Comfort Food

I like to eat. A lot. And by that I mean that eating is a very enjoyable activity for me, and also that I like to eat large quantities of food. Comfort food is particularly enjoyable.

Until now, I have always thought of comfort food as something that tastes really good, and generally gives you heartburn. Beef stroganoff, biscuits and gravy, cheese-stuffed croissants, frozen custard, that sort of thing. It's fun while it lasts, is the idea behind comfort food. And the fun usually doesn't last very long.

But Daltonboy, Jr. and I had an experience the other night that stripped away all my previous notions of comfort food, and was, quite possibly, of supernatural origins.

DBJ asked me to make Pasta Fagioli. I didn't know what that was, but I prefer to cook new things, so I found a recipe on the Internet and pressed forward. Some people call it soup. I think that's far too prosaic a term for it.

So we sat down to dinner. Everyone liked the "soup." It was delicious. But for me and DBJ, it was something more. If I wasn't afraid of being taken away by the Analogy Police, I'd say stuff like, "it was like relaxing on the beach in the warm sun with only a slight breeze and a companion who knows how to apply sunscreen properly." Fortunately, I have a healthy fear of the AP, so I will not indulge myself. Also, people might think I was talking about a mission companion, and that's just weird, because how often do you sunbathe on your mission?

Actually, the whole pasta fagioli experience reminded me very much of Like Water for Chocolate, where Tita makes food that causes people to feel the most extraordinary emotions. And the weird thing was that the feelings didn't stop when the table was cleared. Both DBJ and I had this sense of well-being for hours after we ate. All evening long I kept thinking, "Wow. I feel SO good." And then I'd get this warm, cozy feeling throughout my entire torso, and a memory of that soup would come to me. I didn't say anything, because I thought maybe I was being a little bit crazy, but the next morning DBJ mentioned it, and when we compared notes, we found we had felt the same way. Other less sensitive members of the family recalled the meal, and said it was good, but nothing out of the ordinary happened to them. Too bad.

So now I can't wait to make pasta fagioli again and again. Except I don't want to do it too often, because then it would become commonplace. I'll have to find a balance. I'm probably moving to Italy soon, too, because I want to feel that good all the time. Cicada, you coming?