Mine, currently: spaghetti and meatballs, and I’m really particular about the meatballs. But buy them frozen from Costco…being lazy. I often use Classico tomato sauce—again, since cooking is what I do in 20 minutes after work…from a jar. However, Jane had something at Tomato Street which she really liked, and she says I do better: pour olive oil in a small saucepan, add basil, oregano, black pepper or red chili flake, and a heaping teaspoon of chopped garlic (I get Safeway’s, in oil: Jane and I can tolerate this one member of the lily family if fresh or ‘real’, as in, it was never dried —ironically, there’s a preservative we’re allergic to that they particularly use on garlic)—any, cook the meatballs in that, spoon over spaghetti, add a little parmesan, lovely.
Jane’s: chili with beans over spaghetti, topped with melted cheese, jalapenos and a dollop of very good natural sour cream. But she’s coming to really like the meatballs, too. SHe has trouble with tomatoes.
Home made soup of just about any kind.
I need comfort food when I’m tired. When I’m tired, I have no business around sharp or hot objects. I need something to nuke. Fortunately, those dinners have gotten a lot better, at least by some makers. (The common 3- or 4-hole TV dinners don’t seem to have changed for decades, though.)
I haven’t eaten eggs, at least directly, in a very long time. I guess with the latest cholesterol advice, that dietary cholesterol doesn’t correlate with blood cholesterol, I’ll see if I still like them. But those hotel eggs of the previous post? I’d have to get a bigger nest!
Sheila Gilbert gets a much-deserved rocket for her mantle!
Yay, Sheila! She got the backlash of the Sad Puppies problem in Spokane—so she got the rocket! Good!
Ugh, are those idiots still around? I rather hoped they had been sucked into the nearest black hole.
They got pretty much shut out again.
(We got two actual astronauts accepting, for Andy Weir (Campbell), and ‘The Martian’ (Dramatic – Long).)
Novel: The Fifth Season
Novella: Binti
Novelette: Folding Beijing
Short Story: Cat Pictures Please
Related Work: No Award
Graphic Story: Sandman: Overture
Dramatic, Long: The Martian
Dramatic, Short: Jessica Jones
Editor, Short: Ellen Datlow
Editor, Long: Sheila Gilbert
Pro Artist: Abigail Larson
Semiprozine: Uncanny
Fanzine: File 770
Fancast: No Award
Fan Writer: Mike Glyer
Fan Artist: Steve Stiles
Campbell Award: Andy Weir
I don’t have a particular “comfort food” as a reminder of home or childhood, but I do make something that does put a smile on my face, and it’s quick, easy, and real cheap! 🙂
I’m sure I’ve mentioned I love garlic–more than once. 😉
First I put a packet of Top Ramen (generally chicken or beef but it doesn’t really matter) in a sauce pan on the stove.
While that cooks, I prep the garlic. If all I’ve got is store bought, I put 3-4 cloves in the serving bowl, skin and all, and nuke ’em for just 10sec (1000W microwave oven). That makes the skins easy to peel off–my hardnecks peel easy as is. So peel and press the garlic into the bowl with my Suzi press. Generally I add some basil, in summer chopped fresh from the patio, a pinch of the dried from fall through spring. Pour in 2-3T of extra-virgin olive oil as desired. Cover with a plate and nuke for 55-65sec at half-power (“to taste” 😉 the longer the “milder”) covered with a plate (Note: no BPA laden plastics, thank you.) to flavor the oil.
When the ramen is done, pour off all but 1-2T of the soup/liquid. Add the ramen and remnant liquid to the bowl, then quickly add grated Parmesan/Romano cheese to taste and stir vigorously to mix with the hot “soup” to make a “cheese sauce”.
Serve with a glass of red.
Works for me (WFM)!
Homemade lasagna; I make spaghetti sauce in large batches, then use pint cottage cheese containers or sour cream or (you get the idea) to put it up in freezer batches suitable for smaller consumption. Two of those containers, a dozen lasagna noodles, 2 bags of shredded cheese (Mozzarella or any of the Italian blends) and yet another container of ricotta or cottage cheese, bake for an hour, and you have nearly a whole week’s worth of yum for two.
I’ve found that using the same sauce that I use for lasagna doesn’t taste the same with spaghetti. When I make my lasagna sauce, it’s just enough for that particular dish. I doctor up the commercially made sauce for spaghetti to my tastes. I never have been able to get spaghetti sauce to taste the way I like it if I’m making it myself.
Lasagna made with cottage cheese is only if I’m so desperately poor that I can’t afford ricotta, and if I can’t afford ricotta, I can’t afford to make lasagna. Since there’s only one person in house (er, one HUMAN) making a pan of lasagna means that I get one serving, the rest go into freezer containers and then when I feel like having it again, I pull it out and reheat it. (I hate what a microwave oven does to lasagna, though, next time, it’ll be in the toaster oven).
