It's A Comfort

What is a "comfort food?" It's been described as anything simple that makes you feel good when you eat it. Often it's something that we remember being served in our childhood, perhaps when we weren't feeling too perky and someone took the time to give us the extra attention and care we needed to feel better.

Many times a comfort food tends to be bland and rather colorless. Mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, or sugar/cinnamon sprinkled on white bread toast. Hot buttered noodles. Tapioca pudding. But it could also be something like a popsicle when you have a sore throat.

I have two foods that are my comfort foods. The first is actually more of a "comfort memory" I guess you'd have to say as I no longer eat it in the same way I did as a child.

When my mom and I were living with her parents during World War II because my dad was overseas, my aunt and her son also lived there because Uncle Win was serving in the Navy. My mom left for work early each morning so it was my aunt who made my breakfast on weekdays. On any morning that Aunt Sally would ask Jeff and me what we wanted for breakfast, we would chorus in unison, "Dookey Eggs!"

My dear aunt would then dutifully soft boil an egg for each of us, whack off the top, set the bottom upright in an egg cup alongside a plate with buttered toast that she had cut into four or five one-inch strips. We dunked (is that where the name "dookey" came from? . . . I truly don't know!) these toast strips into the soft yolk of the egg until either the toast or the yolk was gone, and then we would eat the rest of the egg by digging it out of the shell with our spoons. Such warm memories I have of my cousin and me sitting at Grandma and Grandpa's kitchen table while my aunt prepared our special "Dookey Eggs!"

My other comfort food developed around the time I was an early teenager. And that is potato chips.

My mom and dad both worked outside the home so until my brother and I were of a certain age, my grandma was at our house to feed us lunch at noon time when we came home from school which was in the next block from where we lived, and still there in the afternoon when we came home from school. But along about the time I, the oldest, turned 12 or 13, it was decided that my brother and I could stay at home alone after school until Mom or Dad got home a couple of hours later.

My favorite thing to do was to get home, change out of my "good clothes," get a bowl of potato chips, a big glass of orange juice, and curl up on the couch with my current reading book. Comfort, security, happiness.

Even now, close to fifty-five years later (omigawd!), if I'm feeling stressed or anxious or worried or just wanting to get cozy and hunker down for a needed rest and escape into a good book, I crave potato chips. Not your typical comfort food (nor very healthy), but that's what does it for me.

So! What's YOUR comfort food? Come on, spill the beans. It can't be as sinful as a big, ol' bag of salty, greasy potato chips!