Haram Comfort Food

I've been sick for more than three days now and it's rather wearying. My sinuses feel like they're packed tight with cotton balls. My ears pop and slosh. I know I'm half-deaf, I can't hear the air conditioner rattle. I just emptied my wastebasket, it was full of tissues and diet Coke cans. One moment I feel cold, another warm. I've given up on fiddling with the air conditioner as that simply doesn't help. I pulled a blanket out of storage in case I get chilled at night.

But the thing that is making me crazy right now is my absolute desire for comfort food. But I'm tired of chocolate, plus not supposed to really eat it as a diabetic. And I don't eat these comfort foods anymore: ham and cheese sandwiches, pulled pork barbeque, sausage breakfast burritos, ham steak,fried bacon, ham croissants, pepperoni slices (forget the pizza, bring on the slices!), pork chops, barbeque spare ribs, even nasty old pork rinds (aka chicharrones). I love(d) all that stuff, even the icky pork rinds. I can taste it now...no more.

Thing is, even though I was born in California, my parents both have Southern USA backgrounds and their cooking reflects it. Pork was cheap and dad's family raised pigs on the farm. (Yes, my dad learned how to geld pigs as a boy.) My grandmother would can cooked sausage (like Jimmy Dean's in the tube) as well as stuff ground pork in sausage casings. Hams were smoked and cured. My dad said they used everything but the "oink" from their pigs. And knowing Grandma, if she could have figured out how to do that, she would have!

And that's just the way we ate when I was a kid: both pork and chicken were disdained in those days as "poor people's food" but we ate it, lots of it. And my family still eats it. I called over to the house on Sunday and my brother described the enormous breakfast burrito he'd cooked up for himself after rummaging through the fridge--yep, it included bacon. It sounded mouthwatering. But no.

But no.

But I really want a ham and cheese sandwich.

P.S. I can't believe I forgot beans and ham hocks! We ate that a lot when I was a kid.