Comfort food

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

My wife and I have been working on emptying out our freezer.

Part of it is that we are just trying to save money since everything is a hundred dollars these days it seems. But really, it’s just that we’ve got so much leftover food from previous meals that we just decided to clear some space (no doubt so that we can then fill that space back up with new leftovers).

It has actually been a nice little walk down Meal Memory Lane as we’ve made our way through the various Zip-Loc bags and plastic-wrapped packages… Hey, it’s the redfish from the senior summer fishing trip. Hey, there’s a whole package of ribeyes from when your Mom and Dad ended up not coming over that night. Oh, I guess we didn’t give your sister the cookie dough she bought from that fundraiser… what was that, like three years ago? I’m sure it’s fine…

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There has been a lot of stuff in the freezer. Some of it just ended up going straight into the trash… there was some kind of mystery potato casserole dish, some very freezer burnt pork chops… the dogs seemed to enjoy the ribs that might have been leftover from the Obama administration.

But the best part has been the various bags-o-soup. If you’ve ever made soup before, you know that you can’t just make a little soup — you have to make a whole pot full. And that’s just fine because most soups are even better once they’ve sat up a while.

So, we’ve had a bit of a Soup-A-Palooza lately, what with all the gallon-sized Zip-Loc bags of chili, beef stew, seafood gumbo, white bean chiken chili, crab chowder, chicken and cumplings (which may or may not fit your definition of “soup”), and cream of vegetable soup, which went absolutely great with the gloomy, rainy let’snot- leave-the-house-in-casethere’s- a-tornado weather we had Wednesday night.

While I absolutely love a good homemade cheeseburger or a juicy strak or a piping hot pizza, there’s something that just feels “right” about a big bowl of something, especially with chips or crackers on the side and a big glass of sweet tea to drink.

I guess we’ve all got these goto comfort foods that we like, maybe because we remember when our Mom or Grandma would make them for us. Or maybe yours is that “cheap” meal that you’d have at least once a week because it was an inexpensive way to fee a big family? For us, that was spaghetti, which I’m pretty sure you could get for like five bucks back in 1980something. I guess I passed that on to my kids because every time one of them comes home for a visit, they want “Dad’s spaghettt” — which is comforting all on its own.