Comfort foods

I was listening to All Things Considered on NPR yesterday on my way from job uno to job part deux, and the interview was with the author of “the Language of Baklava” which sounded like an interesting book because of the food imagery and the sensory queues used to illustrate the scenes in the story. But more than that the story got me thinking about my own food memories. I started thinking about my childhood and my Grandmothers cooking and the warm memories of being a child in her home while meals were being prepared.
My grandmother was raised in a small town is south Texas (as am I) where people are often still raise with a different perspective on manors and respect for others. She is a short lady all of four foot eleven at her stature apex, she is a round little lady with a warm heart and welcoming disposition toward everyone. As far as I know everyone in my parent’s generation or younger who has ever had the pleasure of meeting her knows her simply as Nanny and this is a moniker that truly fits as she held a critical role in the upbringing of not only her own children, but their children, and even some of their children as well. Everyone of my family members have been shooshed from her kitchen at some point, and most of the males have had their paw smacked lovingly for being caught in the act of pilfering a nibble or roll from the stovetop before a meal was fully prepared and laid on the table. After listening to the this program I found my mind wandering back to Nanny’s kitchen where I was wrapped in the aroma of chicken broth wafting through the air from the five gallon pot boiling on the stove. My little Nanny would be standing at the counter adjacent to the stove with her heavy plastic pastry sheet rolled out with a soup can holding each corner in place on the counter preventing it from rolling back up into it’s permanently coiled posture. She would be working a large wooden rolling pin back and forth messaging a lump of dough into a flat quarter inch thick sheet which she then cuts into strips a couple of inches wide and a few inches longer. Each of these overgrown noodle looking pieces of dough would be slipped into the bubbling pot for a warm transforming bath where they become the most delicious dumplings one could ever imagine. Now I know that some may say that dumplings are intended to be lumps of dough or neatly rolled balls, but I would gladly offer my Nanny’s flat dumplings in a taste bud show down with anything you could offer. I recall many meals where I would ask for a second portion and when instructed to help myself I would intentionally avoid the chicken and ladle through the pot to find the biggest remaining dumplings as if panning for gold. I have to say that my own mother and stepmother, as well as a few other ladies I have known make an excellent pot of chicken and dumplings. But if my Nanny asked me to I would gladly throw rocks at all these offerings in trade for just one bowl of her chicken and flat dumplings.