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.