We've Got to Get Right Back to Where We Started From

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

More on Food and Beverage!

Since make it stop jacked my massive commentary, I figure I'll compose a list/post of my own:
I remember having family dinners until I was in middle school or so. From there on our it was me and lean cuisine or me and my Mom and take out or me and my Dad out somewhere, generally. The home cooked meals of way back included beef stroganoff (noodles mostly for me), chicken cashew stir fry and hamburgers off the grill. I ate buttered noodles everywhere in restaurants. In high school I went through a huge Ramen noodle phase and also discovered that Kid Cuisines were freaking delicious, ate those babies for years. The best food stuff from my Dads apartment included these awesome tuna melts he would make by putting the tuna salad (freshly made) into a little pita pocket with a hunk of monterey jack cheese and warming it in the toaster oven - mmmmm. I was all about raspberry flavored new york seltzer water for a while there too. I was what you might call fat from the ages of about 9-11, in no small part because of the amount of shit I loved and lived to eat, particularly candy bars, cookies, and any sort of cake or baked good. We tended to have cookies at home, the E.L Fudge varieties. My Dad got an apartment right by a Marcs where he started getting those big soft archway cookies which i made short order of. who knows how i managed to load up on so much other junk - trips to the store with friends, etc. I went horsebackriding every saturday and was picked up and dropped off by a van from the barn. We would stop at Gas Town in Perry after every 2 hr saturday session and i would, needless to say, go fucking apeshit in the candy bar aisle ,with a soda for good measure. Speaking of soda (or pop as i usually dub it, which caused confusion @ my west coast college where they don't say pop, on a road trip i announced from the backseat i had spilled my pop and the driver replied "you spilled the pot? pick it up.") - i drank pop like it was going out of style. LOVED it. Went to a lecture at Cleveland State as a freshman where the speaker spoke about how pop depletes the calcium in your bones and basically wrecks you and kills you slowly. My friend who attended with me leaned over and said to me "dude, you don't have lupus. I bet there's nothing wrong with you. It's the pepsi."
Foods that to this day literally transport me back to childhood are cream of wheat with brown sugar all up in it and ginger ale when i am sick. My moms chicken noodle soup was always whipped up when i was sick. I can't remember the first time she made mac and cheese but she made it often when i was in high school/college and i would it it every day at least twice a day until it was gone. My dad made a wicked french toast, and would cut it up for me and one day, when i was probably 9 or so my Mom for some unprovoked reason snapped " What are you going to cut her french toast for her when she is 16?" (she must have been salty with my dad for some reason) Cut my own from there on out.
Tommys on Coventry is a point of food nostalgia, and one of my favorite restaurants of all time. My Dad and I ate there once a week for about 10 years and still meet for lunch there. We ate there as a family of 4 way back in the day before it caught on fire and you could see down into the kitchen and watch your food come up on a huge dumb waiter.
There is much more, all the meals on Riveredge with the most random assortment of people at the table (well, mostly family i guess), Maeve's clockwork vomiting into the standby bucket or bowl. I can't remember the first real thing(s) I cooked myself that wasn't buttered noodles with kraft parmesan on top... perhaps pan fried zuchinni which was then heavily salted and consumed - delish.
Soooo much frozen and processed stuff. Remarkable. And now , with my belly full of Bucci's, i must sign off.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Top Ten Food Memories

Here's a Random Ten: Stolen From Another Blog Edition:

1. My favorite childhood food memory is "Friday Night Pizza". Every friday night, my mom would make homemade pizzas and we would devour them in front of a movie or playing video games, or whatever. There were always a variety, and there were always leftovers. Her pizzas are still among my favorite foods.

2. My least favorite childhood food memory is ham in any way, shape, or form. I hate ham. Once, my grandmother basted a ham with leftover juice from the pickle jar. A child of the Depression, she literally could not anything go to waste. It was disgusting.

