Comfort Food

One of the many things I love about Colorado are all the opportunities for comfort and small pleasures.  I think it's because this is a land of extremes: extreme beauty, extreme weather and extreme landscape to name a few.  It's often said that you can't know light without dark, or good without bad.  Maybe it's true of comfort, too.  I know from personal experience that the hard times make the easy times all the more wonderful.  I also know that too many easy times without enough hard times kinda makes you spoiled, and you quickly start to lose appreciation for just how good you have it if you don't have that reminder every now and then.

I remember one particular day as a kid working my butt in the ground tearing down an old building with my parents.  We slaved, because it had to be done that day.  It was so hot, and later in the day it started to rain.  We worked through the rain.  By day's end, I was exhausted.  I was filthy, soaked to the bone and every muscle was hurting.  But the project was done.  To this day I remember how awesome that hot shower felt and how luxurious my clean clothes felt.  Yet there was nothing special about the clothes or the shower.  I had them every day.  But on this day I had been given a reminder of just how wonderful they were.  But it wasn't just that.  I also felt a sense of power.  I felt strong for having accomplished so much.  I felt confident, yet peaceful.  I've never forgotten it, nor many of the other similar experiences I've had in life.  Sometimes you have to love the pain, because it brings good things.

My weekends at the horse rescue farm has given me a taste of that particular flavor of suffering and subsequent pleasure.  A day of throwing hay bales in the sun is not something I had ever done before the horse farm.  It's hard work.  If you don't wear gloves, your hands get a thousand tiny cuts and pokes, some will bleed, but they all burn like fire the first time you wash in hot water.  Your nasal passages turn black with dust.  You get itchy bits of hay all down your shirt, manure on your boots and jeans, straw in your hair, dust and sweat in your eyes, and at the end of the day your muscles are stiff from head to toe.  And yet, I love it.  The work is so honest.  So primal.  So real.  It makes me feel alive.  It makes the shower at the end of the day feel amazing.  It makes the softness of my bed indescribably wonderful.  It fills me with a great sense of accomplishment that I carry all week long.  I helped an old lady who can't do the work.  I helped a bunch of injured or unwanted horses who can't help themselves.  I helped myself in a way that no book or counsel or potion ever could. 

I was home from work by 5PM today.  It was a beautiful day, sunny, cool and dry, just the most perfect Autumn day.  Tonight it will be cold and clear.  We're supposed to get our first frost of the season, as it'll be the first night below 40 degrees.  I wanted something warm for dinner, so I put a chicken on to boil. When it was nice and tender I pulled it from the pot to cool, and boiled down the broth with some salt & pepper and oregano from the garden.  I mixed up a batch of dough with Colorado flour, butter, salt and water.  I kneaded it with my hands.  I rolled it out flat with my old wooden rolling pin and cut it into 1 inch squares.  I picked the meat off the chicken and tossed it back into the broth.  When the broth reached a rolling boil I tossed in the dough squares and boiled it for ten minutes.  I set the table and lit the handmade beeswax candles in the centerpiece which I created from fresh pumpkins, winter squash, dried sunflowers from the garden, broomcorn, sorghum and other harvest grain stalks I got from the farmer's market.  I served up two steaming bowls of the best chicken 'n dumplin's I've had since mom's.  For dessert, we savored the last of the plum cake I made over the weekend, which was made from the last of the summer's italian plums.  

I suppose I could have just gone out to eat or picked up something from the hot case at Whole Foods.  It would have saved a whole lot of time.  But I got something much more valuable by doing what I did.  Yes it was a lot of work, but the food was phenomenal.  No chef in this world could make my food taste better than when I pour my love and effort into it.  And maybe that's what my food obsession and my cowboy obsession are really all about.  "Easier" or "faster" doesn't equate to "better."  Spending two hours cooking up the freshest seasonal ingredients to produce a hot bowl of chicken & dumplin's gives me comfort food on a cold, starry night.  Toiling in the field gives me comfort food when I take a hot shower at the end of the day and put on my favorite snuggly pajama bottoms.  There are some things, some comforts or pleasures, that can only be earned.