Comfort Food

Today

I've just made that old veggie stand-by, cauliflower cheese, for supper. Very good it was too.

And it's a great comfort food.

In My Day

With a mixture of hope and anxiety we moved into 7 Mead Close on 23 December 1986. The weather was dull and droopy and I couldn't figure out how to get the central heating working. My new neighbour, up to her floury elbows in mincepie making, promised that her husband would come over and explain it all later.

I went back to check that all the furniture was roughly in the right place. As Stoke at that time was a gas-free village I'd had to leave my nearly new gas cooker behind and had bought in the sales a top of the range halogen ceramic hob cooker. This had been faithfully delivered but was too large to fit into the space allocated for cookers in my new kitchen. I couldn't even heat up soup.

This felt like some kind of final straw. Here we were, embarking on a new life, and it seemed to be going wrong in a chilly and dull kind of way. I bucked myself up and when Paul came home we all flossied ourselves up and piled into the car to see what Shepton Mallet could offer in the way of supper.

After walking rather hopelessly up the Main Street (where I fell over on the cobbles) we discovered Cousin's Restaurant just opposite the police station. It didn't look too prepossessing but we were cold and hungry and went in.

Veggie food they did not do, but they did offer cauliflower cheese. Seeing that Becky's eyes glistened as they brought a dish in, they fetched another larger one just for her and piles of very good chips.

Suddenly, everything seemed a little better as we worked our way through the tasty veg. We went home and my neighbour turned up and fixed the heating as promised and the house slowly warmed up. Maybe it was going to be all right after all.

Talking to Lizzie the other day about that evening her main memory seemed to be the cauliflower cheese. Comfort food, indeed.