Ultimate Mac & Cheese, Redux

Do you have what you consider to be an excellent Mac & Cheese recipe? If so, you may wish to enter the Tillamook Macaroni & Cheese Cook-Off. From the contest website:

The third annual Tillamook Macaroni & Cheese Recipe Contest has evolved from past years and will be held during the cold weather months when comfort food is on everyone’s mind. No longer seen as just a simple, family meal, macaroni and cheese has many gourmet varieties. Last year saw more than 1,000 recipe submissions and we anticipate even greater participation this year. We’ll have cook-offs in six cities: Portland, OR; Seattle, WA; Denver, CO; Chicago, IL: San Antonio, TX; and San Francisco, CA. Each regional cook-off winner will qualify to compete in a grand finale cook-off in Portland, OR (all travel expenses paid), for the chance to win $5,000 in cash and endless bragging rights....

Comfort food for breakups

An excellent Toronto Food & Drink Blog is carrying a review of Marusya Bociurkiw's new book, "Comfort Food For Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl." Despite the seemingly light-hearted title the book runs the emotional gamut. From the review:

Marusya Bociurkiw looks back at the personal highs and lows of her life through the food associated with each event. This collection of short stories and essays, interspersed with recipes, offers a glimpse into the Toronto-based writer and filmmaker’s life via what she ate and with whom.

She recounts the curry she cooked for her homeless brother, the coffee she drank on a visit to Ukraine, a torte brought by her mother on a trip, the rye bread from a Jewish bakery she visits with her father, a former prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp. She tells of her various friends and lovers and the food she cooked for them and ate with them, as well as the food she ate to comfort herself when they were gone.

Comfort Food For Breakups is a beautiful collection of food memoirs, each one striking and poignant as they reveal Bociurkiw’s ongoing relationship between food and emotion, particularly love. The author paints a vivid picture of each person, each food, each place, as she describes all of the above with detail and care.

Good reading when chocolate and a sad movie aren't the answer, I guess.

Emotional Eating

The Toledo Free Press is running a story online today about Emotional Eating. Brian Wansink, director of the Food and Brand lab at the University of Illinois, is quoted listing the usual reasons why we turn to comfort food, but has further:

broken down the types of comfort foods used based on sex and different moods. The No. 1 comfort food, to no one's surprise, is ice cream. After ice cream, women prefer chocolate and cookies and men prefer pizza, steak and casserole. Sad people prefer ice cream and cookies 40 percent of the time and bored people prefer potato chips 36 percent of the time.

The only thing I'd add to the men's list is just about any cold cereal, perhaps a quirk only my brothers and I share.

Recipe: Apple Coffee Cake

"Simply Recipes" has a recipe for an Apple Coffee Cake that should leave fans of breakfast "cakes" drooling. This may even top the famed Hobee's Blueberry Coffee Cake that can be had in my neck of the woods (Bay Area of California), though I'm not quite ready to make that claim. Enjoy!

Recipe: Lancashire hot-pot casserole

The Grand Rapids Press is carrying an article and recipe for
Lancashire hot-pot casserole, by Jaye Beeler. The dish's humble English origins make it all the more enticing:

One day, I decided to make celebrity chef Gary Rhodes' Lancashire hot-pot: lamb chops ladled with a heavenly gravy and topped with a layer of golden potatoes, essentially the equivalent of an Irish stew.

Shopping for ingredients, I foraged in the open-air, town-center market, vying with townies for farm-fresh vegetables. I visited the butcher, the baker and the bottle (wine and liquor) shop, lingering in each place and stuffing my backpack.

Then I hiked back to our tiny flat's kitchen -- a narrow, windowless room about the size of a broom closet. There, I pulled together the humble British dish.

Peasant dishes worthy of kings

The Providence Journal is carrying an article by Food Editor Gail Ciampa titled "Chef's Secret: Italian comfort food in Johnston." The subject is a stellar pasta e fagioli soup served at Luigi’s Restaurant in Johnston, Rhode Island. The recipe is linked at the end of the article, and according to Executive Chef Ralph P. Battista, a member of the family that owns the restaurant, the dish originates with his beloved grandmother, Anna "Little Nona" Mignanelli. The name alone should make you wish to break out the olive oil, garlic, and onion, but Battista provides more incentive to try this particularly tasty pasta:

"[It's] the original Italian comfort food and one of the more famous of Italy’s many peasant dishes that are also worthy of kings. There are as many versions of this dish as there are regions in Italy and each is a little different based upon the availability of ingredients or which cut of pasta is preferred."

