Strolling The Super Market Aisle Of My Childhood

Last night my husband and I were talking about favorite childhood foods that we haven’t eaten for years. Some people wax nostalgic about childhood games or family vacations; my husband and I fondly reminisce about crap foods that we grew up on. So here’s what we came up with as sentimental favorites:

Kraft Macaroni and Cheese

I’m sure my eyes kind of glazed over as I talked about how my mom used to fry sliced up hot dogs in a pan and then mix them into a batch of Kraft macaroni and cheese. My sister and I insisted on the blue box kind with the mix in powder because we absolutely refused to eat the one that came with a pouch of real cheese. The pouch cheese molecularly resembled plastic more than real cheese and its taste had nothing on that neon orange powder! Around the age of 10 I took over the all-important job of making this dish. As I served my sister a bowl I would ask her if she wanted one “slop” or two, with a slop equaling a big heaping spoonful. I’m not quite sure how the term slop even came about but I imagine its origins lie in the sound it makes when falling off the spoon into the bowl. Onomatopoeia at its best!

Capri Suns

Ahh, liquid sugar in a pouch. These were the drinks of choice in both of our lunch boxes. We spent a few minutes discussing how important it was when putting that straw into the Capri Sun that you used enough force to puncture the pouch without exerting too much that you caused overflow. That truly was a skill to master; that and the technique of getting every last drop out by flattening the pouch by sucking all the air out of it and then re-inflating it by blowing air back in, forcing whatever juice was left into a corner where you could coax it up the straw. Repeat the sucking and blowing process until the Capri Sun is empty.

Otter Pops

Otter Pops are the shit! I love me some Otter Pops! There’s so much to love! The crazy psychedelic box! The clever puns each character was named after! Come on, how can you not find “Alexander the Grape” or “Little Orphan Orange” the height of true wit? I always insisted on eating the Strawberry Short Kook Otter Pop because I thought she was pretty and I wanted to be pretty just like her. Yes, I know she’s an otter. (I was under the age of five people!) Ok, that’s it for now as far as my stroll down memory lane goes. We discussed many, many more childhood crap foods and maybe someday I’ll take the time to write them down in another post. There are many non-nutritional, barely edible, extremely tasty things that both my husband and I grew up on and still hold dear to our hearts. The thing is that looking back at all this junk makes me think “No wonder I got fat! In fact, how am I not fatter?”