As January has come in full force, the name of the food game seems to be healthy food. Salads, low carb, gluten-free, low fat; you get the idea. I don’t know about your grandma, but mine didn’t do salads. Of course she ate vegetables, but to call a pile of lettuce a meal would have been considered a joke, and one not well received.
However, while one group of us out there seems to be reaching for the cruel-joke lettuce dishes, the other half of us are reaching for comfort food and of that, my grandma was an expert. So for January, we’re going to foray into Grandma Beresh’s kitchen for my absolute favorite dish, Veal Paprikash, and learn a little bit about the bigger picture of goulash, the quintessential comfort food.
When it comes to food, I don’t know about you, but I’ve always said that my grandma knows best. Her dishes are the stuff of legends: the ingredients identifiable and unmeasured, hand-written on now-yellowed paper (if written down at all) and filled with little secrets I can’t seem to figure out. Yet, the thing that makes this food extra special is the images and memories that it invokes: the pie that makes Thanksgiving, the soup that heals me when I’m sick, the smell of the peach upside-down cake that still manages to transport me back to the long summer nights of my childhood. Everything was cooked with love, and when I eat the pie or the soup or the cake, it’s almost as if I’m five all over again, running into her flour-covered apron for a hug.
