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Childhood "Treats"


lannie

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I also did the sugar sandwich thing.  My mom let me take those sandwiches to school in elementary school.  Every day, for three solid years!   :blink:

I'm guessing your dentist drives a Porsche... :biggrin:

Don't they all? :smile:

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- Mark Twain, 1835 - 1910

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My Mom used to let us eat bread dipped in drippings as well, she called it "gravy bread". Yum!

We very rarely got store-bought sweets, my Mom was big on what she believed to be nutritious based upon her classes in nursing school. (An exception was Girl Scout Thin Mints, which she would buy CASES of and keep in the freezer to last all year.) She thought nothing of putting sugar all over something she deemed nutritious just to get us to eat it, though. One item that sticks out was lettuce leaves, sprinkled with sugar, and rolled up. She called them "lettuce cigars". She also put sugar on every fruit (whether it was sweet on its own or not) and on white rice when we had it for dinner.

One of my favorites, though, was when we would have strawberry shortcake for dinner. We usually did this about once a year, in the Summer when strawberries were in season.

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I just remmbered this thread as I sat down with a bowl of pastina with milk and butter...not the really small stuff this is called Acini Pepe I think it means peppercorns. It seems most people put this shape pasta in soup but I always had it for breakfast with milk and butter. I only got a miniscule portion today it seems my daughter has been making it for herself :biggrin:

Tracey

The great thing about barbeque is that when you get hungry 3 hours later....you can lick your fingers

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I can remember when I was about three getting a tiny bottle of creme de cacao in my Christmas stocking. My "Christmas drink" consisted of a quarter inch of c.de c. in a miniature goblet, topped with about three-quarters inch of heavy cream. I was told to make it last "all day" (snark!)

My grandmother also gave me the bread-butter-sugar thingie, open face with hot tea. My mom started me on raw hamburger; also guacamole :wub: (which she regretted when she had to fight me for it!) and artichokes. Great treats all! :biggrin:

"Commit random acts of senseless kindness"

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Wow, I'm still amazed how many people did the bread-butter-and-sugar thing. Woo hoo! =)

Oh, forgot to mention that another wicked childhood treat is to eat the charred, crisp bits of fat on the fat cap of a roast beef. Those browned bits of fat with salt are divine.

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rooftop1000, I know what you're talking about. Acini de pepe means frogs eyes, though, and I never had a lot of frog eyes experience till I ran a harvest crew in Hooper Colorado, which has a considerable Basque community. I was introduced to a proper salade Nicois, as well as frog eyes in breakfast, dinner, and supper. Good food, them Basques make.

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rooftop1000, I know what you're talking about. Acini de pepe means frogs eyes, though, and I never had a lot of frog eyes experience till I ran a harvest crew in Hooper Colorado, which has a considerable Basque community. I was introduced to a proper salade Nicois, as well as frog eyes in breakfast, dinner, and supper.  Good food, them Basques make.

Harvest crew in Hooper is potatoes. What did the sheepherders have to do with that? (my in-laws are in Center in case you want to know why I know about that area)

Edited by Dr. Funk (log)

From Dixon, Wyoming

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We worked for John Walker Harvesting, who was from Casa Grande, AZ. The owners of the farms we harvested were the Honeycutts from Maricopa, as well as the Auzas, Basques from Wellton and Casa Grande. The farms we harvested raised wheat, potatoes, and field peas on set aside acreage. When the due date came up past, 15,000 head of sheep were turned in to the peas, for about a month, while potatoes started up. Oh, I forgot about turnips too. Once we were done combining, we put those to bed, and hauled potatoes primarily to Centennial. The combines got shipped to AZ in October or thereabouts, and got reconditioned for the next seaon. But we harvested many irrigated circles from a general area of Alamosa, Del Norte, and Hooper. This was all siloed. But there's a batch of Basques up in that region, I can assure you. And they do eat some fine groceries.

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Mama Fresser is a wizard at turning leftover veggies into tasty treats. Years ago, Mum would mix leftover spinach with eggs, matzo meal and spices and then fry the mixture up into Spinach Pancakes!

