Winter Comfort Food

Written by Duncan Holmes | 19 January 2009

I enjoy the challenge of making a better-than-ordinary meal using nothing more than food that’s immediately at hand. Going with what I have, the detritus of dinners past, a fading garden, fare from assorted fruit bowls — the end result is invariably a complete and often delightful surprise.

I run a lean fridge, figuring that supermarkets and other food stores can keep stuff in good shape, and at their cost, until I need it —which means that I shop not for carts full of stuff on busy Saturdays, but for small, as needed things, on any day. Freshness and taste really count, so my choices are to stay with lean and go for fresh. I avoid purchases of large quantities of just about anything except basic staples, giant bottles of rich vanilla when I’m in Mexico and earthy saffron when in Spain.

Being a gardener, I preserve and freeze food that helps to see me through the winter and beyond. At this time of year, stockpots bubble with soups, stews and chowders that end up late at night in the freezer. These are brews made without recipes, because recipes don’t necessarily match the day’s pick, or what might have been on the “Reduced for Quick Sale” counter in the supermarket’s meat section. You work at these concoctions until they taste great, and then you stop. And at this time of year, when it’s cold out, and your tummy needs a comforting surprise every now and then, memories of summer can be unleashed whenever you need them.

At the end of the season a few years back, I made soup on a quiet Sunday that included several picks of the day and came together very nicely as the centrepiece for the evening meal. On the following Wednesday, in the Food section of the Vancouver Sun, a challenge caught my eye. Make a dish of these winter vegetables (there was a list), said the item, and you could win yourself a $500 first prize. How sweet!

Would soup work? I checked the list, and three vegetable varieties that I had remembered using in Sunday’s soup were included. But while the challenge sounded exciting, I had no clear memory of what else had gone into the soup, no notes, no record of the ingredients. Like many others, it was one of those meals that had been put together with what was available in the house. If I were to enter the contest, I had no alternative but to make the soup again and, this time, to take notes.

Whether or not it was exactly the same as it was the first time around —the cardamom was a late entry! — I will never know, but I now had myself more soup, and a recipe that I fired off to the Sun. In due course, I got a phone call and, soon after, an envelope came with a letter and a cheque for $500. You could have knocked me over with a salty cracker!

As I said, I’m always delighted at the good stuff you can make with food that’s just hanging around — victuals for the tummy that are equally rewarding for the soul. The stuff we instinctively know as comfort food. Here’s my recipe for the soup, and two more items to keep you warm as winter wages wherever you may be.

The wine pairings were suggested by my friend Jurgen Gothe of CBC Radio “DiscDrive” fame — a man who’s also had thousands of food andwine adventures. Feel free to experiment with your own choices.

Winter Warmup

Tourtière

Plum Pudding