Wednesday, March 05, 2008

3 foods from my childhood that I miss

My sisters and I are all HUGE fans of this minestrone soup. It's the best comfort food in the world. Amazon sells Riviera's "restaurant style" minestrone soup, but I can tell by looking at the label that it's nothing like the original. This stuff looks pretty ghastly when you dump it out of the can: frankly, it resembles dog food. Even when you heat it up and mash up the chunks it still looks kinda hinky. But it's sooooo good with Ritz crackers and cheddar cheese on the side! It used to be easy to find at any decent-sized grocery store, but now we can only find it locally at a certain 99 cent store in Arcadia.

You can take Stouffer's mac 'n' cheese and chicken pot pie. Just leave me the corn souffle, please. My mom used to serve this as a side dish quite often when we were kids, and there were never any leftovers -- in fact, I remember picking the crunchy dried overflow off the sides of the plastic container after dinner. I can still find this at Gelson's, but man... it's highway robbery paying $5 for a frozen side dish. Still, it's worth it every once in a while.

NOT to be confused with Mother's taffy sandwich cookies. Bleccchhhh! Mom used to buy those all the time and I thought they were awful; the "creme" center used to burn my mouth a little, and it seemed the height of desperation for something sweet to eat one of those things. But once she bought the similarly-shaped Gauchos by mistake and I was in heaven -- they're peanut butter through and through, and just lovely dipped in either a glass of milk or a cup of coffee. Once I learned of their existence, I'd occasionally buy a package and hide it in my bedroom, a secret cookie trove I'd share with nobody. Every now and then I see them at the supermarket and they're readily available online.

3 comments:

Lucy said...

My Dad and I LOVE the Mother's Taffy sandwich cookies. Yummmmm! Seriously, they are a favorite. Of course, Dad is allergic to peanuts so I guess that explins why Taffy made it into our home and, until your post, I'd never heard of the peanut butter variety.

Feral Mom said...

I miss Chef Boy-ar-dee ravioli and chicken pot pie. Both, alas, are the casualties of mis-guided pregnancy cravings that ended in a festival of vomit. I guess you can't go home again.

Caveman said...

Mmm..festival of vomit