Cooking for Comfort, Cooking for Joy

Sometimes you just need things that feel comfortable. Comfort comes in many forms. Comfort can be your favorite sweater or a warm blanket. It can be a song that makes you think of something happy, or it can be a meal that evokes a memory. From the beginning of the pandemic I've been wearing comfortable elastic waisted pants and polartec fleece; now that it's warm I only shed the fleece. In fact with all the cooking I've been doing I'm not sure I actually fit into my jeans -- ok yes I do and for those of you concerned I'm working out at home. I found not only comfort but also joy in cooking during these trying times. Cooking became an outlet for me, a way to get my energy out, and do something creative. I looked forward to the end of the day when I would peek inside my fridge, freezer and pantry and see what yummy meal I could whip up. And since I can't paint, I can't draw, don't have the patience to knit and with lots of animals around doing a puzzle just wasn't an option, I decided that cooking would be my creative outlet. It didn't matter if I had fancy ingredients or the most basic, it was all about the creating.

I would put my chef head on after a long day at the computer and look in the fridge and freezer and plan my next episode of Chopped, the Homecook edition. Now that I live in the burbs and not a tiny apartment in the sky, I am lucky enough to have a pantry! And I think it's in my DNA to keep it all well stocked. My parents were always of the "You Never Know" philosophy so we always had a full fridge, freezer and pantry. And that way of thinking was most probably handed down from my dad's mom, the grandmother I'm always referring to in my stories. Grandma was from that generation of immigrant Jews that believed that if you had food on your table all was good in the world, it was a sign for them that they "had," even if they didn't. Grandma always had a full table no matter how little money she had or what the circumstances were in life. This type of thinking was handed down to my dad who lived by the same credo and he handed that down to me. My fridge and freezer are full and so is my pantry so I've been doing a lot of what I call #pantrycooking and #freezercooking.