Yummy!

Whenever I'm feeling down or blue, my appetite is heavily affected. I'm usually less hungry and less tolerant of anything new or exotic. Like most people, I turn to comfort foods.

Recipe books love to classify food into categories. I love recipe books, but I just have to laugh at what qualifies as comfort food. Let's take mac n'cheese. I love mac n'cheese, it's Andrew's favorite food, and I have a mighty fine recipe for it. But my idea of comfort does not include spending 15 minutes grating eight ounces of sharp cheddar cheese. That's entirely took much work when I'm blue. The same with lasagna - way too much work to be comforting if the one who needs comforting is the chef.

My comfort food is breakfast. I love toast with butter and apple butter. Cereal of almost any kind is perfect. If I'm really sad, though, nothing can give me a temporary jump like Frosted Flakes. I also love oatmeal. Sure those instant packages will do, but I mean quick cooking oatmeal with brown sugar, maple syrup, and dried apples. I just had a bowl for lunch and my tummy is pretty happy.

What is your favorite comfort food?

A Delicious Tradition

My part of Southern Ontario is the southern most point of Canada, which generally means shorter winters (shorter than Thunder Bay) and fairly warm summers. Here in the Windsor area, the weather is pretty much the same as the Detroit area. Hot, humid summers are the norm.

This weather gives us an abundance of fresh produce. A few years ago, a girl friend and I decided that we would try our hand at canning fresh tomatoes. Her garden was over flowing and Leamington (about 45 minutes from here) is the tomato capital of Canada. We had no clue what we were doing, but we are both fairly literate and can follow simple directions from a recipe. The endeavor turned out perfectly, the jars sealed, and we celebrated the sealed jars with a toast of whatever wine she had leftover in the fridge. The fresh canned tomatoes provided homemade pasta sauce all winter long. Since then, we have preserved a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables.

Today, we continued the tradition and made strawberry jam and strawberry-rhubarb jam. We started with eight quarts of locally grown strawberries and fresh rhubarb from her garden and ended up with over 20 pints of homemade jam. Later this week, we'll tackle cherry jam for the first time. Plus, we'll experiment just a little. She had purchased a jar of "black forest jam" from a street fair and it was quite delicious. We'll try our own version by adding and ounce of dark chocolate per quart of cherries. I'll let you know how it turns out.