One time when I was about fourteen, the whole family was happily noshing on these Popeye Specials and cracking jokes about the sailor himself. All of a sudden, my seven year-old niece (who had been chomping on the pancakes herself without knowing the secret ingredient), got the joke and exclaimed, "It's spinach!! :sad: " But then she realized how tasty they were, and continued eating anyway.

There are two sides to every story and one side to a Möbius band.

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Some of you guys led childhoods of restraint. My favorite of that time, which I cannot even imagine consuming nowadays (and which my health food fanatic mother had no objection to me preparing for myself, fat not being banned at the time) was juicy-cooked bacon and cheese sandwiches, fried in the excess bacon fat.

Waste not want not.

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  • 2 weeks later...

For breakfast most mornings when I was a kid, my mom used to feed the kids an easy Dutch breakfast: buttered bread with hagelslag. I had no idea how unusual this was until one day in elementary school, when we took turns sharing what we had eaten for breakfast. Bread with butter and chocolate sprinkles was apparently not considered decent breakfast food! (Though I fail to see what makes donuts with chocolate frosting and sprinkles ok :raz: )

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I recall being very envious of kids whose parents bought PopTarts. Why, oh why, I don't know. :rolleyes: I liked the strawberry ones.

I used to like making lettuce sandwiches. Mayo, squishy white bread, and crisp iceburg lettuce. Salt and pepper. Completely lacking in nutritional value.

Little Debbie oatmeal cream pies were a favorite of mine. Grape Nehi soda from the corner market. Sometimes Butterscotch Krimpets.

My mother baked lovely things, when she had time to. But somehow, when you're a kid, crap with bright wrappers is more appealing than homemade. :rolleyes: Luckily, enough of my friends adored her cookies that I learned to appreciate having a mom who could bake.

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Cinnamon toast.

This still is the breakfast treat in my house. Take 12 grain bread and top with butter. Sprinkle on cinnamon and sugar. Bake in the toaster oven until bubbling. My family has a love of toast.

As a child I was always teased about my "gourmet" lunches, which weren't so fancy but fitted my picky eating habbits. Looking back, I can't believe my single working mother did it. Caesar salads, bulghur pilafs, hummus and veggies, peach iced tea. BLT's (the only sandwich I would eat) with each component packed in sep. bags so it wouldn't get soggy.

Other treats included bean dip with fritos as a movie night appetizer.

Whenever we went on road trips, I would always get a Little Debbie oatmeal cream pie when we stopped for gas.

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First, sign me up with the Roman Meal crowd. We never had white bread, which my grandmother called, "That ol' cotton bread that turns to mush in your mouth." I still remember the first time I had it, when I was about eight or so, at the house of a friend. Roman Meal is still my fave for sandwiches, and also the bread and butter and sugar sandwiches. Also still love the butter & brown sugar toast....hey, that's basically just butterscotch, after all. And it's just as good with white sugar. And we did the basic pie dough circles, too. A gringo version of bunelos...made with flour tortillas.

And how about rock candy.... sugar water that you put in a glass, and then you drop a string into, and large crystals form. So you're eating nothing but pure sugar -- speaking of no redeeming social value.

But our real treats were snow ice cream, and rice pudding. Basically made the same way, though one was cold and one was hot.

Snow ice cream: scoop up some snow (avoiding the yellow, of course) and combine it with heavy cream and sugar and stir and eat up.

Rice pudding: take hot rice and add butter, sugar and heavy cream. Maybe some cinnamon or raisins if you're in the mood, and stir and eat up.

Oh, forgot snow maple candy. Boil some maple syrup and pour into a thin ribbon on the snow. It hardens immediately.

Yum.

Edited by Jaymes (log)

I don't understand why rappers have to hunch over while they stomp around the stage hollering.  It hurts my back to watch them. On the other hand, I've been thinking that perhaps I should start a rap group here at the Old Folks' Home.  Most of us already walk like that.

