When the temperature started to drop for winter, I made dietary changes. I craved different foods.

Keeping Sauvignon Blanc and LaCroix in the fridge gave way to a more pressing urge to keep dry pasta in the cupboard (In case, I’d get “snowed in”) along with a wider assortment of teabags. And, I stocked up on ingredients to make soup.

I make a great meatloaf and nice roast chicken, which can be appealing when the mercury goes down. But my go-to winter staple is SOUP.

During winter, I crave comfort food. And it seems like nothing else fits the bill the way a steaming bowl of soup does.

I like the whole ritual of it. Spending an afternoon chopping vegetables, pulling out a box of broth from my pantry (a good friend of mine makes her own stock, which is a level of home-cooking I usually skip), adding herbs and spices by feel. Stirring the pot.

I have two sets of red lidded Le Creuset pots, Christmas gifts from an old employer, chosen from a catalog. I’ve started many hearty concoctions in the round one, figuring I would just make a small batch, which I had to transfer to the slightly bigger, oval-shaped, one. This seems to be a universal law of soup-making.

Use the biggest pot you have around the house. By the time, you’re added what you want, and leave a little room for the ladle,  you will use every cubic inch. You can also think of it this way; The amount of soup you generate expands to the size of the pot.

I also like not relying on a recipe. I refer to this as “karma” cooking. A baker, I’m not. Baking cookies, cakes or breads requires you to rely on exact proportions and thoroughly understand the quirks of your oven, like whether it runs hot.

I know pretty much what might go into a soup, but I really appreciate that no two pots of the same type of soup come out exactly the same way. And that’s okay.

In an age that values predictability and consistency, it’s nice that we can still leave room for something to be exceptional, even if that means a SE (soup experiment) might miss its mark.

For me, the very idea of comfort food has been tied to heartiness (the ability to consume a whole meal in one bowl),  temperature (In an otherwise cold world, the hotter the better), and non-judgment.

There is no one right way to make chicken soup, or mushroom soup, or even pear and parsnip soup. Everyone can make their own version according to their tastes, according to what looks good at the store or what they have on hand.

This idea is tremendously liberating. It’s also great to think you can freeze servings in plastic tubs and thaw them out when you need a fix of “everything’s alright.”

During a recent trip to the grocery store, between a deep freeze and an ice storm, I saw something else that I never thought of as ”comfort food,” but in the moment, it struck me as very nurturing and hope-inspiring.

I passed a display of blueberries and I had to put a pint in my cart. I yearned to treat myself to blueberry pancakes, fresh off my stovetop griddle.

Yes, the berries were not from Michigan bought at one of the farmers’ markets that pop up in nearby neighborhoods in May.  The berries were small, usually a good sign, but, as I found out later, were tart, not being in season, wherever they were grown.

And they were expensive…

But they made me think about spring.

Lush green grass, long walks, barbecues, sunshine, baseball…

My mind became filled with this thought: Spring will visit my corner of the earth again.

Knowing that it’s not hot food or a warm blanket, but HOPE that brings the most comfort is no small thing.