2011-02-08-Comfort Foods Made Easy
Seminars@Hadley
Comfort Foods Made Easy
Presented by
Patti Jacobson
Linn Sorge
Brenda Rice
Moderated by
Dawn Turco
February8, 2011
Dawn Turco
Good morning, or afternoon, depending on your time zone. This is Dawn Turco, Senior Vice President of The Hadley School for the Blind, and it’s my pleasure to moderate today’s seminar entitled Comfort Foods Made Easy. We have a panel of three and all three are familiar with our seminars room and have presented in the past. I’m happy to bring back Brenda Rice, a student of The Hadley School, along with Patti Jacobson and Linn Sorge, both instructors.
Again, I am moderating and let me just start us off by asking if any of this rings true to you. There is a container of ice cream in the freezer at all times. You keep a supply of candy bars in your desk drawer. There is always a box of mac and cheese at the ready in the pantry. These are all examples of comfort foods.
Comfort food is defined as food that is simply prepared and gives a sense of well-being, typically food with a high sugar or carbohydrate content. This food is associated with childhood and with home cooking. I will add that if you search, however, do a little Google search, you’ll find some healthier options out there as it relates to comfort foods. One of my favorite sites, about.com, they define comfort food as food that soothes the psyche by reminding us of comforting childhood memories.
For most of us, these foods are far from gourmet and generally epitomize home cooking. They evoke feelings of nostalgia, safety and security, and for those inquiring minds who would like to know, comfort food appeared in the Webster Dictionary for the first time in 1977.
Having gotten us started with the concept for today’s seminar let me open it up and have a brief hello and a self-identification from our presenters. I will be handing the microphone off to Brenda first.
Brenda Rice
Thank you, Dawn. It’s interesting to hear what you have to say about comfort food. My name is Brenda Rice and I have been totally blind since 2004.
I have been cooking for, I hate to tell you, over half a century. I have edited two cookbooks in the past for recipes for other people and I am presently finishing up a cookbook of my own that I hope to get to the printers within the next month or so and it will have some comfort food in it as well.
I have cooked for many years sighted and I have now learned to cook being blind. It works well both ways if you just apply yourself a little bit. I will hand this off to Linn.
Linn Sorge
Welcome, everyone. It’s so good to have you all here. It’s kind of nice because for some of us, lunch was maybe an hour, two hours ago, so we’re not quite as hungry as we might be if this had been right before lunch. When we would finish, we would really want to go after that comfort food.
When Dawn asked those questions, my hand would have gone up quite a bit of that time with yeses. I have been teaching at The Hadley School for ten years. I don’t teach things about cooking; I teach more things about computers and access technology and Internet, so I’m very, very pleased to see some of my students in here because they’ve taken our classes and now are a little more comfortable joining in the seminar room.
I’ve been totally blind since birth from optic atrophy and I’m with Brenda – that’s been for more than half a century. I have loved to be in the kitchen and cook and bake since I was a wee girl, so mine is mainly a lot of personal experiences and some rehab teaching when in other settings.
Now we’re going to hear from the teacher at Hadley who really is in the know about all of this. Here’s Patti.
Patti Jacobson
I don’t know if I’m in the know because I like to eat comfort food or because I teach the food series, but I would like to welcome everybody here this afternoon and thank you for coming. I’ve taught at Hadley for 16, going on 17 years. I do teach the food series and that talks a lot about buying food and nutrition and adaptive techniques, so if you’re interested in taking that, contact Student Services and let them know.
I’m totally blind and I can’t believe I’ve been cooking for more than a half century, too. We are a bunch of old people. I started out making pie crust cinnamon rolls where my mom would make pie crust and then I’d put cinnamon and sugar on it, roll it up and cut little rolls out of it and then we’d bake it. That was kind of a good comfort food when I was little.
I am going to send this back to Dawn. She’s going to talk a little bit about some research that we did about “what is comfort food?”
Dawn Turco
It’s interesting. As we were getting started, one of you said, “I didn’t know coffee was comfort food.” Well, I think comfort food might be very much different for each of us and, in the end, very much the same.
We did do some research and each of us will be divulging what we’ve learned. I had to laugh about two weeks ago. I flipped on the Food Channel and the Barefoot Contessa was on, Ina Garten is her name, and she was saying that the definitive comfort food that she would be making that day was mac and cheese. I have to tell you, mac and cheese came out loud and clear.
