Buckets of Rain...

i have always believed in the concept of comfort food. and it is never the same as one's favourite food.

i, for example, love my sugar. so my favourite food generally arrives at the end of every meal. but my comfort food almost never has sugar in it. one could say that comfort food is basically the food one craves for when one groans with fever.

or is too lazy to wake up on a winter morning.

so picture this.

december morning. you know you have overslept so it does not make sense to hurry up and get out of the loving embrace of your blanket.but your your stomach's groaning and you know you need food.and you happen to be living out of your city and may have a bad cold and a blocked nose to go with it.

now, if you could get a person and ask him/her to make you ONE (only one) kind of food. what would it be?

that food, ladies and gentlemen, would (under most circumstances) be your comfort food.of course the food might change depending on the situations you are in, but it is generally ONE food.

for me, generally, it is sheddho bhaat and/or a glass of cold milk with bournvita :)

(sheddho bhaat is basically rice boiled with potatoes and other vegetables) this is of course strange given that i hardly ever eat rice voluntarily. there are other times when it changes to a bar of 5 Star or a bowl or chicken "stew" (the way my ayah made it when i had measles). as you can tell, more often than not, comfort food has to be prepared very specifically- complete with minute details. for example, i will never settle for a 5 Star with nuts in it. it just cant be any stew but that one which she made and served in a plastic blue bowl.

my friends of course have a varied list. while one thinks it is buttered toast with sugar, another sticks to black coffee.

and then i have two friends who are characterised by their love for soggy food.they share their love for this thing they call makha, which is a very gooey and soggy mix of curd/milk with rice/ muri and (wait for it) bananas with lots of sugar.

as you can tell by now, comfort foods are extremely personal choices and often invite the disdain of your larger social circle.

if you still havent figured out what yours is, think about it now.

because they've been known to lend smiles to faces in the darkest times.