Breakfast for supper.

Food.  It's my favourite thing to eat.  I was asked recently by my niece what I considered comfort foods.  The question stumped me for a moment, because I have many answers to that question and they seem to change all the time.  But I knew she meant the food I go back to again and again, so I said peanut butter on toast.  And somehow it felt like a lame answer.  As I thought about it later, I knew that lame as it was, it was true.

When I was around eight or nine, we lived in a place that was a half-hour walk from an outdoor pool.  And believe is or not, in the summertime, that pool was open to the public and it was free. My brother Philip and I would go to that pool pretty much every day and be there for hours.  Literally hours.  By the time we were walking home again, we were starving, since I can't ever remember taking food along.  We would stop to pick blackberries on the side of the road and they were delicious, but a handful of berries only fed my hunger.  By the time we got home, I was drooling.  The handiest thing to make (and really the only thing I knew how to make) was toast and peanut butter.  I would eat spoonfuls of peanut butter while the bread took forever to toast.  Once the toast popped, it would be slathered thick with peanut butter and I would savour every sticky mouthful.  As well as satisfying my hunger and feeding my body, this peanut-butter ritual was like a warm hug.  It made me feel warm and reassured and safe.

If we went to the pool every day, then I had peanut-butter toast every day, which meant that after a while, even the smell of chlorine elicited a Pavlovian response: swimming equaled peanut-butter toast.  To this day, if I swim in a pool, I crave peanut butter.  

But I can't write about comfort foods without mentioning a few more.  I'm not going to just throw out all the foods I enjoy, but strictly the foods that gave me that same "warm hug" feeling as my peanut-butter toast.  And I do this knowing that I will think of more foods in a hour and wish I'd included them.  

I will preface this by mentioning that I am a vegan, but I wasn't always a vegan.  We are raising our kids vegetarian/vegan, knowing that they will try whatever foods they want when they want to (but I can't see ever cooking meat again, so they might be limited to eating some things outside of our home).  Sonja has started eating cheese when we have snack time at her playgroup, so her experiment has started and I've enjoyed watching her try new foods.  I told her that some people eat cows and chickens and pigs and fish, but she laughed and assured me this was untrue.  We'll see how adventurous she becomes.

Pre-vegan, I was a big egg eater and I still miss them sometimes.  Eggs are fantastic and I loved them almost any way, but especially when they were soft-boiled in an egg cup, dipping toast spears into the runny yolks.  I also loved me a good hamburger and I still smell BBQ's in the summer time and salivate (of course I do).

Vegan or not, I have always been blissful eating really good cereal with really cold milk (or soy milk), heaping mounds of piping-hot pasta, and steaming bowls of soup.

I've been blessed with a husband who not only likes to cook, but is really very good at it and his risotto (yes, vegan risotto) is like comfort food on steroids.  

But I think the one thing that I think back to from childhood (besides pools and peanut butter) has to be when my Mom would make pancakes for supper.  Is there anything better than breakfast for supper??  It's like eating love.

Pancakes with apples and blueberry sauce.