Comfort Food....

When I was growing up, I used to love hanging out in the kitchen with my mom.  I learned how to cook by watching her create things...and my parents were very adventurous eaters.  I grew up very poor, and we had to "make do with what we got" for a lot of meals.  We picked dandelion greens from the big field near our apartment, and mom would cook them with onions and whatever else we had on hand.  Mama would make a big pot of rice for dinner at night, and the next morning we'd have rice with milk, butter, and cereal for breakfast.  We never knew we were poor, all we knew is that we never went hungry.  My parents fed us stuff like monkfish, polenta, and we'd go to the Calumet Fisheries in Chicago and have little cartons of fried smelt.  We also had the more traditional beans and rice, collard greens and corn bread.  However we did NOT have a lot of the things that some people take for granted!  I never had a pork chop until I was married to my ex husband.  I never tried SPAM until a couple of years ago.  And I still haven't eaten Vienna Sausages.  My dad was, and still is, King of the Grill.  Barbeque is in his blood, and I've been sworn to secrecy on his sauce recipe...passed down from generation to generation. I'll never forget, we had this "Betty Crocker International Cookbook", and my mother would pick one country a month for us to have a recipe from. The only time it "bombed" was this beef/bean recipe from somewhere in Africa....even the dog wouldn't eat it!  She still can't live it down :-)  I've taken bits from my mom, and my dad, and merged them into a single mom's practical recipe collection.  My mom still can cook circles around me, every day of the week, but I can honestly say that some things I make..I do them better :-)  Every time I see her (which isn't nearly as often as I would like..) I get the request to make my homemade shrimp and grits.   One of my friends lost her mother and grandmother at the same time in a horrific fire, and her father came to visit.  The one thing he asked for?  Chicken and dumplings..because the recipe was lost with her mother.  I found out that this sweet old man wanted nothing more, and made the biggest pot I could.  Now it's become the most requested thing that I make.  Cooking food to me IS comfort food.  I come home from work, change clothes, put on the music, and my kitchen is my haven.  It's that place where I can think, I can create, and I can make people happy.