If you enjoy “comfort food”, you will be happy to hear my friend and cookbook author Chef Leslie Bilderback cookbook from her line of Complete Idiot’s Guide series called Comfort Food. It “savors the flavors of home cooking with over 350 delicious recipes”.

 What Is Comfort Food?

I guess what foods you declare comfort food is based on individual tastes and memories. For example, growing up, I remember my mom preparing roast leg of lamb with mint jelly on Sunday afternoons. Now when I prepare leg of lamb at home, it conjures up great memories of those earlier meals and is “comforting”. I’m sure we all have these memories.

Today, I think of meals like beef stew, pasta with Bolognese sauce (I plan to make some today), braised beef, lamb or pork shanks & homemade soups as some of my favorite comfort foods. These are meals that I enjoy preparing when it is cold outside while I’m watching a football game on a Sunday afternoon. Yes, you can make comfort foods all year long, but I yearn for them more often in the colder weather. Did I mention mashed potatoes?

But then again, a juicy cheeseburger grilled outside in the summer is also comforting and brings back memories of my dad starting the charcoal grill in our backyard. He would get busy with some project he might be working on and forget about the burgers or the chicken pieces and they would have a crispy exterior but we still enjoyed the food and loved the event.

So before I go too far down memory lane, let me tell you more about Chef Leslie’s book. It’s a guide filled with recipes that she describes as food that will “soothe your soul – and your stomach – with homemade favorites” like creamy potato soup, chili con carne, chicken a la King, Yankee pot roast, meatloaf, crab cakes, candied yams, and let’s not forget green bean casserole or tuna casserole for that matter.

These are recipes that we are all familiar with and crave every once in a while. Chef Leslie offers over 350 “mouth-watering” recipes that are easy to make at home with step-by-step instructions as well as tons of helpful hints that only someone with her experience can provide.

What I really like about Chef Bilderback’s recipes is she gives you a complete recipe with lots of how to’s. They are not just a list of ingredients and a few lines of instructions. They really explain how to prepare the recipe so you get it right. My kind of recipe.

So if you are looking for a collection of simple recipes that will bring back memories of foods that you remember, I highly recommend you check out Chef Bilderback’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Comfort Food.

Tomorrow I will post one of the recipes my wife prepared from the book for Potatoes Anna that we served as a side dish. She added her own “comfort” addition to Chef Leslie’s recipe that I think you will enjoy.

What are some of your favorite “comfort foods”?

You can list some of your favorites below in the comments area or better yet, head over to my new Cooking Community Forum and post the entire recipe.

It’s birthday season at our house and the girls get to choose what they want for dinner. My oldest daughter wanted all her favorite foods that could be dipped in butter. Not great for my diet but we obliged.

Artichokes

We started out with fresh artichokes that were trimmed and simmered. To trim an artichoke, you want to cut the stalk right to the very bottom of the bulb. Next cut off the thorny thistle leaf ends so nobody gets hurt.

To cook, bring the water to a boil, add the artichokes, cover and lower the heat to a simmer. It could take anywhere from 30 to 40 minutes depending on the size and number of artichokes you are preparing. You’ll know they are ready to eat when one of the leaves comes off easily with a tug.

The kids love pulling off the leaves and dipping them into butter. Lucky for my wife and me, they are not thrilled with the hairy choke protecting the artichoke heart so we get to feast on them.

Crab Cakes

My wife told me this was an impulse buy. I usually make my own crab cakes but she saw them at our local gourmet supermarket, Food Source, and knows how much our oldest daughter loves them. My youngest won’t even look at them.

The crab cakes fell apart when cooking so we just put the broken pieces on our plates for dipping into some heated butter.

Steamers

Who knew 6 & 8 year olds would love steamers? Our girls have been eating them ever since we started vacationing at the Jersey shore. We started out buying a couple of dozen for my wife and I but now have to order 50 or more because the kids love them so much.

Steamers are easy to prepare. I like to give them a bath in cold water to wash out any sand that may still be in their shells. You do this a couple of times with fresh water and they will purge most of their sand. Some people like to add salt water to the water but I’m not sure why.

In the house that we rent in the summer they have a large aluminum pot that looks like it is just for steaming clams and boiling lobsters. We just add ½ inch of water to the bottom of the pan, season with a little salt and add the clams.  If you have a steamer basket, that works fine too.

Steam the clams for about 8 to 10 minutes until all the shells open. You don’t want to eat any clams that don’t open. It means they are dead and can make you sick. There are times when a clam needs a little extra time but don’t mess around with partially open clams. Not worth it!

When serving, be sure to have an extra bowl for the shells and plenty of that melted butter. A little fresh squeezed lemon juice doesn’t hurt either.

Lobster Tails

Nell enjoyed her first lobster this summer while dinning out at a seafood restaurant in Sea Isle, New Jersey. They actually had a small lobster tail on the children’s menu. After that she was hooked.

So we picked up a couple of tails at Costco. These were cold-water tails from New Zealand that had sweet, delicious meat. If you want to learn more about buying lobster tails, read my article, How to Buy Lobster Tails & Not Get Ripped Off.

My wife baked them in the oven while the steamers were steaming. After they were cooked, she cut each of the two tails in half and there was plenty for everyone.

Rice Pilaf

My daughter’s real favorite food that she can eat breakfast, noon and night is the rice pilaf from the company Near East. They don’t sell this at our Costco so my buddy buys me cases of it at BJs. It’s a real stable in our household and you see it in a lot of my food photos.

It was a fun meal; everyone was covered in butter and seafood.  

 or as my kids call them, “Crabby Patties”

Whenever I tell people how easy it is to make crab cakes they look at me as if I’m kidding. I tell them, “If you can prepare a meatloaf and cook a hamburger, you can make a great crab cake!”

If you are a purist and want to do it right, you would buy a bunch of blue clawed crabs, boiling them up, chill the creatures and spend hours picking the meat from their tiny little claws.

I remember as a kid, my dad taking us down to my grandfather’s house at the Jersey shore to go crabbing. We came home one time with two bushels of Jersey Blue Claws that had to be cooked and cleaned.

After a while my dad who was doing most of the picking came up with the brilliant idea of using a water pick to blast the meat from those tiny little legs to speed things up.  His idea worked but when my mom came in the kitchen, she had a fit when she saw crabmeat hanging from the ceiling and walls. My dad ended up having to repaint the entire kitchen.

I find it much easier to buy fresh lump crabmeat at my local fish market where someone else has spent hours picking the meat. Great if you can find it…even better if you can afford it. A more affordable alternative is buying “pasteurized” crabmeat in 16 oz cans. Costco sells a Phillips brand that is “hand picked lump” that is not bad at all.

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