Comfort me with food

TheStreet.com is carrying an article by Rocco DiSpirito titled "Comfort me with food." It centers round "pastina," or "tiny pasta," a soup that served as comfort food in Rocco's childhood home, and includes a little history and a recipe. Definitely worth the quick read!

Yet another reason to visit London

Charles Campion has an article on thisislondon.co.uk about where to eat comfort food in the great city of London. Campion waxes gastronomic about risotto, mince, custard, mashed potato, and rice pudding, and offers up favorite London restaurants where each of these dishes may be had. I'd visit each tomorrow but the cost of air fare from California makes the meal a tad pricey.

USA Today's "A trip down comfort food lane"

USA Today's website still carries an interesting David Grossman article from 2004 entitled "A trip down comfort food lane." Grossman has a travel focus:

When Bill Cosby dines at the Mansion at Turtle Creek in Dallas, he always orders a big bowl of chili, according to chef Dean Fearing. Along with many Americans, it's his comfort food. People may envision frequent travelers feasting on exotic dishes during their journeys, but most get tired of fancy restaurant cuisines. They just want a meal that reminds them of the comforts of home.

"Comfort food is familiar food," says Noah Bekofsky, executive chef at the Aria restaurant in the Fairmont Chicago Hotel. "They are foods we associate with positive memories in our lives."

My mother used to make a wonderful chili from scratch, full of beef and kidney beans. I haven't had a bowl in more than twenty years but I can almost taste it still. Of course, mom's chili - as with most chilis - provided little that might be called "comfort" hours after ingestion, but if I can dig up the recipe I'll post it here.

Gender preferences in comfort foods stem from childhood?

The University of Illinois News Bureau carried an article back in 2003 about a study relating comfort foods and gender. From the article:

"Comfort foods are foods whose consumption evoke a psychologically pleasurable state for a person," reported Brian Wansink, an Illinois marketing professor who heads the Food and Brand Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Drawing from national survey questionnaires, the lab has concluded that a person’s comfort-food preferences are formed at an early age and are triggered, in addition to hunger, by conditioned associations and gender differences.

Men, for example, find comfort in foods associated with meals prepared by their mothers (mashed potatoes, pasta, meat, and soup) rather than from snacks and sweets (excepting ice cream).

But what is comfort for men is work for women. "Because adult females are not generally accustomed to having hot food prepared for them and as children saw the female as the primary food preparer, they tend to gain psychological comfort from less labor-intensive foods such as chocolate, candy and ice cream," Wansink said. Indeed, one study found that 92 percent of self-reported "chocolate addicts" were female.

So, what does it say about a person if, in the throes of satisfying a comfort food craving, he or she follows up a big plate of pasta with some Godiva chocolates?

Science Daily: Comfort food cravings linked to chronic stress

Science Daily reported in 2003 that comfort food cravings may be the body's natural response to chronic stress. From the article:

Evolutionarily, the drive to eat comfort foods makes sense, says Norman Pecoraro, co-author of the study. In the animal kingdom, it's an eat or be eaten world, and a body under constant, or chronic, stress may preferentially eat high-energy foods to stay in the game. Under the model that the research team has proposed, glucocorticoids would both prompt vigilance to threats and send a signal to the brain of a chronically stressed animal to seek high-energy food. If it were successful in finding such food, stress and its attendant feelings would be terminated.

In regions of the world where people struggle with wars, epidemics of disease and chronic food shortage, the need to seek out high-energy foods would be great, as well. In the developed world, where stress is more often found in a commuting office worker, people seem to be seeking the same solution and finding it at every street corner.

So if you, too, are feeling stressed like so many of us, stop and eat a chocolate chip cookie. Just be sure to follow it up with a glass of milk and a couple miles on the treadmill.

Sunset Magazine's "New Comfort Classics"

Sunset Magazine is carrying a nice article about "new" comfort food classics. Recipes include those for Biscuit-Topped Chicken Potpies, Lasagna with Sausage Ragù, Beef-Ale Stew and Green Onion--Buttermilk Dumplings, Porcini Mushroom Meat Loaf with Mushroom Gravy, Ultimate Mac 'n' Cheese, and Smoky Beef-and-Bacon Chili. The article also has a link to 108 (!) cookie recipes. None of the above will jibe with your New Years resolution, we're sure, but rest assured you won't be the only person cheating with these recipes. As with all things, cheat in moderation. Enjoy!


Ultimate Mac 'n' Cheese!