comfort food – in thriver words

Finding Your Comfort Food

If you grab anything in the kitchen when you’re distressed, have you considered spending time finding your comfort food? As the days grow shorter and temps cooler, many of us begin to dream of comfort food. This year, election season seems to be putting people on edge adding another level of desire for comfort.

White bowl with black rim filled with pumpkin colored soup garnished with sour cream and parsley on board with napkin and spoon on white cloth covered in parsley and seeds.

Here’s an experiment that can provide distraction and help you narrow the list of foods you reach for when you need comfort.

Often, distress leads us to flail about grabbing at anything that might lessen anxiety. When we mindlessly start eating, we aren’t necessarily choosing the most effective foods. This can mean that we have to eat more in order to feel calmer.

When we change that process to a deliberate one, it both helps focus us on something besides feeling ramped up and keeps us from consuming calories trying to get to the thing that works. It can also help prevent feelings of guilt.

Step 1: Hot or Cold?

When you feel a need for comfort, begin with a drink. Try hot herbal tea, hot broth, or hot cocoa. Make note of how you feel.

The next time, try cold. Cold herbal tea (passion tea is excellent chilled), ice water, or milk. Note how you feel.

Caffeinated drinks aren’t by nature going to calm you, but you don’t have to rule them out. The aroma of coffee calms me. And as long as I don’t overdo, it can help get me past the antsy feeling I get when I’m fighting sleepiness.

Step 2: Salty or Sweet?

If you’ve determined that heat has an impact, choose a salty or sweet version of hot or cold.

For example, if warmth has more benefit for you, try warm salty foods like queso, pizza, baked or mashed potato, or mac & cheese. If you feel better with cold foods, choose cheese and crackers, pretzels and hummus, nuts, olives, or pickles.

Warm and sweet choices could be cobbler, pie, brownies, fresh baked cookies, or poached fruit.

Cold sweet choices might be fruit and yogurt, ice cream, smoothies, pudding, a milkshake, or candy.

Step 3: Perfect Combo

Some people feel best with the perfect combination of protein, vegetables, and grain carbs. The combo may combine salty and sweet and be served hot or cold. For some, a mix of salty and sweet hits the spot. Others may prefer hot and cold together.

Hot apple pie with ice cream is a perfect combo for some. Others might prefer hot apple pie with melted cheese on top. One is warm and cold and sweet and has protein. The other is warm and salty and has protein.

For some people mac & cheese is the perfect combo. It’s warm and salty and has grain carbs.

Trying new combinations can lead you to comfort you haven’t previously imagined. You may even discover that the best comfort food for you is what you grew up eating with your family on special occasions.

There’s no right or wrong to comfort food choices as long as you only include foods within your dietary restrictions. The idea of experimenting with specific choices and noting how you feel is simply to help you know exactly what to go for to feel better. That way, you feel better sooner and without accidentally consuming too much in an effort to find the thing that will satisfy.

Instead of waiting until you feel distressed, have some fun giving comfort food a trial run! The competition is sure to be enjoyable.

Comfort Comes in Different Flavors

Comfort comes in different flavors. One of my neighbors was taken away by ambulance this morning. Once I knew he was stable and in good hands, I immediately thought about rounding up food for his wife. It’s not just that he’s the primary cook or that we often share recipes and dishes, but food is a basic need and I understand how overwhelming it can feel to meet that need when we’re stressed.

Our grandmothers, great aunts, mothers, and cousins understood this too. That’s why there’s a tradition of delivering food to sick friends or those who have lost someone. It’s a simple gesture that meets a need and brings great comfort. But comfort does not have to arrive wrapped in a specific flavor profile. Individual preferences for comfort food vary, but as long as you consider known allergies, intolerances, and dislikes, whatever you offer should be well-received.

