I've looked back on the foods that have survived frequent rotation during the past ten months. Mostly it has been comfort food which means several things. One is the nostalgia factor, the things I grew up eating pm the east coast or ate during my years in New Mexico, during the late sixties and early seventies. That would be wonton soup, various other Chinese dumplings, bagels and lox, linguini with clams, tuna melts, rice pudding, date-nut bread with cream cheese, root beer floats and of course pizza, although our home made pizza doesn't resemble a NY slice.
Ever-present today are some of the foods I lived on in NM, admittedly with tweaks: pots of beans, burritos, flour tortillas, a constant freezer supply of roasted green chiles. Rattlesnake beans cowboy style over rice is what's for dinner tonight, on New Year's day, with Chile con Queso as an app and some pickled cabbage and carrots for a side.
Another requirement about comfort food: I have to feel comfortable making it. It can't be too involved or time consuming. Yes, I have plenty of time, but limited energy for cooking. And, surprisingly, it involves decreasing amounts of meat, especially red meat. I ate beef for the first time in two years on xmas eve, in honor of a NM tradition. My first burrito was from basically a window in Albuquergue which became a years-long habit: a huge affair with pork, green chile and pinto beans, wrapped in foil, no table service, and eaten in the car. While driving a stick shift. The green chile was searingly hot. Now my burritos are very different, often made with rice and shrimp or fish, more coastal CA, more often with a hot red sauce.
Soups are a constant. There's always some kind of stock in the freezer. So is pasta with a basic marinara sauce that gets frozen in pints; sometimes that becomes penne with a little hot Italian sausage, sometimes it becomes cauliflower with red pepper flakes on linguini fini. And now during the citrus months, fresh squeeze orange juice for breakfast seems important, where it used to seem too much trouble. I'd rather spend big bucks on a bag of oranges than on a hunk of meat, but that's just me, now.
Prepared take out during the pandemic has been every couple of weeks from the same place we've been to for years, a Vietnamese place that has the strongest most delicious iced coffee you can imagine. Best for lunch, or it pretty much ruins our night.
