Rechewed Saltine Balls & Other Childhood Food Memories
Today’s post is inspired by my hike, my hunger and the need to remember some things before dementia sets in.
My jaunt to the mailbox is a great time to mull over blog ideas. Yesterday, Lance gave me a legal pad to jot down my thoughts. I filled up 5 pages worth of potential blog posts! Not once in those 5 pages did I write anything about rechewed saltine balls. Today my mind was wandering (again) and it landed on food. Probably because we drank more than we ate last night (yipes).
While trying to decide what to have for lunch (Probably a potato. This IS Idaho, ya know), I flipped through the categories in my mind and landed in my childhood. What did I like to eat as a kid? This memory is too weird not to document. My little brother Johnny and I would chew up a handful of saltines and spit them out in the palm of our hand. Don’t get too grossed out, we each had our OWN handful of rechewed crackers. That would just be too gross, eating HIS chewed up crackers. When we had enough chewed up, we’d roll the glop into a ball, pack it tight, like a snow ball. We’d then admire our creation and proceed to eat it like an apple. I’ll have to verify this with my brother to see if he has the same memories. We’d also make cracker and margarine sandwiches (Blue Bonnet of course, because everything’s better with Blue Bonnet on it) then freeze them.
My friend, Beth, would take a handful of spanish peanuts, chew them up and spit them out. She got the taste but not the calories. I thought she was brilliant (can you say early signs of anorexia?). I could never do it. I wasn’t that disciplined. Beth, if you find your way to my blog, I know you didn’t have anorexia!
My mom use to hide sweets in the freezer. Hey, if you had 7 kids (5 of them teenage boys), you’d hide your treats, too. I grew to enjoy the taste of frozen glazed donuts. I do believe the frozen snicker bars lead me down the path to major dental work tho 🙁
My daughter had a long list of weird things she’d eat. Uncooked ramen noodles, cake mix straight out of the box, pasta-pillars (those were actually SORT of healthy). She’d use margarine, prolly Blue Bonnet, to coat her noodle, then drag it through freshly grated parmesan. It looked like a fuzzy caterpillar when she was done. Hey, if that skinny little scamp wanted to play with her food, as long as she ended up eating it, that worked for me.
I can’t recall any weird stuff my son ate. Butter on a ham sandwich or brown sugar on peanut butter. But those were his mother’s doings, not his. Hmmm, Char? Did I forget your childhood weirdness? He vetoed casseroles. I tried calling them ‘ensembles’ instead. Didn’t fool him, ever.
Lance talks of buying paper bags full of bell peppers and or cucumbers at a farmers market. He would then eat the entire bag of veggies. Okay, THAT’S a really weird thing for a 9-year-old to do with out being told. Even crazier is that he’d get all that for one quarter.
Thank you for letting me walk down memory lane and document this here. Now I’ll have some silly things to look back on when I’m about to fall off my rocker. I’d love to hear what YOU remember eating as a kid. I sure hope it’s weirder than mine.