Most of us have a favorite go-to. When I was young, my mother made Chicken Spaghetti for such occasions. I took a big gluten-free pot of it to the luncheon before her funeral. She probably wouldn’t have approved of me bringing a dish or the fact that the family didn’t parade into the sanctuary behind the casket. She was a stickler for the rules of tradition and convention. I sometimes find them a bit too confining. Nonetheless, I often wander back to the comforting foods I remember from family gatherings.

My grandmother served canned pears topped with a dollop of mayonnaise and grated American cheese. This was called a Pear-Cheese Salad in the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook. I haven’t eaten that combination in years, but I can still taste it in my head.

When my exchange sister visited from the Netherlands a few years ago, she wanted Mom to cook Goulash because that’s the comfort food she remembered from the time she lived with my parents and sister. I’m pretty sure that recipe also came from the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook. It contains cubes of beef chuck roast, onion, flour, salt, paprika, tomato sauce, canned tomatoes, garlic, some kind of oil, and a spice bag filled with bay leaf, celery, parsley, and thyme.

My sister and I wildly preferred my grandmother’s beef and noodles to everything else. It was always our favorite and our most frequent request. Last year, I braised some beef and accidentally mimicked the flavor so closely I was shocked. My sister now wants this as her standing birthday meal.

Other common dishes were Green Rice, Swedish Meatballs, Poke Salat, and Hot Spots. Hot Spots go by other names. They’re crunchy crackers made using cheese, flour, crispy rice cereal, butter, salt, and red pepper flakes. My ex-husband loved my grandmother’s so much he adopted the recipe and still takes the crackers to parties as one of his signature dishes.

Your family may prefer Mac-n-Cheese, Lasagna, Clam Chowder, Crab Cakes, Buffalo Chicken Wings, Tamales, Enchiladas, Green Bean Casserole, or Sushi because comfort comes in different flavors.

Five Rainy Day Comfort Foods

Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Stop and Smell the Memories

Do you ever take a moment to stop and smell the memories? My tomato plants are covered in tomatoes so heavy they tipped the trellis over this morning. As I was setting them back up surrounded by the smell of the plants, I was reminded of gardening with my grandmother when I was small. There’s a strong connection between smell and memory. There’s a strong connection between memory and comfort. And there’s a strong connection between comfort and food.

Have you ever had a chance to stop and consider how smell and memory influence your food choices? Most of us don’t even have time to stop and smell the roses, much less the memories. But an awareness of our relationships to smell memory can be helpful with compliance when we need to follow a specific diet in order to be healthy.

A few years ago, a gluten-free bakery opened in my city. My response upon first visiting it was to feel disappointment that there was no yeasty smell in the air. For me, the joy of a bakery lies in the smells-yeast, coffee, cinnamon. The visuals are great too, but while I might be hesitant to eat an oddly shaped cut of meat or deformed looking vegetable, I’d never refuse a misshapen cookie or a torn piece of bread.

Much of the joy and comfort of cooking come from familiar aromas. The first time I cooked fresh green beans in my home, I remarked, “This is how this house should smell.” The house is over 100 years old. Somehow, the smell fit the hardwood floors, carved wood doors, transom windows, and 12-foot ceilings. And I knew it.

When smell is a reminder of family, comfort, and tradition, it can be especially compelling. That’s because smell goes directly to an olfactory bulb that’s connected to the amygdala where emotional processing occurs. All of those warm feelings can end up being connected to related smells.

The idea of giving up a certain food may trigger a feeling of loss or separation as if you’re giving up family or comfort. Knowing this up front can help inform your choices and give you enough insight to recognize and overcome emotional memory stumbling blocks.

And perhaps knowing this can help you process through a diagnosis of celiac disease, diabetes, IBS, or Crohn’s disease without feeling as though required dietary changes will be dire. You will quickly recognize that you can enjoy the warm memories associated with the scent of a cinnamon roll without actually eating one. This knowledge will increase your sense of power, confidence, and choice.

It may also mean you value your memories more because you take time to smell them.

