It’s starting to get cold, we’re spending more time indoors, it is also cold and flu season, and with the onset of earlier darkness, I start to turn to comfort foods. You know – those foods that make you feel better. The foods that you turn to when you are feeling lonesome or you want something to wrap up in. Everyone has their own sorts of comfort foods, so let’s talk about them! What makes a dish a comfort food? Is it the warm and creamy kind? My warm-and-creamy favorite would be macaroni and cheese, with potato and leek soup running a close second. I have heard other people talk about thick stews being their warm-and-creamy, as well as things made with matzohs. I haven’t eaten much made with matzohs, but spaetzles are pretty good!
These warm-and-creamies all tend to be higher-carb, higher-fat foods that can make you sleepy, so I suppose that’s a comfort – eat a big serving, curl up under a quilt, and instant comfort! All of a sudden, winter isn’t so cold and dark, and you’ve got some extra insulation to get you through the cold months!
Nostalgia also seems to be a part of my comfort foods. A pile of warm, fresh, corn tortillas will take me back, and I will happily eat ‘em up. My grandmother always seemed to serve lamb chops with mint jelly on the side, with mashed potatoes (with the skins on!) loaded with butter – so medium rare lamb chops/mint jelly and buttery mashed potatoes takes me back to being a spoiled six-year-old allowed to sit at the grown-up table, eating grown-up food!
But I have summertime comfort foods, too. Dead-ripe tomatoes, eaten right off the vine! Fresh black-eyed peas! Fresh dewberries, complete with thorns and peaches picked that afternoon! Okra, dipped in cornmeal and eggs, fried and served too hot to pick up – and finish up with home-made peach ice cream. Can’t think of anything better.
Our choices of foods, how they make us feel – I know that there is a lot of biochemistry there, neurotransmitters, insulin, serotonin – but those polysyllables don’t come close to defining comfort food. Part of comfort food is the friends and family we share it with.
11 Comments
Kate! Help! Have I gotten a stalker, or is my topic so magnetic that the opening paragraph is following around through cyberspace?
It’s one of those automatic skimming robot thingies. I sent him on his way with a flea in his metallic ear.
My sister likes to talk about these things as working at the cellular level.
All I know is that, on a cold night like tonight, there really is nothing like a hot meal of something to make me feel happy.
Tonight I’m working on two ears of corn, currently cooking. That’s the appetizer. The real meal? We’ll see …
What I wouldn’t give for fresh cor tortillas drenched in butter and dipped in fresh salsa!
We ate Mexican tonight. Coincidentally, I had some fresh tortillas that I rolled up and dipped in salsa!
No butter, though.
Wow, comfort food is comfort food! Stuff you or someone who loves you terribly has made.
I love my Mother’s chicken spaghetti, my sweetie’s Gumbo with rice, his macaroni and cheese, my fresh apple cake, my 18 degree beef stew, fresh clam chowder, throw-down bread, Mexican lasagna, homemade bread and butter pickles, sourdough pancakes, freezer strawberry jam…many more. They all are soul feeding stuff!!!
Not so fast, Scotia! Do you really think that you can get away with tossing around terms like “throw-down bread”, 18-degree beef stew and Mexican lasagna without offering an explanation, or, lacking that – a recipe or two?
Speaking of which, if you’ve never made macaroni and cheese (baked) with feta and cilantro, you’ve never lived!!
Biscuit – I never truly LIVED until I ate real feta!
But, but…plain ol’ mac-and-cheese made with feta and cilantro? That would be more like Pastafilakides with a Thai accent!
Not the same thing!
Oh god! It is heavenly!
Got me through grad school. Seriously! It’s a yum fest, and very decadent.
OK, Biscuit, I will iffen you will. The mac ‘n’ cheese and feta ‘n’ cilantro sounds yummy.
I have posted the “throw-down bread”….I’ll post the Mexican Lasagne from a Picante 25th anniversary recipe book (with my touches, of course!), the 18 degree stew was in Dallas in about 1978 during an ice storm and I pulled everything out to make a decent stew and biscutis!!!
No recipe! Just mix it up and bake – be sure to add garlic, too, and black pepper – oh, and I would cook the noodles beforehand.
Yummers!
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