Weird or Icky School Lunches

[Stephanie]

I just happened to think of this last night as I was putting together today's lunch. When you were a kid, did you ever bring to school anything (a) you thought was gross but your parents foisted upon you anyway or (b) something you loved then but look back on now with "anti-nostalgia"? These would be the kind of things NOBODY would trade you for.

Mine was chicken roll. Anyone ever heard of that? It's various bits of cooked chicken meat, plus skin and fat, pressed into a fat roll shape like a breakfast sausage or a kosher salami. Slice and put on bread. Lord knows how much calories and fat were in there-I don't know if they even make it these days. I put up with chicken roll sandwiches for a few years until I begged Mom not to buy it anymore.

Edited March 20, 2003 by Stephanie (log)

[Kim WB]

For school lunches, I put cheese wiz on all my sandwiches..Wonder bread, cheez wiz, and then a few slices of whatever lunch meat was around..usually bologna or salami.

My son had cauliflower in cheeze wiz at my mom's, and loves it, so I do now keep a jar of the neon yellow cheeze in the fridge...but I put it towards the back..it kinda glows, and lights up the dark back corners of the fridge!

edited to add I remember chicken roll well...and how about Olive loaf? Pressed ham?

Edited March 20, 2003 by Kim WB (log)

[elyse]

I loved chicken roll sandwiches but my mother would rarely buy it (chemicals, ickiness). I was such a picky eater, if there was something I WOULD eat, I usually got it.

[smallworld]

My school lunches were fairly dull and (comparitively) healthy- just a sandwhich, vegetable sticks and fruit. Except after Halloween when there was surplus candy.

I was always jealous of the kids who got chips and candy everyday- especially the ones who got packs of Jello. I'm not talking about already made Jello- I mean just the packs of powder. There were kids who would dip their licked fingers in the powder and suck! At the time I thought that was so cool, but now I realize how nasty it is- I wonder what their parents were thinking!

Did I just go to a weird school, or does anyone else remember this?

[Suzanne F]

I don't remember having problems with the fillings -- but during Passover, I got sandwiches on matzo. Can you say "soggy wet cardboard?"

[aliwaks]

I just happened to think of this last night as I was putting together today's lunch.  When you were a kid, did you ever bring to school anything (a) you thought was gross but your parents foisted upon you anyway or (b) something you loved then but look back on now with "anti-nostalgia"?  These would be the kind of things NOBODY would trade you for.

Mine was chicken roll.  Anyone ever heard of that?  It's various bits of cooked chicken meat, plus skin and fat, pressed into a fat roll shape like a breakfast sausage or a kosher salami.  Slice and put on bread.  Lord knows how much calories and fat were in there-I don't know if they even make it anymore.  I put up with chicken roll sandwiches for a few years until I begged Mom not to buy it anymore.

ohmygod I remember chicken roll...my mom gave it to us on Branola bread w. mayo & lettuce in fact we had everything on branola bread chicken roll was on rotation, then there was kosher salami & muenster cheese (on branola), cream cheese & jelly and the dreaded cold scrambled egg sandwich actually now that I think about it there was a period when we did not have branola bread and that was when my mom decided to make her own bread ...helped my get rid of my loose teeth. I would look wistfully at all teh other kids with thier nutritionless white bread and bolonga or ham & cheese. But we didn't eat things like that, some how chicken roll was ok bolonga was not

[Schielke]

I remember one sandwich that I got back in grade school. The bread had this funny white powery looking stuff on the crust. I thought it was mold and I threw out the sandwich in disgust. I later found out that it was just a dusting of flour on the bread, which I had never seen before.

Kids are funny.

Ben

[Stephanie]

I don't remember having problems with the fillings -- but during Passover, I got sandwiches on matzo.  Can you say "soggy wet cardboard?" 

Definitely. I try to avoid that these days by making my matzo sandwiches in the morning, not the night before. When I was a kid, Mom would actually make kosher-for-Passover rolls. They didn't taste all that good plus some kids would give me grief because they thought I was cheating. Eventually, I told Mom I'd just deal with the matzo.

Oy, that reminds me--Passover is less than a month away!

Edited March 20, 2003 by Stephanie (log)

[aliwaks]

my grandmother made those rolls, I loved them they had a really weird texture. During passover my mom would usually send us to school with a chicken leg or some other left-over meat thing or some cheese and buttered matzo wrapped in tin foil

[kpurvis]

The one my mother will never live down: Peanut butter and bacon. She had read a tip in a women's magazine that peanut butter would keep the bacon crisp. I never trusted Betsy McCall again.

Given how gross it was, crispness really wasn't the point. As I recall, it was made even more horrible by the fact that she used leftover breakfast bacon, and she sent the awful thing with me as a lunch at day camp. So it sat in the heat, getting good and rancid by lunchtime.

