By now I’m sure most of you are familiar with the term “Comfort Food.”  It’s a funny thing, this comfort food.  It means any foods, especially those we grew up with, that bring us comfort as an adult.  Meals your mother would make perhaps, usually some typical American style food, like meatloaf, fried chicken with mashed potatoes and milk gravy, beef and vegetable soup and corn bread muffins.  Ok, those may be more mine than everyone else’s, but you get the point.

There are things I remember from my childhood that I am sure made me into the person I am today in regards to food.  Watching my mom saute onions and ground beef on the way to becoming goulash or spaghetti.  Or when she would make those butter cut-out cookies I’ve mentioned before.  Then there was all the times I would sit on the couch with my father on the weekends watching PBS.  We’d sit and watch This Old House and The New Yankee Workshop, then it was onto Yan Can Cook, Justin Wilson, and so on.  My Father was stationed in Taiwan during the Vietnam War and when he came home he created these dishes.  We call it “Dad’s Chinese” for lack of a better term.  Simple, delicious dishes, but certainly not the American Comfort Food I was talking about, yet still it is a comfort food.  Flavors from my childhood that I crave, and relish in when I taste them again.  Sense memory (an acting term coined by Strasberg) but it certainly applies to food.

I was in 5th grade, it was afternoon, and I was walking back to my desk from the bathroom at the back of the temp building.  All of the sudden, right in the middle of the room it smelled like Vanilla Cake Batter.  Who knows where that smell came from in such a strange place, but when it happened I was instantly taken back to my kitchen when my mother would bake a cake for one of our birthdays.  Of course, now that smell takes me back to 5th grade in Ms Austin’s temp.

Comfort food, it’s made with love, by people who care about us and want to nurture us-our minds and our bodies.  I believe good food made with love makes you happier and when you’re happier, you’re healthier.  As we got older, but still lived in