Staple comfort food - PowerHouseCreatives Contest

This week's contest got me on food: I write about it often. I cook every day. Sometimes a lot. However, I was also a tad confused:

Contest :
Comfort Food

This I can do. Then I read:

Criteria :
......2. .....You can talk about its ingredients, why it's your staple.....

My challenge is that, technically, a key staple food in Africa, is maize (or sorghum before the maize arrived) and in the home where I grew up, the staple was potato. I eat the former as porridge in the winter. However, three years ago, not liking the lump I had become, I cut as many carbs as possible. So although The Husband's diet includes the staple spud, mine doesn't.

Anyhow, I thought I'd rather share a bit about what my staple comfort foods. In other words what is it that I want and choose to eat when either nothing else will do, or the cupboard is bare (almost). Mine is a house that is never without eggs -I looooove eggs - or tomatoes. As a little girl, one of my fondest memories is an agricultural show where my Dad judged the flower arrangements and fresh vegetables. At the end of the show, the exhibits were auctioned off. Including the prize, large eggs. Darling Dad, at my behest, would finess it so that I would get the prize hen's egg. It was always a double-yolker and it was all mine. He, of course, had to fork out whatever exhorbitant amount I had bid... And I love duck eggs, too, and when a villager had duck eggs on offer, I was first in line.

Blue duck eggs? Well, The Husband knows I'll hock the house!

That said, if I am feeling poorly (which happens infrequently because I'm revoltingly healthy), my go-to meal for breakfast lunch and supper (after tomato soup) is scrambled eggs. They must be light and creamy - just like my mother made them. None of this watery, hard stuff. As a wee girl, I loved sitting on my Dad's knee, eathing his scrambled eggs, sprinkled with a good grinding of black pepper, which he fed me off his fork. If I'm wanting to treat The Husband and myself, it's the go-to breakfast.

Scrambled egg with, of course, my other go-to comfort ingredient: tomato

Our mutual fondness of tomatoes is part of why we grow our own, and when tomatoes are scarce, I do resort to tins. The larder never has less than two tins of tomatoes. As a small child, young adult and even now, tomato soup - good tomato soup - is chicken soup. That includes a good tinned tomato soup. When I fell ill with the worst dose of flu of my adult life, when I was in my 20's and living alone, I literally survived on tinned tomato soup. It was all I had the energy (let alone inclination) to do or eat. Now, I will make my own fresh tomato soup and leave me alone long enough, I'll devour the entire cauldron.

Fresh tomato soup is a popular menu item for Sunday Supper

Finally, there's pasta. I know, I know it's carb-laden, but made with 100g flour and a jumbo egg, it contains a heck of a lot less carbohydrate than the off-the-shelf stuff. It's much more satisfying too - in all senses of the word. Of course, as I've explained, I do pasta with tomato, but we eat it at least once a week with whatever I might decide. It's usually a meat-free meal, too.

Not often without a smidgin of tomato

So, pasta might well be a staple food in Italy, where tomatoes are also a critical ingredient but came from Central America where they are also integral to that quisine, but they, along with eggs, comprise staple comfort foods in my life.

This is my thirty-second straight day of posting at least once a day as part of @traciyork's #SteemBloPoMo challenge.

She and I have agreed that we will keep it going at least until Monday, May 6th.

Until next time
Fiona
The Sandbag House
McGregor, South Africa

Photo: Selma

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