Comforting to know

Somehow I used to think that I am wasting my time (official time) by reading blogs and blogging instead of working and you know guilt and all that but as last three months are testimony, I have thoroughly ignored all my blogs.

While I try and change that - I need to cook more, click more photos and of course post more - thought would start off with what seems to be everyone's favourite - comfort foods.

• Mine will be a confession of sorts. Topping the list is wheat flavoured Cerelac. Its the ultimate comfort - unless not mixed to the right proportion. I have hidden this affliction for as long as I can remember. My mother would actually make up stories about fictional visiting babies so that the grocer would not smirk. And here have to give my sister away too... she loves it as much. And the irony? We spat it out as babies or at least my sister did. My excuse is that it was not even there when I was a baby!
• Then there is plain, white, untoasted (or kaccha, as it is called in Delhi) bread with mayonnaise and sliced cucumber. No sandwich tastes better to me. The softness of the slice, slight wetness of the mayo (too much is never a good thing) and crrrunch of the cucumber. There is no substitute to this.
• Potato lightly fried in (no) oil and spinkled with pepper and salt and a sunny-sde-up egg over it. But then potato is common comfort food.
• A perfect pasta which I somehow make best when I need comfort food. I never get it right when I am cooking for company.
• Orange marmalade on toast.
• A hot phulka off the stove, with ghee(clarified butter) drizzled with a little salt.
• Plain arhar ki dal, steamed with salt and lime.
  

I have heard many over the years - just bread and butter, toasted bread and butter, bread with sev/bhujia/namkeen (a salty tea time snack often interchanged forsev or bhujia), bread with Iodex (typically an IITian or some such haloed institute thing), tomatoes with cheese, tomatoes with bread and cheese.

I even have comforts in ice creams. The best and can cheer me any day is vanilla ice cream with dry cake and loads of chocolate sauce. Of course then there is chocolate sauce by itself, which I can have coated on Marie biscuits, added to any flavour of ice cream and even tried adding it to jelly. I admit that was not a wise thing to do.

Surprisingly (mostly to me only) chocolate does not come high on my list of comfort foods. But yes it can do its trick. In fact these days reading about food has become a comfort of sorts.

You might want to read the post that got me thinking about mine...