I do the same thing for beef stew, for chili, for spaghetti sauce, and if I choose to make egg rolls, I’ll make as many as I can, put them on a baking sheet (on wax paper), freeze them for an hour, and then put 6 in a freezer bag and back into the freezer. Portion control for one thing, or I’d sit and eat 10 – 15 of them….or more. Same for the lasagna, or the other stuff I freeze. Makes it so that by the time I’d heat a second helping, I’m no longer hungry.
I like Mexican and Chinese and Italian style because it’s a case of whatever you’ve got on hand. It varies by the spices, of course, but if you’ve got the tortillas, pasta, rice, or noodles, and you’ve got or can make the sauce, you can add whatever meat, whatever veggies, and some dairy, as in cheese or sour cream, and it’s dinner. French cooking, more fuss. More butter.;) I like it fine, but it also requires that must-do of French life—the daily store run. Everything is fresh…but it’s also a cuisine into which ‘le supermarket’ has made only slow inroads: nothing in these ancient cities is too far: markets and houses are somewhat scrambled, and neighborhoods have places reachable on foot.
I also find myself doing traditional Southern and, to a certain extent, the translated version of British cooking: part of my family, from whom I learned most of my skills, was English via Barbados to Baltimore and on to Illinois, and roast beast, pies, and bread were big in that branch. Amazing how when you think of it, your cooking may be a palimpsest of influences.
Eri-Guy does a wonderful Tomato-Spinach-Orzo soup that uses chicken stock as a base and warms the soul. I’m cutting back on carbs these days, so the typical comfort foods made with pasta, white flour or potatoes are a no-no, but I’ll make an exception for the soup when cooler weather arrives. By the way, the low carb diet is really working for me — I’ve lost 20 pounds since April!
Congratulations on the weight loss! I was low-carbing before I came out to WorldCon in Kansas City. Something about being away from home and eating in restaurants makes it too hard to resist desserts. Sigh. But the good news is I get my 10,000 steps in easily.
Good job on the steps! I probably average 10,000, but we are walking many miles on weekends making up for being slugs on weekdays. I didn’t go to WorldCon even though it was here as I didn’t have enough vacation time (new employer), and I’m already taking 6 days off in September. Sorry I missed seeing you, BretG and all.
BTW, Happy Birthday, Teegan…..August 24.
And another happy birthday for Teegan!
I can’t eat my old comfort foods anymore – they give me gout. Just be thankful you are allowed to eat anything.
OT, again, but USofA is getting a total solar eclipse in a year less a day! 😮 The path of totality will run through Salem, OR, KC MO, and lots of SC.
My prep for a 30% decades ago when I was in LA, was to use a pair of low-power field glasses, a lawn chair, and a large sheet of white cardboard. I sat in the lawn chair with my back to the sun, propped the cardboard on one leg with the ankle on my other knee, approximately perpendicular to the sun, and held the field classes over my head “looking” at the sun. I got a very nice projection on the cardboard, with focus control. The projection was very good, we could even see sunspots–I attracted a crowd.
Oops, forgot, here’s a map of the path:
http://www.space.com/33797-total-solar-eclipse-2017-guide.html
Canned tuna and Le Seur peas in creamed gravy served on toast (a species of SOS). Scrambled eggs and Gebhardt’s chili (this San Antonio based company used to put out the best canned chili, which they don’t any more, alas, although they do still make chili powder, so now I have to use Wolf Brand Chili with beans in my scrambled eggs). My mom’s fried chicken (made with an egg+milk batter and flour, fried in a covered skillet and only turned once with tongs, not a fork). Beet salad (cubed pickled beets, diced white onions, Kosher dill pickle relish and mayo). Big, thick Bisquick biscuits with apple butter. Spaghetti broken into thirds before being cooked, mixed with Wolf Brand Chili and diced white onions, sprinkled with grated cheese (Sargento 4 Mexican cheeses mixture, for current preference, historically with cheddar) and nuked in the microwave to melt the cheese. Mincemeat pie the way my dad made it with Nonesuch Mincemeat (that used to come in a foil-wrapped brick and now comes in a jar), with a lattice crust. He used to cut the strips of dough to make the lattice crust using this old eggbeater we had. He would use the crimped edge of the wheel that turned the beaters to cut a zig-zagged edge to the dough strips. One of my earliest memories is of watching him cut the lattice strips and watching the red wooden handle of that eggbeater go round, wondering if next time it would touch the pie dough. (It never did.) He passed in 2014. Sunday would have been his 94th birthday.