What I am thinking about this week...

Today I woke up to an impossibly cheery announcer on KUT chirping that it was 24 degrees in Austin. I'm pretty sure I moved to Austin just so that I would never have to hear these kinds of announcements again, but apparently it's not working this week.

This kind of cold makes me want to dive head first back into bed, and after the covers are dragged off, it makes me want to go straight to the kitchen and start cooking some comfort food. "Comfort food" is a term that is everywhere these days, but what really is "comfort food"? Is it the food of our childhood? (As a kid in Portugal I remember eating some kind of dried meat pastries that were put in hot sweet tea, and I have NEVER found myself craving those...) But familiar is a quality that is welcome in comfort food. As I walked into my daughter's elementary school today I smelled pizza - the kind of pizza served by lunch ladies in a cafeteria, and I was right back at Nokomis, my old elementary school, with a massive craving for 2 slices of that Friday pizza hot lunch.

Nostalgia aside, I don't really want cafeteria pizza to warm me during the remainder of the Arctic cold spell. But I do want warm delicious food, that is immediately identifiable. Nothing strange, no food that causes even a hint of hesitation before springing fully loaded onto my mental taste buds. I want tomato soup. I want baked macaroni and cheese - the kind with cheddar and gruyere and buttery crumbs on top, that sends out sirens of fragrance to call you as it emerges golden and bubbling from the oven. Let's face it - I want a chocolate cream pie. So that's what I'm making - a wonderful creamy tomato soup, baked mac & cheese, some hot yeast rolls, pork tenderloin, and chocolate cream pie. A warm embrace of food to keep the cold out.