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Oh, the pie dough scraps! I don't know which I like better, the baked scraps with butter and cinnamon sugar or just the raw dough. I still tend to eat the scraps when I'm making a pie. Mom always let me lick the beaters (and usually the bowl), too, when she baked other things.

One thing we never ever ever had in our house (that I can remember) was white bread. So when I found out that my best friend's mom let her have it, we'd sit and watch TV, tearing off the crusts and squishing the bread into a ball before eating.

Mom did, for a time, portion out some pancake batter for me to color (I was into adding food coloring to things and loved the little formulae on the side of the food coloring box: purple: 3 drops red + 2 drops blue), and then I could use a spoon to make shapes -- Mickey Mouse, snowman, etc. on the griddle.

I also occasionally got mint milk: milk with sugar, a few drops of green food coloring, and sugar - kind of like McDonald's shamrock shakes, but available year round and probably closer to being good for you than the McD's version! :laugh:

I always tried to sneak pieces of raw hamburger. Still like it. Strange, though, that it took me as long as it did to get over the idea of eating sushi. Raw hamburger is OK,but raw fish isn't? Explain to me how that one makes sense. :unsure::blink::wacko:

"I just hate health food"--Julia Child

Jennifer Garner

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My mom is Scots, so after frying up bacon and sausages for Sunday breakfast she would fry thick slices of homemade bread in the bacon and sausage fat and top them with fried tomato slices.

My cholesterol is fine regardless and boy was it good. :wub:

''Wine is a beverage to enjoy with your meal, with good conversation, if it's too expensive all you talk about is the wine.'' Bill Bowers - The Captain's Tavern, Miami

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My grandmother was the source of childhood treats. It's a little funny - her mother, my mother's grandmother, used to spoil MY mother rotten with home baked goodies. My grandmother, on the other hand, never really learned to cook. Her mother, the fabulous baker, didn't like having anyone underfoot in the kitchen. So MY grandmother's treats for us were of a somewhat less home-made nature. She had my brother hooked on stuffed green olives since before he could walk. I was a disappointment, not having the same palate for grown up food that he did. She also used to slip us sips of her sweet sherry which was abysmal. However, I can't complain since she was also responsible for my first glass of champagne, at her 75th birthday when I was 10.

The one thing I remember most of all though is that when I was 10 or 11 I'd go to her apartment after school - I was a latchkey kid, and it wasn't that she was supposed to babysit me, it was that we genuinely really enjoyed each other's company. She'd give me the most abysmal green cordial (not the alcoholic stuff, fruit cordial in Australia is like kool-aid but you mix it from syrup not powder) that was an unidentifiable limish flavour, and then she'd let me choose between chocolate biscuits (tim tams or mint slices, which are like thin mints only they have a layer of peppermint cream in the middle) OR I could have some Breton crackers and pate from a little tin of pate de fois. Although I've always been a chocolate lover, I couldn't get enough of the pate. I think I redeemed myself for the whole not loving olives enough at an early age thing.

I miss my grandmother terribly. She really wanted us to appreciate the finer things in life and not grow up provincial. Of course, since she couldn't cook at all and also sometimes had to feed my brother and I an entire meal, not just snacks, she also used to spoil us by giving us bacon and tater tots, and baby carrots from a tin. She'd always say that it was only bread and dripping for lunch (and be astounded that I actually WANTED bread and dripping, another family treat after a roast meal), but then we'd always get bacon and tater tots, which my parents would never let us have, so it was a real pleasure.

My mother, who broke the cycle and taught herself AND us kids to cook, used to make cheese straws as a treat when she had left over pastry from making a quiche, which she did quite often. My dad used to spoil us by crisping up the rinds of bacon and letting us eat them. Yum.

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My mom is Scots,  so after frying up bacon and sausages for Sunday breakfast she would fry thick slices of homemade bread in the bacon and sausage fat and top them with fried tomato slices.

My cholesterol is fine regardless and boy was it good. :wub:

oh, boy. This reminded me of my the grilled cheese sandwiches I discovered in high school. I would occasionally make them with bacon, and then I discovered frying the sandwiches in the bacon fat. :wub:

I don't make them like that anymore.