Think Going Gluten-Free is Hard – Visualization Can Help

Mid-Morning Pick-Me-Up Snack Fit For a President

By the time mid-morning rolls around, I’ll need a pick-me-up snack. I eat breakfast really early on holidays as well as regular days. Three to four hours later, I’m hungry. Snacking is common in the US. According to a study published in 2017, snacking increased from 1977 to 2012. While not everyone snacks in the morning, everyone has some favorite treats. Elected officials are no exception.
snack
In honor of President’s Day, let’s see what snacks are fit for high office. I live a few blocks from the governor’s mansion in my state where the previous governor enjoyed a peanut butter sandwich with a gin and tonic each afternoon when he got home. I know this because chefs love to share and I knew his chef.

US presidents have their favorite snacks as well. Their chefs love to share too!

Some of you may remember the jar of jelly beans Ronald Reagan kept on his desk as President. Before he ever reached the White House, Reagan used jelly beans to help him quit smoking. He chose a mini jelly bean flavored all the way through that was introduced by Herman Goelitz Candy Company in 1965.

When he took office as the governor of California in 1967, Reagan’s staff placed a standing order for monthly delivery of jelly beans from Goelitz. In 1976, the company introduced gourmet flavors like Very Cherry, Root Beer, Cream Soda, Tangerine, Green Apple, Lemon, Licorice, and Grape into the mini jelly bean line. They placed complimentary samples of the gourmet flavored beans called Jelly Belly into Reagan’s monthly order. He soon converted his entire order to Jelly Belly.

Reagan’s fondness for Jelly Belly was well known. When he died, it wasn’t uncommon for visitors to leave offerings of jelly beans at his library and gravesite.

Abraham Lincoln preferred gingerbread cookies. I can get on board with these as a snack. My grandmother used to keep them in her cookie jar when it wasn’t full of oatmeal raisin. I don’t know anyone who keeps a cookie jar full of homemade cookies now. Funny thing is, we rarely grabbed a cookie. We were too busy playing.

It’s not hard to appreciate a fondness for candy or cookies. It’s much more difficult to understand how someone could eat cottage cheese with ketchup on it. Apparently, that was a favorite snack for Richard Nixon. While it’s arguably healthier than jelly beans, I can’t get my mind around the taste. Some might say he lowered the bar in more ways than one.

Before his heart surgery, Bill Clinton liked to consume sweets and heavy foods like cinnamon rolls, cake, ribs, and enchiladas. And he was famous for jogging down Broadway to McDonald’s when he was governor of Arkansas.

President Obama’s preferences fall closer to mine – pistachios, almonds, chocolate roasted peanut protein bars, trail mix, and handmade chocolates. I could eat a handful of pistachios right now. I like them best roasted and salted whereas I prefer almonds and cashews raw.

I don’t know that I have presidential taste. It seems there’s not really such a thing. Just because you hold high office, doesn’t mean you have some sort of elevated preferences. In fact, with all the pressure that comes with the job, you’d most likely resort to whatever you find most comforting.

And now it’s time for a comforting snack for myself. Happy President’s Day!

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5579603/

https://americacomesalive.com/2017/11/11/ronald-reagans-jelly-beans/

https://www.jellybelly.com/?scid=scawd796498&utm_source=google&utm_medium=paid_search&utm_campaign=sidecar_paid_search_google&gclid=CjwKCAiAqaTjBRAdEiwAOdx9xl7Vb1eY02u9rjsMln9faUFLtW1zFldzYMfXIR5g9vt14QZ8jJOJ0hoC_oUQAvD_BwE

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1955&dat=19691203&id=258tAAAAIBAJ&sjid=YKAFAAAAIBAJ&pg=5155,1679604

https://www.washingtonian.com/2012/01/06/former-white-house-pastry-chef-recalls-bill-clintons-scary-appetite/

http://www.cooking2thrive.com/blog/top-five-gluten-free-summer-snacks-2016/

http://www.cooking2thrive.com/blog/safe-graze-snacks/