Yeah, I’ve been away, and I have a damned good excuse. That’s me, after squeezing out more than 7 pounds of screaming baby. Oh, and that’s baby. He calmed down a bit.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the traumatizing effects of childbirth as much as this: I ate hospital food for six meals, and loved it. After I arrived in the postpartum ward in the early evening, more exhausted than I’d ever been in my life, a nurse handed me a cheese sandwich and it seemed like the most glorious thing I had ever tasted. And this was no gourmet sandwich de fromage. It was good old processed Kraft American slices on the kind of soft, flexible bread that pretends to be whole wheat but is really a mixture of refined and whole grain flour. I was even more excited when a whole tray arrived with my real dinner.

What was there to love about chicken breast lubricated with some kind of clear fat, plain white rice and steamed vegetables on the side? And at lunch the next day, a soft taco of ground beef flavored with laughably mild spices on a flour, not corn, tortilla?

Well, there was the primal appeal of simple food, not simple in the I-worked-on-a-farm-in-France-for-a-year-and-communed-with-the-earth way but completely utilitarian and unpretentious. I grew up with my mother’s unimaginative, assimilationist American cooking, so perhaps this is just my comfort food.

There was the luxury of being waited upon and eating in bed, something I can never quite pull off at home because I don’t have an eating-in-bed tray with legs and if I wanted to actually enjoy my meal, I’d have to cook it myself, then climb back into bed and serve myself, which undermines the lovely indulgence of the concept.

There was the childish delight in being able to order off a menu while lying in said bed, like on an international flight. There was even acidophilus milk for the lactose-intolerant, like me, although I later learned from a lactation consultant, “You don’t need to drink milk to make milk.”

And there was the minor miracle of a meal delayed 20 minutes by a screaming baby that is still warm because the plate comes encased in this nifty insulated shell.

We’ve all heard that hunger is the best sauce of all, but those six meals reminded me that many other factors contribute to deliciousness.