PORCH PONDERINGS

Food, Wonderful Food

PROMPT March 2nd

What kinds of things do you like to cook or are good at cooking? What are your comfort foods?


What kinds of things do I like to cook? Well, do you have a few thousand words to spare? I like to cook just about anything. I like to cook, bake, can my own food, freeze leftovers.

My mother was not a very good cook. I remember food that just wasn’t made with a lot of imagination. I like to take chances, try new things. I like to experiment.

I’ll go for stretches of time where I will bake lots of cookies and brownies and cakes and such. Then they’ll all be frozen. So we’ll have them for a month or so. Then it’s on to some new adventure. I like to watch the Great British Baking Show. Such fun and great inspiration for baking ideas.

Yesterday I made an Irish soda bread. A new recipe from a magazine. Interesting. It had no sugar or egg in it. Just flour and buttermilk, baking soda of course, salt, raisins, and caraway seeds. Baked in a cast iron skillet in the oven. To go with that we had coddled eggs, cole slaw, peaches and chocolate chip cookies (homemade as well). Nice dinner.

Coddled eggs? Eggs in little porcelain egg cups. You put the eggs in the cups, put on the lids and boil them for several minutes til they are soft boiled. Hubby introduced me to them when we met.

We plant a garden every year and enjoy eating the fresh vegetables from that. We eat fresh food every day. I really enjoy that now, and feel cheated if I don't have a some kind of salad daily.

I was diagnosed with gluten intolerance years ago. And lactose intolerance. Try eating with those problems. Add to that having no gall bladder and well, your diet choices just greatly diminished. I have to watch my carbohydrates - I recently have discovered I can eat small amounts of wheat, if I bake with Wheat Montana flour. It’s a local product - non-GMO. We also use Lactaid milk. And I try not to eat fried foods. But I have a diet aid to help with fat digestion. Whatever. I’ll not bore you with more details.

So, my comfort foods that I cannot eat anymore: homemade macaroni and cheese that my husband used to make and homemade pizza with a wholewheat crust that I used to make.

Some things I do like to eat: anything salty. Potato chips, gluten free pretzels or crackers, Doritos. Like they used to say, ‘You can’t eat just one.’ And as my friend used to say, ‘That’s because they’re sprinkled with cocaine.’

We all know that isn’t true. Don’t we?