How comforting!

I like to think of myself as a happy traveller. And discovering new places is, if you ask me, one of the best ways to spend one’s leisure and money.
When foodies travel, where to eat and what is as significant a question as what sights to see. I travel on my stomach as it were, seeking out the best and most varied eating experiences a new city, town, seaside resort or mountain retreat will offer.
One always remembers, the lamb at a Sydney harbour restaurant, the fresh salmon at the fjord-side stalls during the brief summer weeks in Oslo or the platters of crab claws at beach restaurants in Colombo. It’s a seemingly endless list of eating joys.
But there comes a time, no matter how exotic the fare you’ve been indulging in, when your palate begins to long for a taste of home. It begins as a mild craving, the inability to face another platter of pasta or bowl of Thai curry, and then grows to be a consuming obsession. “I must,” we tell ourselves, “have rice and dal/ rice and rasam/ curd rice and pickle.” To each his own.
What is the food that satisfies that longing in you, what is your comfort food? Sometimes, it’s just the familiar, everyday food we depend on for sustenance. But when we have been deprived of it for any length of time, it takes on all the lure of exotica. I have never so hankered for a meal of soft cooked rice, rasam, and potato fry as I did after a few weeks of bangers-and-mash meals and pies and fish and chips in London.
Sometimes, it’s the nature of the food itself that is comforting — perhaps a bowl of mashed potato, with lashings of butter, to be eaten on its own because the carbs and the richness of butter all come together to hit that inner spot somewhere and let us know the world is not so bad after all.
For some people, it’s ice cream that does the trick, for yet others chocolate cake. Pasta in cream sauce serves the same purpose for some foodies as does a juicy burger or French fries. It’s an inexplicable thing and only the diner knows why he or she chooses a particular comfort food and how it manages to comfort.
Rice is always my pick-me-up staple. Sometimes, I like it with lashings of a chutney/thuvayal which I can whiz up in my mixer. Eat with hot rice and don’t forget the ghee.
Tur dal chutney
You will need:
1 tbsp tur dal
4 tbsp grated coconut
1 dry red chilli
Pinch of asafoetida
1 tsp oil
Pinch of tamarind
Salt to taste
Heat the oil, fry the dal to a golden brown, add the chilli, asafoetida, the tamarind and the coconut. Stir for a minute. Leave to cool and grind everything in a mixer adding a minimum amount of water.