The Dining Dish blog is Dara Bunjon's take on anything food, both national and in her hometown of Baltimore. Warning: this food blog can be harmful to your waistline.

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Food Memories from my Yout

My love affair with food didn't start at an early age. I only recall one food favorite as a child and that was and still is spaghetti in a red sauce, my mother's and then eventually my own concoctions - but that is another post.

Today I was trying to remember back to my childhood to any food memories. I know the story my mother talked about was that my sister and I were picky eaters. We were both very scrawny, tiny children and my mother being a good Jewish mother, felt guilty that we weren't robust looking. I think she felt her friends thought she was starving us.


She bribed both of us with $10 if we could gain 10 pounds in a year. Okay, it was a long time ago and that 10 spot is equivalent to $100 by today's standards. I recollect trying hard to gain but I just couldn't do it. I could win challenge today in about 3 days.


My mother's frustration was that there was little that I liked and my goodness if I said I liked something, I got it everyday for lunch....EVERYDAY...until I would throw a tantrum. The sliced turkey meat sandwiches on rye with a sprinkling of salt sticks in my mind. The lunch box would come home still in tack with the morning's packed sandwich. Oh, mother would be so aggravated and upset. It was my sister who told me to throw the sandwich away (she was the rocket genius between the two of us). I remember swapping a sandwich with another student, it was a meatloaf sandwich with ketchup on white bread...it was good, WELL, it wasn't sliced turkey.

Let me not forget breakfast every morning, of course it was the same thing every morning, a soft boiled egg and a glass of chocolate milk---talk about nausea to kick off your day. She probably did something else on the weekends. I know I had pancakes from time-to-time but it was those fast, so-called nutritious soft boil eggs every morning. To this day I can't watch Rocky Balboa swallow the raw eggs in Rocky and not have a feeling I'm going to toss.

Chocolate milk was the only way to get milk down me, I couldn't handle white milk and to this day I don't drink white milk. I do use it with cereal if there is sugar in it (sugar substitute at this age.)

Don't be shy, let me know about your personal recollections of food of your youth ( or as Joe Pesci said in My Cousin Vinny, "yout").

1 comment:

JNpottery said...

You really want to know????
Ok, we sat around the table on Saturday mornings and decided what we'd eat for the week. Then Mom would call the butcher, who had a well stocked store and delivered.
We'd have a set menu for the week.
If we had chicken, then we'd have rice and a green veggie.
If it was steak, then mashed potatoes and a green veggie.
Lamb....maybe roasted potatoes and a green veggie....

See a pattern here?

Occasionally the green veggie would turn into corn. At least the
veggies were frozen, not canned!

Sometimes we had a casserole. Then there might be a salad as a side.

My most favorite food memories were Mom would make either pea soup from
a ham bone, or she'd cook a big pot of stew. It would be even better if
she made dumplings(from Bisquik) to top the stew!

I learned the cooking basics from Mom. I just took them a bit farther.
Judy

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