comfort foods

Michele is talking about the comfort foods you want when you're sick.

I listed some of mine - pancakes, buttered toast, Cap'n Crunch Peanut Butter Crunch...

And I thought of a few more:

buttered noodles. No garlic, no stinky foot cheese, no acidy tomato stuff - just butter and a little salt on noodles, or wagon wheel pasta, or alphabet macaronis (which are VERY VERY HARD to find where I live now - I don't know if there's a nationwide drought of these things, or if it's just my region. But when I was a kid - we used to have them on the shelf all all the time. Mueller's, I think, was the company that made them.)

(Actually, more on pasta - where I grew up, Mueller's (white box with blue and red accents) and Creamettes (green box with red accents) were the two big brands. Neither of those are sold down here. I can get DaVinci (blue plastic bag), which is good, but it is somehow not the same. I remember the first time I went back to visit my parents after I moved down here, going to the grocery to pick some things up for my mother - I saw the Creamettes boxes on the shelf at the store and had to fight tears. And after a brief flirtation with the "healthier" whole wheat pasta, I'm back to good old durum semolina. I don't eat pasta that much - maybe a couple times a month at most - so I don't think I need to eat something with the consistency of sandpaper in the interest of my health)

White bread, with butter and sugar on it. (This would probably be regarded as child abuse in some circles today). That was one of the upset-stomach-can't-eat-real-food treats, or one of the we're-out-at-a-restaurant-and-you-don't-like-anything-on-the-menu-
and-I'm-sorry-about-that palliatives. I didn't get it often but I loved it. (And I made it for myself a couple months ago, just as an experiment. It was as soothing as I remembered. Not that I eat it OFTEN, mind you - but it's nice to know my memory of that wasn't inaccurate.

Lemon-lime soda, although I wasn't a big soda fan as a kid, we got that or Vernor's ginger ale when our stomachs were upset. Funny, that was one thing that I didn't particularly crave when I wasn't sick. I still don't, today.

Cereal. Any kind of cereal, pretty much, except for junk like All-Bran or some kind of flake cereal without any added sweetener. I still eat cereal for dinner sometimes - when I've been at work from 7 until after 5, and then had a hellish meeting right after, and now it's 9 pm and I've neither been home nor had a proper meal all day - cereal works because it's easy, and you don't have to go to much effort to eat it, and you don't have to wait for it like you have to wait even for soup to heat up. I like hot cereal, too, but I never have time to do it in the morning (except maybe on Saturdays), so sometimes I fix that for dinner.

Grilled cheese. Yes. A good grilled cheese, properly made - that is, cooked on a hot grill with butter on the outside of the bread, and preferably it's a restaurant grill that's held onions and hamburgers before the sandwich, so the bread picks up a little extra flavor - that is one of life's joys. From the age of about 4 until the age of perhaps 14, that was my standard, fall-back, restaurant order: a grilled cheese sandwich.

Sadly, grilled cheese can easily be debased, and often in subtle and unexpected ways. I think I talked before about the "grilled cheese florentine" I got one time when I ordered a simple grilled cheese - I'm sorry, but spinach has no place on that sandwich. Even tomatoes - as much as I may like them on other sandwiches - have no place in a grilled cheese, at least in my universe. Nor should the sandwich be made on ANYTHING but lily-white, sponge-type Wonder bread. (One possible exception: my mom used to make an excellent tomato bread that made fine grilled cheese sandwiches. They were not the old-fashioned diner standard type sandwich in many ways, but they were still good). And NEVER mayonnaise. I am adamant on that and am STILL appalled that Culver's thought somehow grilled cheese and mayo were a combination that a human being could ingest.

But your old-fashioned, "golden age" grilled cheese - the simple, classic type: buttered Wonder bread, grilled with a slice of that wrapped American cheese (or Velveeta - call me a Philistine but I do like Velveeta) inside it, cooked until the bread is crisp and slightly brown and the cheese properly melted - that is a wonderful thing.

Tomato soup, I'm kind of agnostic on. I didn't like tomato soup until I was an adult so I never experienced the "dip your grilled cheese in your tomato soup" tradition.

Milkshakes. Milkshakes were another "forbidden" (well, most of the time) food that became permissible when we were sick. We didn't live in an area that had many fast food joints, so my mom usually made them at home in her blender. (Oh, and did you know? Ovaltine makes excellent shakes. Ovaltine, milk, vanilla ice cream - it's like a good chocolate malted. Ovaltine has the DUMBEST radio commercials EVER, but it's a good product.)

And while I'm on Ovaltine: hot Ovaltine. Made with milk. In a big big mug. It makes a lot of the bad things go away. Especially if you have a couple of slightly sweet crisp crackers to eat with it. (I've recently discovered a product called "Milk Lunch" or "New England Milk Crackers." I swear that we had something like this in the Great Lakes region when I was a kid, and I'd just not seen it for years - they are sort of between a Ritz cracker and a butter cookie with a hint of "saltine" about them. They're wonderful, the only place I've seen them for sale is Vermont Country Store, and like a lot of the specialty products from them, they cost the Earth but are worth it to me in terms of the comfort they bring.)

Homemade applesauce. It's different from the stuff in a jar. I don't often make it for myself because it's extra work but it's very good. My mom always used to serve homemade applesauce. (It's cooked, the stuff in the jar seems to be raw ground up apples. It gives a different texture and flavor).

Belgian waffles. These were a rare treat because you had to be at a restaurant, at a time when breakfast was available, and that had Belgian waffles. (My mom had a waffle iron, but it was one of those flat unexciting American-type waffle irons. And her waffles were good, but they weren't Belgian.)

More recently, I've found other comfort foods:

Wonton soup. If you have a good Chinese place near you, this is the best thing for a cold. I think they make the stock with more wings than normal or something - it has a vaguely gelatinous taste and seems smoother and fuller than usual chicken stock.

Hot tea. I hated tea as a kid - couldn't be made to drink it, even when the doctor said it would settle my stomach. (I had lots of stomach issues as a kid). But now, I love it. It's almost as good as Hot Ovaltine for making the bad things go away.

Barbecue. Lots of it, preferably the baby back ribs, and in a setting where you can eat them with your fingers and get the sauce on your face and not feel like a slob for doing it. Barbecue is fairly big where I live now, but it's hard to find a place that's exactly to my liking, because I tend to prefer the sweeter, Kansas-City style sauce to the more vinegary, more hot sauces.

Tapioca pudding. Another hated-it-as-a-kid thing. (Along with rice pudding, which I actually make more frequently than tapioca, because I'm more likely to have the ingredients on hand). It's kind of like cereal or soup - there's something inherently comforting about food you don't have to cut or even really chew.

Those cup-o-noodle things, chicken flavor - I almost never eat these because of the salt content, but sometimes there are times when you just want a salty cup of noodles. (And I like Ramen, too. Even though I ate it a lot as a student.)