[MsRamsey]

I was mortified by the cream cheese and jelly sandwiches my mother made me take to school. I was also teased because of them. (Hm, aversion to cream cheese is starting to make sense . . . )

Edited March 20, 2003 by MsRamsey (log)

[nightscotsman]

OK, confession time: I invented, and insisted my Mom make for me, a sandwich consisting of white bread, peanut butter, salami or bologna, and sliced sweet pickles. The taste of these is still a vivid (and not unpleasant) memory.

[Marlene]

My son insists on sandwhiches made of sliced cheese, mustard and sweet pickles in his lunch for school. Ick.

[Wilfrid]

I once brought a lunch box to school containing chicken cooked in Grand Marnier. My own concoction -revolting in retrospect - and it didn't exactly enhance my reputation among the other lads.

[hjshorter]

edited to add I remember chicken roll well...and how about Olive loaf? Pressed ham?

::shudder:: Olive loaf and Miracle Whip sandwiches. On Pepperidge Farm white bread.

Just about any sandwich was disgusting by the time it had been a locker for 4-5 hours.

[hjshorter]

The one my mother will never live down: Peanut butter and bacon. She had read a tip in a women's magazine that peanut butter would keep the bacon crisp. I never trusted Betsy McCall again.

I used to collect the Betsy McCall pages. Wow, haven't thought about that in years.

My mom used to get all sorts of gross ideas from women's magazines.

[Xanthippe]

Oh, woe, the dreaded olive loaf! And Vienna sausage sandwiches on Wonder Bread -- the stuff of some of my worst nightmares. I would try to surreptitiously jettison the little suckers when my friends weren't looking.

On the other hand, I adored my mama's pimento cheese.

I still do . . .

[torakris]

I guess my mom was pretty "normal"?!

I pretty much lived on ham, swiss and mustard and a piece of fruit.

( I hated peanut butter, bologna, and mayo)

Smallworld--

jello powder straight from the pack?

Never seen that before and don't think I want to give it a try.

[NeroW]

I'm not talking about already made Jello- I mean just the packs of powder. There were kids who would dip their licked fingers in the powder and suck! At the time I thought that was so cool, but now I realize how nasty it is- I wonder what their parents were thinking!

Did I just go to a weird school, or does anyone else remember this?

Nope, kids at my school used to do that all the time, only with powdered Kool Aid. I posted about in the Kool Aid thread a while back.

[nervousnelli]

When I was really poor I took a sandwich to school that consisted of two slices of white bread with mayo on it and a couple of leaves of iceberg lettuce in the middle. Yuck.

[jackal10]

Dried bananas. Looked like dog turd, and had a unique taste and a sticky chewy texture.

Haven't seen them in an age

[fifi]

Jello right out of the pack... YUM!

I still remember doing that. Except this wasn't a lunch thing. It was something we did in the summer as a snack. We weren't prissy enough to lick our finger and stick it into the Jello. We opened the packet and stuck our tongue in the Jello. Your tongue would get all coated with the gelatin and stained with whatever color you were eating. Then the game was to go stick your purple (red, green, etc.) tongue out at the first unsuspecting family member.

[maggiethecat]

The one my mother will never live down: Peanut butter and bacon. She had read a tip in a women's magazine that peanut butter would keep the bacon crisp. I never trusted Betsy McCall again.

I used to collect the Betsy McCall pages. Wow, haven't thought about that in years.

My mom used to get all sorts of gross ideas from women's magazines.

Betsy McCall! Have not thought of Betsy for let's say...many years! Thanks for tickling that part of my memory. Those paper dolls!

I lived in a cold branch of the French-speaking world . We had an hour and three quarters for lunch. Imagine: the school buses had a lunch run. Sounds crazy in retrospect.

So...hot lunch en famille every day. My poor father would put on the slow movement of Bach's "Italian Concerto" and have a fifteen minute nap after lunch.

Seemed normal then. How strange now.

[Sandra Levine]

My son used to like egg salad sandwiches but stopped taking them to school because the other kids used to make fun of him for liking egg salad. I offered to make two sandwiches, one for him to eat and one for him to push into the other kid's face, but he declined.

[stefanyb]

Just about any sandwich was disgusting by the time it had been a locker for 4-5 hours.

Actually, David Rosengarten did a show on how to make the perfect tuna salad sandwich and after mixing the tuna and celery and mayo, he put it on the bread, wrapped the whole thing in aluminum foil, put it in a brown paper bag and let the whole thing marinate for a couple of hours just to get the desired taste.

Also there are other sandwiches that need to be wrapped, weighed down and stored in order for the dressing to permeate the bread. One is panne bagnat.