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.