Sometimes cooking is its own reward

Comfort food is what someone cooks for you. Comfort cooking is what you do for yourself.   

– Regina Schrambling

If you've been reading this blog for a bit, you know that I love good writing and I love good food – and most of all – I love good writing about food. 

I recently ran across this essay. It captured much of what I love about cooking. It was originally published in The New York Times. I wondered as I read it if some tragedy had come into the author's life. I wanted to share it with you and that is when I realized that it was written in September of 2001, just a week after 911. That explained it all. 

I remember feeling the same way and wanting comfort. The weekend after the 911 attacks, we loaded up our van and headed out of town with a group of our best friends and all our children. We set up tents deep in the woods. We camped. We hiked. We cooked simple comfort food around the campfire. We sang songs late into the night. We grieved together.   

I thought you might like to read this essay and see if it speaks to you as it spoke to me. As the author wrote: The food is not really the thing. It's the making of it that gets you through a bad time.