The Simple Joy of Comfort Food

Comfort food is not about the food or eating. It is about the feeling it evokes when you enjoy it. Sometimes, it only takes a taste for you to feel better. Some comfort foods were an everyday part of your family meals growing up. For example, Mr. Diva always made meatloaf for dinner every Wednesday night for years. His meatloaf is still a comfort food for our daughter and me. Some comforts foods are enjoyed less often but stir feeling when we eat them. My mother always made Christmas cookies each year. We only enjoyed some of those cookies at Christmas. To this day, I feel close to my mom when I make and eat those special cookies. Comfort food makes you feel better. It's not always the same food that make you feel better but it always works for you. Sometimes it takes chocolate chip cookies. Other times, it takes tomato soup. Comfort food is like medicine. You must choose the right prescription in order to treat what ails you.

Whenever I see a list of comfort food, they tend to include meatloaf and mashed potatoes. These are indeed comfort foods for many of us but for others, both dishes offer no comfort. If these items were not part of the regular family menu when you grew up, then they offer no comfort to you. Your comfort foods must be familiar to you. They are usually dishes that were a regular part of your family's meals. They may not have been made often but they were served often enough for you to associate them with your family. Your comfort foods give you a warm feeling inside because of the emotional ties and the identification with family.

This doesn't mean comfort foods must be hard to prepare but one of the reasons they are so special for us it the effort it takes to make them. Baked potatoes are good but mashed potatoes are a comfort food for me, especially mashed potatoes and gravy. Baked potatoes take little to no effort. While mashed potatoes and gravy are simple to prepare, they do take some effort to make. In fact, I am discovering mashed potatoes are a lost art. Comfort food can be easy to make but it isn't just a matter of opening a package and eating. Let's face it, store bought chocolate chip cookies just aren't the same as homemade. Even if you make the cookies that you slice off a roll, you still bake them. That takes some effort. When you are sick, soup might be from a can but you have to heat it up. Corny as it sounds, we taste the love and that make us feel better.

Comfort food doesn't need to be spicy but it needs to have a distinctive flavor and odor. Go back in your mind to childhood and the great smells that came out of the kitchen when dinner was being made, especially when your favorite foods were cooking. Just the smell made you feel better. Our sense of smell is the strongest memory trigger of all our senses. When we smell a comfort food cooking, just the fragrance triggers our sense of well-being before we ever taste them. Ah, but when we do taste them, WOW! As more of our senses become engaged, we are comforted even more. This is why a package of chocolate chip cookies don't have the same affect as fresh baked cookies. Smelling those cookies in the oven, you can just faintly taste the chocolate while they are still in the oven. When you prepare comfort food, make sure fragrance as it cooks is part of the experience. It's easy to microwave soup but when I need comfort, I like to cook soup on the stove so I can smell it cooking. Bland food doesn't bring as much comfort as food that has been properly seasoned. Experiment with spices to learn the ways different flavors comfort you and your family. Take time to work on creating fragrant and flavorful dishes for fresh comfort foods for you and your family.

Comfort food isn't just a stand alone dish. Sometimes, it is an entire meal. Consider Thanksgiving. It's not just the turkey. It's the entire meal. The menu may change over the years but certain dishes remain year after year. If they are missing, the day just doesn't have the same feel to it. Have you ever spent a holiday with another family? Their traditional dinner probably wasn't the same as your family's. It might have been a very good meal but it just didn't have the same feel to it, right? You associate the good feelings with the food you have shared with family year after year. When you prepare comfort food, you want to consider the additional dishes you must make to make the experience complete. When you get married and begin preparing holiday or traditional meals for your spouse, you want to ask what dishes his family made for the event when he was growing up. Combining your traditional dishes with his can create a new comforting holiday tradition for your new family.

Comfort foods may be simple but it is not easy to classify dishes in this category. Become more aware of the affects different dishes have on your mood, good or bad, and before long, you will have a much better idea which foods make you feel better in different situations. That is a tremendous comfort in itself.