3. I always took my lunch to school. Sometimes my mom put it together, sometimes I put it together, once in awhile Norm put it together and I loved when he did because he made us cream cheese sandwiches on toast and they were delicious. And yes, my mom usually put a little note in but no, Norm did not.

4. The after school snack was very important to me. Sometimes it was a bowl of cereal. Sometimes it was some fruit. Many times it was handfuls and handfuls of chocolate or butterscotch chips eaten directly from the bag! Mmmmmmmm....

5. Dinner as a family every night was pretty much mandatory, until I was 16 and got a job. Weeknights always included whatever uncle was living with us at the time, often a grandparent or two, many times a cousin, sometimes a neighbor. We didn't have to clean our plates, but we did have to eat a little of everything. We had to ask to be excused and clear our plates and we shared kitchen chores.

6. As noted above, we didn't have to clean our plates and I only remember being forced to eat once in my life. I was a bit of a pain in the ass at times as an adolescent and once insisted that I wanted creamed corn for dinner. My mom wasn't home at the time and Norm said no. I insisted that I have creamed corn. After a me badgering him, he told me I could have a can of creamed corn, but I had to eat the whole thing. I don't know about you, but for me, a couple of spoonfulls of the stuff and I'm done. But my pride wouldn't let me back down and I made the can, and tried, really tried, to eat it all. I failed, but had to sit at the table for a couple hours, pretending to still be eating the corn.

7. I once called an uncle a "bastard" at the dinner table, not knowing what exactly it meant, causing the adults at the table to sputter and choke on their food. Why is this a food memory? It was the first and last time I ate brussel sprouts. I'm pretty sure the uncle deserved it, by the way.

8. We were not allowed to have pop as kids, and I think we were in high school before my mom finally started buying it for home. But then, all she would buy is diet. I hate diet pop. Give me a fountain coke any day, but keep that diet crap away. We also were not allowed to have "sugar" cereal. It was all cheerios and cornflakes for us. One of my only memories of my maternal grandmother is that she always had Trix for me at her house and I was allowed to eat bowl after bowl of it when she watched me.

9. My favorite baking memory comes from the weeks my mom spent making Christmas cookies every year. Often the job of peeling the Hershey's kisses for the peanut butter cookies fell to me. I loved how the whole house would fill with the scent of her cookies. She would make at least 6 or 7 different kinds and share them with everyone.

10. The first time I cooked a meal for someone, like a real meal, with salad, entree, and dessert, was for a date with someone well known to the readers of this blog (well, 2 of the 3 readers of this blog, anyway). I was 19 and the only thing I could really make was pasta, with sauce (from a jar, of course), garlic bread, salad with italian dressing, and cupcakes for dessert. The dinner part of the date went well, as the food wasn't awful. The date did go downhill from there, though, and it took me many years before I would cook for a date again.


Wednesday, February 10, 2010

I'm tired

I'm tired of being tired. Alas, until they approve use of Afrin for infants, or until Spring comes, I'm not anticipating getting any sleep. Poor baby still has a cold, and I'm coping by drinking more coffee. In fact, going on my third cup of the day. And, eating cookies. Lots of them. Silk, hit the bootcamp up for me too, next time you go.

I took a short walk today to get some soup for lunch and am amazed at how much snow is out there! Crazy! As you can see, not much to blog about. Its been a slow few weeks here.

I'm in complete amazement at the "tea party" movement and their "leader" Sarah Palin. There is a good article in the most recent New Yorker talking about the movement. Heard Palin's remarks to the nationally gathering of tea party-ers (do NOT want to make the same mistake some other politico did in referring to them as "tea-baggers"; not to mention there is only one tea bagger in my opinion, that would be Tea Bag Dan, we can share his story in a later post). Anyway, as I listened to the radio program and the chants of "Run, Sarah, Run", I realized how completely and totally FUCKED UP so many of my fellow citizens are. I mean, really. Really. REALLY.

I know I'm a-preachin to the choir. So may as well go make my coffee and have another cookie. Look for a more inspired post soon.