Creature Comforts

Why is there a phrase called “creature comforts”? Well this is what www.phrases.org.uk says:

“Man is presumed to consist of body and soul, the “creature” being the body, as opposed to the soul, which is the divine spark. Thus “creature comforts” are those which nourish the body – food, liquor, warmth, etc – as opposed to those such as love, companionship, sympathy, and so on, which nourish the soul. (VSD)”

There is also the phrase “comfort foods” that I like, but I wonder where it originated.  What I have found has brought me some dismay, but I shall dispence with that until another post or I shall disregard it altogether.  The only reason that I was considering either phrase is that I wanted to write a poem.  Instead I have decided to write about the dinner that we had tonight.

I try to fix something unique at least a couple of times per week.  I don’t always get it done, and I don’t always do it well, but I can always rely on one thing.  If it is a particularily difficult dish, or if it has had to cook for a long time, my daughter will not like it.  She may like parts of it, she may hate all of it, but there will be no good thing to be said about the dish.  Then she will go have some snack food within her reach.  It drives me nuts, but this phrase gets me into trouble, “Just try it, I bet you will like it”.  Yeah right.

Tonight I put nothing in the dish that she disliked, except for sauted onions.  I should have diced them instead of basically coarse chopping them. But she saw them and immediately started telling me how much she hated onions.  I reached over and took her plate and started eating her food so that she could be free to eat what ever she could fix.  She is 8 mind you, and has made no effort to ever prepare a meal.  She stopped her whining and took the plate back and ate it, but only after bargining down to only being required to eat half of it.  Why do I do that?

Any way, here is what we had:

• 1 lb of ground breakfast sausage, browned on the stove.
• 1/2 onion
• 1 large carrot
• 2 “regular sized” cans of black beans
• 1 small mix of Jiffy cornbread mix (This stuff is great.  It is less than $1 per box, but it is packed with flavor.)

I didn’t put any other seasoning on the meat, and I sauteed the first 4 items in my cast iron dutch oven.  Once the meat was cooked I added in the beans.  I think that next time I may add a clove of garlic, and maybe a can of tomatoes, but this mix was really good.

I prepped the cornbread mix as if I was making muffins.  I then smoothed out the bean and sausage mixture so that it was somewhat a flat surface, then poured the cornbread muffin mix so that it covered the top of what was already in the dutch oven.  I then put the lid on the dutch oven and put it in the oven as if I was preparing the muffins per the directions on the box.

I cooked it for about 35 minutes at 400 degrees instead of 15 to 20 minutes since it had to heat up the cast iron container.  I cooked it for about 25 minutes with the lid on, then I took off the lid and cooked it for about 10 minutes naked.  The dish was naked, not me.

My Son, my Wife and I loved it.  My daughter thought that she would be better off eating gruel or sewage water.  I almost got that for her, but we worked it out.