#1 Comfort Food

*Insert pic*
(no pic for now because I have a 3.5 yr old Dell nearing its death)

冬瓜汤(冬瓜湯)
Dong Gua Tang (Don Qua Tang)
Winter Melon Soup

Ingredients
Pork Bones
Shrimp Shells Dried
Cuttlefish
Bonito
Green Onions Ginger
White Peppercorns
Sichuan Black Peppercorns
Water
Salt to taste
Winter Melon, skinned & cut into pieces
Shrimp, peeled & deveined

And soon, mechanically, oppressed by the gloomy day and the prospect of another sad day to follow, I carried to my lips a spoonful of the dong gua tang. But at the very instant when the mouthful of soup mixed with succulent wintermelon piece touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening inside me. A delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated me, without my having any notion as to its cause. It had immediately rendered the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, acting in the same way that love acts, by filling me with a precious essence: or rather this essence was not merely inside me, it was me. I had ceased to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Where could it have come to me from--this powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected to the taste of the wintermelon and its soup, but that it went infinitely far beyond it, could not be of the same nature. Where did it come from? What did it mean? How could I grasp it? I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, a third that gives me a little less than the second. It is time for me to stop, the virtue of the drink seems to be diminishing. Clearly, the truth I am seeking is not in the drink, but in me. The drink has awoken it in me, but does not know this truth, and can do no more than repeat it indefinitely, with less and less force, this same testimony which I do not know how to interpret and which I want at last to be able to ask of it again and find again, intact, available to me, soon, for a decisive clarification. I put down the bowl and turn to my mind.