Pass The Corn Bread

COMFORT FOOD is this millennium's classification of everything we ate growing up in the 50's and 60's. It includes meatloaf and mashed potatoes, fried chicken and baked beans, spaghetti and meatballs, and chicken pot pies. It applies to anything reminiscent of the good ol' days and anything that makes you fatter...at least that's how I see it. Hell, when we were growing up, other than hamburgers and hot dogs, COMFORT FOOD was the only thing we ate. Back then, it was just called home cooking. There we were, humming along, minding our own business, when out of the blue, our hamburgers and hot dogs became FAST FOOD. And our precious french fries became taboo because they were fried in saturated fats. Then, a few years later, in order to justify eating anything but salad and sushi, the food editors dubbed all the go-to foods that we had so dutifully learned to cook, COMFORT FOOD. I don't know where they got that. DISCOMFORT FOOD would be more like it. Sit down to the table and eat a big ol' plate of COMFORT FOOD, then tell me how comfortable you are. Better still, stand in the kitchen for an hour, chopping onions and peppers, slapping a meat loaf together, peeling potatoes and carrots and shredding cabbage, and when you're finished cleaning up the mess, would the words COMFORT FOOD come to mind? VERITABLE FEAST would be more like it. One of the reasons that restaurants have started serving this so-called COMFORT FOOD is because nobody is willing to go to all that trouble to make it at home anymore. And few, if any, young people are interested in trying out the old family recipes. They'd rather order pizza. At my grandmother's house there was a pot of pinto beans and a pan of corn bread on the stove at all times. I daresay, it wasn't COMFORT FOOD. It was survival.