Comfort Food

It's been raining yet again here in NYC, and it has me craving comfort food. After a long day I work, I headed on over to the grocery store and went shopping. Not wanting chicken again, I opted for the other white meat: pork! Autumnal foods always remind me of home and comfort, so even though the temperature was pushing 85 I purchased a sweet potato and rosemary. Ready to get comfortized!


Contents:
Rosemary Pork

• Pork
• Rosemary
• Olive oil
• Salt and Pepper
• Garlic

Marinade the pork in the rosemary, salt, pepper and a little olive oil while preparing everything else. Bake at 375 F for about 25 minutes. Lower heat and longer cooking time will yield more tender meat (and vice versa). I topped my pork off with chopped garlic for the last five minutes of cooking, although it could have been added sooner.

Sweet Potato Fries

• Sweet potato cut into thick slices or wedges
• Salt and Pepper
• Olive Oil (cook spray would be preferable - see below)

Coat the sweet potato slices with salt, pepper and a touch of olive oil. I used too much olive oil and so my fries turned out a little on the wimpy side. If you can avoid using oil all together, I think they would turn out much crisper. Anyway, bake at 400 F for 30 minutes.

The greens are broccoli rabe that have been boiled until tender and then sauteed with garlic.

So, this was last night. Today I was working on my Italian and practicing the imperfect tense. I was to write about what I used to do as a child, and one of the questions happened to be "Che cosa preferivi mangiare?" (What did you prefer to eat?) To which I responded, "Preferivo mangiare la lasagna." (I preferred to eat lasagna.) Stoffer's lasagna, to be exact. It's such a guilty pleasure, and I'm slightly embarrassed to admit it. You'd think after rolling my own pasta dough, making my own tomato sauce and bechemel sauce, that a frozen Stoffer's lasagna should taste like an edible form of blasphemy to the Italian culture, but I still love it.

As far as I remember, I always asked for Stoffer's lasagna to be my special birthday dinner. My favorite part about it was the little cheese balls (what they called "ricotta" cheese), and they were even better because my brother hated them. I love it when I can kill two birds with one stone. Maybe it was my way of ensuring that my brother got no enjoyment from my birthday night; his birthday was just two days later, and then I'd have to comply with his every wish and demand.

Missing home, I picked up a frozen one at the store. It brought me right back to a chilly December 2nd night. It's nice how some things never change.