Comfort Foods

I've been ill.

Not to worry, I'm getting better. But being ill is like your body's little reminder for you to stop, take a breather, and let the rest of the world get on with what it's doing for once.

Which is exactly what I'm doing - and probably why I have found the time to blog (having taken some much needed time off work to do the things that keep me sane*).

I've been sleeping a lot. That's one thing I do particularly much of when I am ill - it's my miracle cure to everything. I swear, it's better than chicken soup and penicillin (though those help too).

Somewhere in my half-waking moments, I'd dreamt that I'd woken up to the smell of freshly baked cookies. It was most definitely a dream, because unless I'd sleepwalked my way to the oven, baked a bunch and put it in, there was most certainly no other Christmas elf around that would be figuring out the oven in my house.

It led me to think about comfort foods - tastes and smells that just make one feel better when one is ill.

My comfort foods used to be:

1. Minced pork with garlic soup
2. Pi Tan Porridge
3. Rice Krispies or Corn Flakes with warm milk (I'm a Kellogg's baby)
4. Quaker oats and condensed milk
5. Teh (the kopitiam type with condensed milk - something about the milk and sugar combination is very soothing)
6. Ginger tea
7. Yong Tau Foo - which I eat even when I'm not ill

They now are:

1. Vegetable soup or any creamy soup of any kind
2. Quaker oats and condensed milk
3. Warm apple juice and cinnamon - I wish Lemsip came in warm apple juice and cinammon flavours!
4. Toast - with butter, with ham, with jam, with nothing at all. just toast
5. Warm honey with lemon juice
6. Carr's Table Water

So some things change and others don't. I have found that oats settle one's stomach much more than porridge, but takes a stronger stomach for digestion - so they're useful in a flu situation, and less so in a bad tummy situation.

I guess I never do eat very much when I'm ill in the first place, but give me a choice of what to eat in the worst of situations, and the list above would be what I probably could not live without. The food we eat and come to love must surely be a function of where we are. I believe this now wholeheartedly - just look at how my comfort foods have adapted themselves to harsher climes.

That said, I still take my pi pa gao loyally when I am down with a sore throat.

* Incidentally which were, in no particular order - the laundry, socks and fleeces; cook soup; blog; admire the flowers; sleep.

The Season of Soups

January's BBC Good Food Guide finds one new year's resolution to always have home cooked soup sitting on the stove. I just realised this morning how easy it was to make, and how - given some time, mainly the chief ingredient of a good soup - this was one resolution that will keep one warm and toasty at home in the winter time.

For me, warm soups are comfort foods. Ever since I discovered Pret a Manger's soup collection, which started recently in autumn, I've been chasing up soups and soup recipes from all over.

In a cafe in Nuits-St-Georges on a recent French trip, I discovered what would possibly be the warmest, nicest, easiest to make vegetable soup possible. The secret? A Marigold brand vegetable bouillon stock powder that I have sitting on a shelf at home, thanks to enuwy's lovely recommendation a while back.

So upon coming down with a bad cold and wanting to experiment with the warming qualities of vegetable soup, I've decided to make my own:

Vegetable Soup

3 carrots
2 parsnips
1/2 a floret of broccoli
handful of barley (optional)
2 tsp bouillon stock powder
750 ml water
pepper

1. Chop vegetables roughly and throw into pot.
2. Sprinkle over with the bouillon powder and some pepper to taste.
3. Cover with hot water and bring to a slow boil.
4. Allow to boil for at least 1-2 hours for the vegetable flavours to set.
5. With a stick blender, blend into a creamy soup. Serve.

The soup feeds about 2-3 and in reality, you can toss in any sort of vegetable you like. In fact, I have my suspicion that this is one soup you can keep boiling on the stove regularly, topping up with leftover vegetables and other unwanted odd ends. Just remember to toss in a hearty amount of bouillon powder for taste and blend before serving.

This is one soup I'm definitely going to keep on my stove all winter!