Soul Food

It is no secret that I love food.  Not cutesy potato-on-a-plate-with-two-grapes-and-a-thimble-of-meat-mouse kind of food, but hearty, solid meals that stick to your bones, fills your belly and makes your believe that all is right with the world.  Those are the meals I love.

 

The food does not have to be fancy for the meal to be memorable.  For example, last Thursday afternoon my friend Emily came over for a chat and when she left I suddenly felt deflated.  I missed her company and on the spur of the moment I called her up and invited her and Andrew over for supper.

Now, we have not been groceries shopping in a week and supplies were running very low by Thursday evening.  All I had to offer our friends was bread, some left over pork belly from the previous night's supper, eggs, frozen vegetables (literally a handful of spinach and even less bell peppers) and a dash of cream.  Oh, and after some desperate scratching around, I uncovered about half a cup of bacon bits in the back of the freezer. Whoo-hoo! A quick check with Emily and two onions were added to the mix.  What to do, what to do...

 

Emily and Andrew arrived with some beer and a bottle of white wine. With the price of alcohol over here, BYOB* is a standard, unspoken rule when invited to someone's house, unless they are Muslim, of course!  After some stalling on my part, Emily and I retreated to the kitchen, where  I had to produce a meal of some sort with the limited ingredients, pronto! 

A-ha!  Brainwave.  I chopped what needed to be chopped, fried the fryables, whisked some eggs and cream and voila! Toasted pork belly sandwiches and spinach, onion, bell pepper and bacon frittatas – yummy!

 

It might not have been the biggest meal ever, and despite the fact that it consisted mainly of left over bits and pieces we had ourselves a lovely evening.  Which brings me back to why I love food so much.  You don't have to serve up a nine course meal with all the correct wines and palate cleansers that the various dishes required in order to enjoy a meal.  It also does not have to take hours to prepare or cost an arm and a leg.

Sometimes the simplest meals prepared with left-over meat and heaps of spare love can lead to the most enjoyable experiences.   It is over those meals that we discover each other's likes, dislikes, hopes, dreams and passions.  We discuss food, music, travel.  We tell jokes, we tease, we question politics and religion and at the end of the evening we close the door behind friends having been fed and watered, but more important than that, we go to sleep having thoroughly nourished our souls.

*Bring your own booze