such an occasion.

Except when we take that box of Valrhona upstate, as we did the previous weekend, and forget to buy a new one. Also, we had somehow managed to run out of organic artisanal marshmallows.

Sure, we could have made do with Droste, and no marshmallows, but a storm of this magnitude seemed to merit something better. So we pulled on our wellies and trudged two blocks through two feet of snow, to the Garden of Eden gourmet grocery store where they sell the Valrhona.

Then it was on to Whole Foods to buy overpriced handmade marshmallows. On the way, we passed the statue of Gandhi in Union Square Park and were delighted to see that the storm had bestowed a Marge Simpson-like snowy beehive on his head (Matt said he looked like Beaker from the Muppets.)

I had this naïve fantasy that Whole Foods would be relatively empty, given the weather, but, no, the store was just as full of foodies foraging for goji berries and wood ear mushrooms as usual. Neither snow nor rain nor record-breaking blizzards stays these consumers from the swift completion of their appointed shopping, evidently.

We slogged home, savoring the novelty of being able to walk down the middle of blissfully car-free streets. But not as much as we savored our super-deluxe hot Valrhona cocoa, sweetened with just a bit of eucalyptus honey. We topped it off with the Tiny Trapeze Truly Chocolate marshmallows, which are made with “a unique chocolate extract from a recipe formulated over 100 years ago.” Worth walking half a mile in a blizzard for? We thought the first big snowstorm of the century deserved no less.

Photo: snow covered statue of Gandhi in Union Square Park