Comfort food

Captain's Log, Stardate 11.06.2008

So this week, I’ve been sick. I think I got sick at church (I always seem to get sick at church).

I was feeling so miserable that I resorted to comfort food. What surprised me was the comfort food I picked to eat.

Normally I love chicken noodle soup or mac and cheese. This time, I made something completely Japanese-Hawaiian (Mom would have been proud of me).

I made shoyu egg rice—an egg scrambled with soy sauce and then fried like scrambled eggs, served over hot rice (the Japanese short-grain rice, not Uncle Ben’s), and topped with furikake, which is small pieces of dried seaweed and toasted sesame seeds and other spices formed into a dry shake topping which is typically used with rice.

I sat at the table and just reveled in the comfort the dish brought me. My sensitive stomach liked the bland rice, my ion levels like the salt in the furikake, and I’m sure something else inside me liked the protein in the egg.

(My arteries probably didn’t like the cholesterol, but we’ll ignore them for now.)

What’s weird is that I never really thought of shoyu egg rice as “comfort food” before. Mom would always make it for breakfast for us (usually sans furikake) so it wasn’t anything particularly special, or even something particularly bad for us.

But this time, being sick, my body just craved it. Weird, huh?

How about you? Any weird comfort food stories you want to share?