Emotional Appetite

If you are going to indulge in a junk food extravaganza, it might as well be via a bag of Fritos Corn Chips dipped into a pint of French onion dip although it begs two questions; what is a French onion and do the French actually dip? Did you groan there? I'm sorry. It's just that, oh my, yesterday was a bad food day. After a difficult week I dove right toward comfort, which meant wrapping up in a down quilt and reading Anne of Green Gables while scooping Fritos and drinking Coke.

Just to make things clear, I don’t buy soda normally. The Fritos happened to be left over from a family gathering, and while I’ll confess to loving them, they are rarely invited in the doorway because of how above and beyond terrible they are as snack foods go--not to mention the fact that they make my hands swell. Ugh. It’s depressing that swollen appendages have become a part of my regular discourse—but tight rings or not, at that particular moment, the emotional need was there and so were the chips. That’s what I call Karma and the phrase “I snarfed” is appropriate here.

As for Anne of Green Gables, well, like the Fritos, that was a regression to childhood and if I could have found a way to hop on my two-wheeler and ride back to sixth grade--when the rain stopped I’d have done that too. Instead, I made do with salted chips and sweetened soda while disappearing into a tale about innocence and kindred spirits.

Every once in a while real life makes it necessary to exit stage left and head back to an easier age--to an era when our only worry about food was what time we were expected home for supper--and that’s the place where I spent Sunday. If my mother-in-law hadn’t called and invited us over for her own version of comfort food, roast chicken--gravy and stuffing too, it wouldn’t have stopped there. Sitting with my legs perched on the coffee table, enveloped in my cocoon and picturing a redheaded Anne with an “e,” I had been contemplating meatloaf and macaroni and cheese.

What foods do you eat for comfort?