[2020-12-28] Comfort food
No naps today. I had enough energy to make easy bagels with my daughter this morning: 8 sesame seed and 8 everything bagel. This afternoon, I organized my recipe file.
That entails transferring recipes from various websites and recipe books into a single consolidated file. Only recipes that we feel are a 10 make "the book"—a binder of all our favourite recipes.
Sometimes we try a recipe from the book and find that it no longer makes the grade, so we drop it. Over the years, as our tastes have evolved, we have honed our recipes and refined our collection.
If I didn't consolidate our recipes, I would quickly forget favourites we had once made and loved.
Our ancestors simplified their culinary habits by having a smaller collection of favourite recipes, which they prepared by memory. When I first came to Ottawa at 18 to go to university, I lived with an elderly woman who had no more than a dozen favourites in her meal rotation. They included roast chicken, macaroni with tomatoes and cheese, and breaded pork chops. And yet I never got tired of her cooking. She had perfected each recipe.
My mother-in-law took a similar approach. Her repertoire included rôti de porc, soupe aux légumes, salade aux cailles, and—on special occasions—tourtières, pâté à la viande and ragoût de boulettes.
There's something comforting about making a recipe that reminds us of our ancestors or of our childhood. Many of my own recipes, such as this guilty pleasure (Peanut Butter Butterscotch Marshmallow Squares), are 40 years old.
I find it especially soothing, as the nausea from chemotherapy round 5 abates, to enjoy comfort foods—some old, some new. It helps make recovery just a little bit easier.
