Comfort Food

Comfort food. What images does this term conjure up for you? Is it something for your childhood? Is it a recently developed taste? Perhaps comfort food, is to have a takeaway delivered to your door.

Comfort food I think depends on the mood and why we are craving comfort food. Recently I was craving comfort food. I was craving something savoury, instant with not too many ingredients.

Comfort food invariably requires and egg. Yes, for some reason it warms and comforts me. It usually involves bread as well.

When I crave comfort food, I want to be able to look in the fridge and grab a few ingredients. These ingredients need to be versatile and quickly cooked.

Recently I needed and wanted comfort food. I was lacking in energy and needed a hug from food. Opening the fridge, I found a few left over sausages from the previous night’s dinner, some boiled potatoes and one lonely egg. The fridge was very bare. A shop was looking more and more urgent, but it was raining outside.

I mashed the potatoes adding, salt , pepper, dried thyme, dried parsley, some nigella seeds. I sliced the sausages very thinly and added to the potatoes. Some flour would make potato cakes but there was no flour in the larder. I broke the egg into a bowl and beat it with a fork adding it to the potatoes.

Grabbing an omelette pan I heated it with a drop of oil. ( There was only a drop of sunflower left in the bottle!!!!) . When it started to smoke, I added the potato mixture reduced the heat and allowed it to cook slowly. Flipped it over to cook the other side while boiling the kettle to make a mug of tea.

This really was comfort food. It was a cross between a tortilla and an omelette, and it was pretty delicious even though I do say so myself. Could it be enhanced? Yes, with the addition of cheese or some cooked onion and peppers together with another egg.

However, it really passed the test of comfort food for me that day and gave me enough of a hug that I headed to the greengrocer and butcher to top up on some fresh produce. There was not enough of a hug to venture into the supermarket. That required too much effort and was deferred for another day.