All I know is that there are a few things bring me to a place that is familiar and warm, I suppose you could call them comfort foods…for the soul.  Earlier this week Sami asked if she could bake something after supper – as if I’d say no to her baking…crazy I’m not!

She enquired if we had any scone recipes, and after we searched through some of our cookbooks we found a couple of likely candidates.  I could tell she wanted to bake something sweet, yes that’s what you get when your daughter is a foodie with a penchant for anything sweet.  My only input was, so how about adding raisins?

She smiled and said that she wasn’t a big fan of raisins so she would search for something else to add to them…  At this point I wasn’t going to quash her creative genius so wished her luck and exited stage left.

In what felt like just a couple of minutes she walked into my office with a plate of steaming hot raisin scones…OMG!  I was in heaven, and promptly padded back downstairs to the kitchen and slathered them in butter and raspberry jam, and I mean pronto!!!

No surprise that the sheer taste of them took me back to my childhood when my mum would bake scones on a Sunday night to have with our homemade vegetable soup.  Seriously I was blown away, they tasted exactly the same all these years on as they had when I was a kid.  I always knew Sami was gifted in many things, but now I can surely add “scone baker” to her impressive list.

Consequently I’ve eaten my way through the whole batch of scones in just a couple of days, so incredibly delicious but clearly not good for the waistline.  Ha! ☺

This got me thinking what other things are my go-to comfort foods, whether it be for the stomach or my soul.

That’s an easy one – my next on the list is a steaming hot bath.  If I had my druthers I’d take a bath every night before bed, however the competition at night for the bathroom often makes it a bit tricky.  Whenever I do take a bath I more often than not bring my book to read, until I start to nod off which invariably I do irrespective of when I take the bath as it relaxes me to my core.  

I have to admit the best bathtub experience I’ve ever had was in Vietnam at the Vedana LagoonResort & Spa on the Central coast just south of Hue.  My private villa had a bath carved from a single piece of marble which must have been at least seven feet long, three feet high and three feet wide…okay it was more of an indoor swimming pool, but surely the coup de grâce was the spectacular view of the lagoon and surrounding mountains from the tub.  Can you say heaven???

It was the sort of experience where I could stretch our fully underwater and not touch either end and could run the water up to my chin…so good!  

I’m a little surprised that given the weight of the tub combined with the additional weight of the water that it didn’t end up at the bottom of the lagoon as my villa was on stilts over the lagoon.  Now wouldn’t that have been story…if I survived the fall that is.

Now as crazy as this sounds the next one on my list (cos, you know I love lists!) is traveling with Zach and Sami.  There’s just something about all being together on a trip and exploring the world, with nowhere else to be or timeline to hurry us along.  Nope, slow travel is the way to go.  

It’s the fact that we’re all together in one place at one time, which brings me joy and a sense of warmth and comfort like nothing else does.  Not sure I’m ever going to lose that feeling of contentment and connectedness when I’m with them.

Next on my list of comfort foods for the soul is without doubt Italy…but of course you already knew that. 🙂

So my Christmas gift to you all is that for the next couple of weeks I’ll be live in Italy, so our weekly blogs, video’s and photo will be streaming from there.

Arrivederci!  

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