I sent an e-mail around Hadley and asked that people, without a lot of great thought, just e-mail me back your comfort food, and I got so many e-mails so quickly. I then went onto my Facebook page and did the same thing and that was a good way to get replies from your friends. And, finally, my hairdresser, and you know what? My hairdresser does mac and cheese gourmet style, so he was quite proud of himself.
I’ll tell you a little bit more about some of what I learned, but let’s hand it off to Brenda again and see what her ideas of comfort food are.
Brenda Rice
Thanks, Dawn. It’s interesting to find out, Patti, that between the three of us, and Dawn, I notice, didn’t tell us how long she’d been cooking, but we’ve got at least 150 years of cooking experience between the three of us.
Also in my research, I did find mac and cheese at the top of the list, and I also found seasonal foods. This time of the year in particular were things like warm soups, chilies, hot chocolate, those types of things, as opposed to summertime where you’re talking about things like ice cream, milkshakes and creamy things – cheesecake, et cetera.
So, consequently, in the top five I also found a considerable variety depending on the part of the country people were from. I’m in the south. I live just a stone’s throw from the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, so what we consider comfort food here may be different from what Patti has where she is in Colorado or what you and Linn have, Dawn, in the Chicago area.
As you were saying, comfort food certainly elicits memories for me of childhood. When we get ready for recipes, and we’ll go down that trail in a little bit, but I know some of you have other things that you want to mention first.
Linn, how is it with your survey on comfort food?
Linn Sorge
Well, interestingly, I did a little asking about what Dawn was saying. What is it? What makes you say comfort food? I found that sometimes it isn’t necessarily simplicity of preparation, which one would expect, but the feeling that comes with it. One of the recipes I put on the page was a healthy meatloaf. No, it’s not quick dump the mac and cheese out of the box, which I love – it was on my list – but it may be, “I remember my mom making that and I love how it smells in the oven. I can put the potatoes in there at the same time.” It just brings back good feelings.
One of my former students who is a friend of mine, her name is Carla and she couldn’t be here today. I asked her her thoughts and this was very meaningful to me. She said she has a grandmother who is 105 years old and they call her Ma. Carla’s comfort food is Ma’s homemade vegetable soup.
Now, is that quick and easy? Probably, again, not like getting that ice cream out of the freezer or the Lorna Doones that the parrot ate out from under the sofa or whatever, but it brings back wonderful memories to a granddaughter who remembers as a youngster her grandmother preparing this for her and it making her feel warmed and loved and cared about. That recipe is up on our website as well.
I think a lot of it is ease of prep, ease of cleanup, but also, really thinking about why do I feel that way. Homemade bread is another example, and we’ll address some easy ways to resolve that, but that smell when youwalk in that kitchen and that bread is baking, that is comfort.
Your turn, Patti.
Patti Jacobson
Thanks, Linn. I think it’s interesting. This is what I’ve observed right now. Dawn and I talked to our hairdressers. There used to be that old commercial that said only your hairdresser knows for sure. I asked my hairdresser what comfort food is. She said fresh hot bread, so that’s kind of a theme.
I asked somebody else – it’s kind of funny what would be comforting to different people – but she said a bologna sandwich with lots of mayonnaise. My mom said tapioca pudding and anything that’s got pudding in it or that’s one of those Jell-O pudding-type, chiffon-type desserts that’s got whipped cream on top. That’s comfort food, too.
But, I have to tell you an experience that I had with comfort food. It was a cold winter day, kind of like it is right now here in Colorado. I was reading a magazine and I decided to make some chicken soup from scratch where you have to boil the chicken and boil the bones, take the chicken off the bones and add your spices.
It took several hours for me to make this soup and I decided that I wanted it to be a little bit more substantial than it was. I thought I would put some macaroni in this soup, so I did. I just put the uncooked macaroni in and I boiled it for a while and thought maybe this will be good. When I tasted it, the macaroni was still hard. I boiled it some more and it was still hard. Come to find out, I had put popcorn in my soup.
So, needless to say, one of our first tips is to find out a way that you can label your food so you know what you have.
Dawn, I’m going to send this back to you.
Dawn Turco
I love that story. Yes, comfort foods. When I polled Hadley, the expected mac and cheese came up and pastas of all varieties. Because we asked them in wintertime, it was no surprise that many varieties of soup came up, mashed potatoes and so forth.
Having that list, I went to a teacher we have in China. We have a school in China and there was a special program going on with about 50 Advanced English students that they were doing online. I said, “Would you mind asking your students what’s comfort food in China?” because, quite honestly, it’s not an American thing. Comfort foods come in all shapes and varieties and from many countries.
