Comfort food Friend

The Algerians find a few things very strange about Canadian food: mint jelly on lamb, peanut butter, pumpkin pie and most other things that have been ground into something akin to baby poo. Asparagus lying flat and naked on a plate with nothing but lemon and butter…so plain. So strange!

But when I showed them the long neck on my hard chicken, they were very pleased. “Look just like in Algeria!” Sousou took the first bite of a leg that looked like it belonged to a very tiny, very tanned, eighty year old marathon runner, and said, “Hard to chew but good, good! Oui!” Personally, I think the pumpkin pie tasted a lot better than that hard chicken but it’s all about the familiarity.

Part of why I love mint jelly is it reminds me of Grandpa Jack. Peanut butter: that’s childhood in the seventies, no allergy alert at school back then. Oh heck no. You could take a Jack Daniels and a pack of Camels in your lunch kit if you wanted to. Pumpkin pie, it’s as much about the taste as it is about the memories of all those Thanksgivings at the farm. Home. Baked.

I had a wonderful day today. Back on track with my allergy elimination diet, I’m in a funny clever play and tonight I talked to Rene, my longest lasting friendship: 43 years. A truly dear soul. She’s an exquisite award winning painter whose promising career was abruptly cut short with the arrival of a seriously disabled child. Now a decade later, she’s starting things up again. I’m so very proud of her. She’s a lesson in resilience. She would never call herself that. But she is. She’s still here. She’s still creating. She’s still tender hearted and full of all kinds of unexpected joy. And I love her. She is the best comfort food family recipe.