Friday open thread: comfort food

Edited to add that I feel this post would fit the criteria of today's snowflake_challenge: In your own space, interact with someone.



This generally isn't much of a problem for me — I try to post at least one comment or reply every day, and that's certainly the case today. However, it occurred to me that this post might be a good opportunity for people to ease their way into commenting, or interacting with others (it doesn't have to be me! you could reply to someone else's comment!) in a hopefully low-pressure context. My Friday open threads are intended to be the ultimate in low-pressure posting: each week I ask a question, answer it, and open up a space for others to answer too. The questions are generally fairly low pressure topics, although of course that is somewhat subjective. So ... feel free to jump in! Consider this post license to comment if you've never commented before, or to interact with perfect strangers. (Or don't: the whole point is that it's meant to be low pressure!)

And we're back for another round of the Friday open thread. This time, my question is a simple one: what is your favourite comfort food?

I have a lot of things that would fit this definition — basically anything that is warm, flavourful, and takes a long time but not a lot of effort to cook (so soups, stews, slow-cooked curries, etc) is comforting to me. And my stepmother introduced me years ago to the healing powers of congee, and ever since I've cooked it when I have a cold. But really, there's one dish above all others that I turn to for comfort: Marcella Hazan's pasta with tuna sauce. This has been a staple in my family since before I was born — my parents encountered Hazan's cookbooks when they lived in New York in the 1980s, and when they returned to Australia they taught every other adult member of my family how to cook it. There are photos of me as a baby with this dish smeared all over my face and upper body. I've been cooking it myself since I was first allowed to be solo in the kitchen — so probably since I was about ten or eleven years old — and I helped my mother, father, and various other relatives cook it many years before that. (We are a family that has always encouraged children to be active observers and participants in the kitchen, and it's generally resulted in said children growing into confident cooks and adventurous eaters, not that this dish is 'adventurous' by any stretch of the imagination.)

I've moved house around fifteen times in my adult life, and this dish is always the first thing I cook in a new kitchen.

Its beauty is its simplicity: it has only five ingredients (plus salt, pepper and olive oil), and it can easily be doubled to serve four, or be saved as leftovers to serve one person over two days (although I'd generally cook new pasta fresh on the second day rather than reheating old pasta, which I find disgusting). And it takes about five minutes to prepare and fifteen minutes to cook.

( Recipe behind the cut )

What are your comfort foods?