He sent me his list and as expected, there were the noodle dishes, and having been to China a number of times now, I know how much they love their fresh fruit, so a variety of fruits were on the list, but I was surprised to find ice cream and chocolate. As I said, some things are just universal.
Well, I have a quiz and I’m going to do some questions throughout. Let me go with the first quiz question. This is about a variety of international comfort foods. Here’s the question. According to a survey by British television channel Good Food, what is the most popular British comfort food? Here are the choices – there are always three – fish and chips, baked beans on toast, bangers and mash.
Well, I’ll tell you, if you didn’t guess bangers and mash, you’re wrong. If you’ve been to any good pub throughout England you’ll find bangers and mash on the menu. It’s basically sausage and mashed potatoes. Yum – I’ve had it. Anyway, that’s the idea of comfort food in England. We have some others coming along in a moment.
Meanwhile, I’m going to turn it back. We’re going to start talking about some recipes and some tips and I’ll be back with you in a little bit and talk to you about grilled cheese.
Okay, since I’m being pressured, I’m in the same age group as the rest of you and, if you’ve attended any of our food seminars in the past, you know I’m a low-vision cook and have lots of experience with comfort food, mostly on the eating side, but a lot of cooking along with that.
Let me hand it off to Brenda and she’s going to share a recipe. A reminder before I do that, we have started to compile our resource and recipe list. It will be posted with the archived version of this seminar so you can go and get it, and I can tell you, it’s already 20 pages long. We had a lot to say about comfort foods.
Brenda, handing it off to you.
Brenda Rice
Thanks, Dawn. It is hard to know where to start. I do have a macaroni casserole dish, but I’m going to save that for a little later because I know some of you other ladies have some macaroni things that you want to talk about as well.
Instead, I will start with something that I call Clumsy Chili. Especially with the cold weather, as Dawn said, around the United States right now, this came about…my father used to cook this back in the ‘50s when he was home on the weekends. It’s a very simple chili dish. If any of you have heard my Crock-Pot seminar before, you know I’m the crackpot with a Crock-Pot, so usually if I can put in a slow cooker I’m in better shape.
I usually make this in the slow cooker and all it requires, this is on the resource list, is two to three pounds of ground beef, or in our case, we use a fair amount of ground venison. We live way out in the country and we have a lot of game out here on the farm so we do have venison, but ground beef works great.
Two to three onions, chopped, a couple of stalks of celery, red hot kidney beans – they’re called red hot chili beans – a can of those. If you can’t find those you can use regular kidney beans, either the light or dark. I don’t drain them. You can.
This is a very flexible recipe and, as I said, you can get the ingredients off the resource list. It calls for chili powder, cumin, I think maybe a tablespoon of sugar. I don’t use salt in my cooking. I rely on herbs instead, but if you do like salt, add however much you want to taste. A can of tomatoes and then the special ingredient that my dad put in that you don’t usually find in chili is (break in audio) and you can start with a half cup and go up to as much as a cup if you want to for flavor. But, it does give it a really nice texture and taste. Look on the resource page for all the ingredients.
Anyway, put all of those together in your slow cooker, stir them up, put the lid on, turn it on low – I cook almost everything on low in the slow cooker – and leave it on for six to eight hours. Here in the south, my husband is a great lover of having that with corn bread. I prefer either saltines or oyster crackers with it.
If you want to have a chili party then you can set out all kinds of toppings – shredded cheeses, mozzarella, sharp cheddar, sour cream, guacamole, more chopped onions, anything that you think you would like to put on top as a dressing for your chili. We like it plain.
There are a couple of tips that I’ll give you before I turn this over to Linn. The first tip I’ve heard from Patti numerous times, if you’ve taken any of her courses or heard her on seminars before, and that is have your ingredients all out and in order so that it’s easy for you to know what you’ve already used and not used. Put it away as you’ve used it or throw away the cans when they’re empty so that you don’t have extra cleanup later on.
That’s one tip that’s very important. The other thing is I like to use a dish in more thanone way. If I’ve had chili as a soup in front of a nice cozy fireplace one day, then perhaps the next day for lunch, let’s say I’m going to have a good old fashioned cozy-type hot dog, just take your slotted spoon, drain off the liquid part of the chili and then just put that chili sauce, that mixture, the solid part, on top of your hot dog. It makes kind of an unusual chili topper for your hot dog. Sometimes I’ll add some shredded cheese on top of that.