*edited* again to add, welcome to eG, Idlewild! What a great first post...

Edited by cakewench (log)
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  • 2 weeks later...
OMG, fried chicken skin.  *drools*

I could never understand people who DON'T like chicken skin.  I love chicken skin...it's-just-so-delicious!

When I was a kid, I would eat two Wonderbread slices slattered with butter or margarine and sprinkled with white sugar.  Funny thing is that I learned how to eat this at my dad's Chinese carryout!  :biggrin:

When I worked at an Italian restaurant with a lot of a lot of Cambodian kitchen help, they all did the same thing --only with the dinner rolls - and warmed them up in the pizza oven. Maybe it's an Asian thing.

Nah, I did the same thing but on Jewish Rye. In fact I spent a summer at sleep away camp where I had one at least once a day, but that is another thread.

Chicken skin, turkey skin, duck skin. If I was really lucky I got the tush of the chicken on Friday nights (I can't remember the Yiddish word for it).

Actually, all my other Asian friends (and non-Asian friends) think I'm off my rocker when I do my bread-butter-sugar bit. Before this forum, I've only met one other person so far (until now!) that did this and she was from Scotland!

Wow, I didn't know that non-Asians enjoyed the chicken tail! My father and I love that part of the chicken. Growing up, I never liked it until one day I saw the light. :biggrin: I get flack from my relatives for liking it. OK, would it be strange to admit that I would like to have a meal of salt-roasted chicken tail au jus with rice? :blink:

It must be an colonial holdover. Toast with butter and sugar is pretty commonplace in singapore and malaysia. Hmm.... nice warm crunchy white loaf with a generous spread of planta (a margarine made with palm oil... bad for you but tastes so good!) and white sugar! Top that off with a nice cup of kopi-o!

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I can't believe I haven't seen this yet:

When my mom made pie, which was a couple of times a month, she'd put the trimmed raw crust on a cookie sheet, sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar, and bake it along with the pie.

And I must confess, I did that last week when I baked pies for Thanksgiving. 

And to be really honest, what I really prefer is raw pie dough.  Oh, man!

My mother worked full time, kept the house straight, watched after two children and was active in church. Dad started his own business when I was eight, and spent many long hours there. The pie crust trimmings were one of my pleasant memories from that period. They were put on a cookie sheet and sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar and put in the oven along with the pie. While the pie was baking, we would remove the crusts and have a snack that was almost as good as the pie (usually apple, because our home was built in a former apple orchard and we had four trees in our yard).

My other memory from home was the traditional Sunday evening meal, which was almost always cheese toast and cinnamon toast. We usually went out for a nice restaurant meal after church, and spending her limited free time cooking was not a priority for my mother. Now, fifty years later, when a light evening meal seems appropriate I frequently suggest (or prepare) cheese toast and/or cinnamon toast. In my childhood this was always on white bread, but now we enjoy a variety of breads - which makes for some pleasant variations.

The food that I remember most pleasantly from my childhood came from a local restaurant, rather than home. With both parents working, we probably ate out a little bit more than most. Della's Spanish Dining Room (Farmington, New Mexico) started out as a couple of tables in the family operated grocery store (formerly their living room) and eventually caused the grocery to close and also caused Della and her family to need move to a new home. Della was famous for her sopapillas. Her food was generally too highly seasoned for me to enjoy, but I could get the taco plate down (required to be able to eat from the bottomless basket of piping hot sopapillas). Frequently, the sopapillas were so hot from the kitchen that I had to be extremely careful in biting off a corner. Then I would pour honey inside the sopapilla, turn it so that the honey would coat the entire inside and try to eat it without having honey drip off my elbows. A couple of restaurants in Old Town Albuquerque were better known for their sopapillas, but they never were as good as Della's.

One food that I have never prepared for my family is sopapillas. The memories generated by the above paragraph has adjusted this week's menu. We are going to experience homemade sopapillas.

Edited by Milt (log)
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