So when I answered all those questions for that game of tag, I actually had a bit of fun reminiscing, so here’s another old-times post.
Remember being a little kid and going to elementary school? I almost NEVER had “hot lunch” or the lunch the cafeteria provided. I always had “cold lunch”– which means mom packed me a lunch. I remember there were some years of school where they’d actually let kids go in and help serve lunch. Funny to think that back then it was a privilege, haha:
“Hey there, Derek. My name is little Kleatus. I’m just a regular kid who wants you to know the real truth about child labor laws. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“They’re silly and outdated. In the good old days kids as young as five could work s they pleased from textile factories to iron smelts. Yippee! Hooray! But today, the age-old right of children to work is under attack. From the philippines to Bangladesh, in China and India and South America too. Boo-Hoo!” –Zoolander
Ok that was a tangent, but that’s how my brain works, in movie quotes. I remember the one time I went to serve hot lunch they stuck me at the cook vegetables section. Combine the gross cooked veges with the fact that I hadn’t eaten lunch and I got super light headed and almost passed out. So much for helping with hot lunch.
So what I was reminiscing about today was the cool different things I’d get in my cold lunch. I remember Turtle Pies (hostess pies that were filled with yellow custard and had green frosting to be Ninja Turtle-ish). Then there was stuff like Fruit by the Foot. I remember Kiwi seemed to become popular sometime in the late 80s and I had that in my lunch a lot– I loved it, ate the skin and all. I remember that there was this other kid named Corey who always got the best goodies in his cold lunch and he’d trade with other kids cause he sometimes got tired of the stuff. I miss bein a kid where you could go sit down at the table in the cafeteria, compare your cold lunch with other people and then trade around, like, some fruit snacks for a twinkie.
So did you eat hot lunch or cold lunch? Get anything cool in your cold lunch? (We already know that hot lunch was gross.) Did girls do anything like trade stuff from their cold lunch? I’m just realizing that girls rarerly ate with us. Those were the days when boys and girls were separated pretty exclusively… hehe, when it was a punishment to sit boy-girl-boy-girl. Cooties, gross.
Comments
14 responses to “Cold Lunch”
holy crap, i was just talking about those ninja turtle pies and how much i loved them to my sister about a week ago. do they have anything like that…anywhere?
i never really had anything too special in my lunches. there was a kid today in class that was munching a peanut butter and honey sandwich, which i used to love. oh, and while i never had it in my lunch, i used to eat cinnamon sugar toast or bread every day. good stuff.
here are some funny related links:
pies & petition.
arg, no html allowed? here they are again:
http://www.x-entertainment.com/articles/0898/
http://www.petitiononline.com/288/petition.html
Cinnamon toast! We made that allll the time. I need to get me some cinnamon and sugar. Nothin quite like a piece of toast with butter, cinnamon and sugar on it. Such an easy treat to make.
Awesome links! That’d be so crazy if Hostess made those again. Ahhh, remember ECTO COOLER HI-C, too?
got to ask you guys because my wife and i called different things cinnamon toast. megan makes toast, then sprinkles white sugar and cinnamon on top. i spread butter on untoasted bread, then add cinnamon and brown sugar to make a think crust on top. then stick in the broiler to let it all melt with the butter into some gooey sweetness. ahhhh.
i never took my own lunch. i ate ‘hot lunch’ every day in school. in college, i LOVED the cafeteria food. i even liked MTC food. i guess i’m just an institutional food junkie. sorry.
also, i rather enjoyed dog soup in korea. i noticed on some other blog that you had denounced it. guess my culinary tastes are just more refined!
mike and heebs, when you were little kids at willow canyon, did they make you raise your hand to be excused at lunch? they did for us! we had to raise our hand if we wanted to leave! and do you remember the milk dump? it was a garbage can with a metal filter-ish thing over it, and you had to dump your milk in it, instead of throwing it away. what did they DO with all that milk???
Josh: I seem to remember making it both ways. The quick and dirty way was to toast it and then spread butter then put cinnamon sugar. But our friend Justin had one of those oven toasters and we might have done it the way you described in that thing. In any case… it sounds tasty, I think I need to try it that way soon.
As far as Dog goes… refined tastes eh? You don’t even care much for kimchi (while your wife who hasn’t been to Korea eats it like a champ). I actually found most boiled meats gross in Korea. I don’t know that dog was terribly unique, except that the way it was cut / prepared, it was too chewy / didn’t break apart. So you’d just chew and chew until you wanted to vomit.
I suppose you also would like that soup I ate where the pieces of cow still had HAIR on them? If it tastes like animal… ick. I’ll give you that your cinnamon toast may be superior. But dog soup… blah.
Mel: Hmm… I think I remember the milk thing. Maybe it was just a way to dump it down the drain rather than have milk in the garbage can rotting. Who knows? Or maybe they DID recycle it somehow, ick. I think the hand raising thing might have been limited to my earlier years at Willow Canyon….
so my blog has been reduced by Josh to “some other blog.” Ha ha. That’s awesome.
As for Ecto-Cooler Hi-C, I loved that stuff. Nice one on the nostalgia! And, nothing says nostalgia like SUPER HUD!!!
maybe they fed that milk to some orphan goats or something
Woohoo, another Ecto-Cooler fan. That was good stuff. There aren’t enough green citrus drinks out there these days.
Hahaha… I know, can you believe it? I thought you and Josh at least knew each other 😉
Superhud… the flavor transcends nostalgia for me, but that’s because it isn’t officially a part of my past– it’s a current menu item for me, hehe.
strange, i never remember the milk thing or the raising your hand thing at Willow Canyon. not that it never happened to me, of course.
an alternate cinnamon toast was just spreading butter and cinnamon/sugar on a piece of bread then nuking it for 5 seconds or so. makes the bread all soft and melts and butter. mmmmmmm.
LUCKY!
My mother gave me weird things like peanut butter smeared on the heel slice of whole wheat bread with a huge slab of cheddar cheese on it.
And an apple that got cut up and bruised by lunch time.
Nasty icky food.
🙁
I remember that sometimes my mother would pack me a plum and I would get SO excited. Mmmm, I’ve always been a sucker for fruit. (I’m THAT kind of apple slut.)
Otherwise, my lunches were pretty sad. No one would have wanted to trade with me, although I do remember some other girls switching around.
Gee… I can’t remember any of the healthy stuff except that I often had a thermos of milk and then it was usually PBJ or maybe ham and cheese. Usually it was just the treats that got traded.
I remember one time I had a twix in my lunch box, and my class was in a portable outside the main building, and since it was locked at lunch we’d leave our lunch boxes by the portable door. I came back from lunch recess to find ants were ravaging my twix… can you hear George Costanza? TWIIIIIIIX!!!!!!