The Cuisine of Comfort
As the nights turn brisk and the wind more penetrating, the home cooking has hunkered down with heavy carbohydrates. The menu around the Skelton dinner table this week reads like a heavyweight fighter’s dietary training schedule. We shield ourselves from cold temperatures with fortresses built from blocks of cheese and mortar made from starch.

The beginning of the week saw a return to midwestern roots and family values as I prepared a traditional tuna hot dish garnished with crushed potato chips for extra love. Tuesday was a ten hour slow cooked chili with mountains of Tillamook cheddar and double dollops of sour cream. Wednesday night, the chili returned for round two, complimented by a sun dried tomato dip that caused such a sever food coma that I actually drooled on one of the cats while watching the season finale of America’s Next Top Model.

Tonight I will show the kitchen (and my stomach) no mercy as I prepare a scalloped potato recipe that will border on gastronomic lunacy.

If you’ve got a staple comfort food recipe in your winter culinary arsenal (remember the Skeltons are pescatarians) I want to know about it. Send it to me and I’ll rate it on a scale from one to five, where ‘one’ is Iggy Pop and ‘five’ is John Candy.