Comfort Food

As you’ve probably gathered by now, I think about food a lot. Like, I get super excited about trying different recipes or finding out about a new restaurant in the area. I tend to measure time by counting down to meals. My wife and I plan vacations based on what we’ll eat when we get there, for Pete’s sake.

I was pretty much bound to turn out this way. My whole childhood, I formed emotional attachments to food. We all have those treats and meals we remember fondly from our youth — maybe the dish we’d always request for birthdays, or those snacks we’d only get when we visited Grandma, or that new thing we tried on a really fun trip that blew our little minds.

For me, a lot of my food memories are just the everyday things I ate as a kid — foods, I might add, that I probably haven’t touched in 20 years or more. So in my mind, most of these items take me back decades, and many of them belong in the past (I’m looking at you, Nardone’s Brothers Pizza).

Since I love lists, here’s the unceremonious mental dump of foods that take me back (and some occasional trivia for the real diehard fans out there 🤔).

HAPPY MEMORIES

• “Sun tea” — My dad’s mom (Mammy) would make this in the summer: tea left out in the sea to steep all day. Her secret ingredient? Tang. 🤫
• Creamy freeze pops– If anyone can locate these for me nowadays, I will probably pay an absurd amount of money for them
• Tuna Noodle Casserole — my birthday dinner request most years. My grandma made it best 🤗
• Pumpkin pie with coconut — Grandma style (her apple pies were top-notch as well)
• Mashed potatoes with peas/corn/lima beans mixed in
• My own chili/goulash/etc. WITHOUT onions or peppers (I was spoiled 😏)
• “Delish” – ground beef sautéed in ketchup; this was my first attempt at cooking for myself

SPECIAL OCCASIONS

• Chicken and biscuits — my mom’s specialty 👩🏼‍🍳
• Red Lobster for special occasions — clam chowder, salad with ranch, Shrimp Scampi (and obviously all the Cheddar Bay biscuits I could shove in my face)
• Rainbow sherbet (ahem… it’s pronounced SHER-BERT!)
• Cosmic brownies (used as the base for make-your-own sundaes 🍨)
• Hoss’s beef tips (WELL DONE) with baked potato; plus salad bar (I’d always make a particular salad there that I never concocted anywhere else — DM me for the deets!) 😶
• Rice pudding — Mom’s other specialty!
• Ambrosia

LEAN TIMES

• Nardone’s Pizza (came in a 3 x 3 rectangular slab; I usually microwaved it instead of baking it due to laziness, resulting in icy patches next to lava-like cheese)
• Ramen (sometimes eaten without cooking — my brother would sprinkle the packet on top and crunch away)
• Stove Top Stuffing (again, often consumed from the canister, uncooked)
• $0.29 frozen burritos
• Archway cookies (Dutch Cocoa or Jam Filled — I would often just eat the centers and toss ⅔ of the sugar cookie away)
• Chicken patties (cooked in the toaster)
• Blueberry Raga Muffins
• Microwave milkshakes (they came frozen in a bright orange cup that you’d nuke and it would half-thaw)

OVERINDULGENCES

• Cases of Pepsi (especially Crystal Pepsi!!)
• Campbell’s Tomato Soup (condensed, no milk added), heated, with a full sleeve of saltines added
• Campbell’s Chicken Noodle (condensed, no water — two cans, sometimes draining off some broth) – same saltine ratio
• Peanut Butter Captain Crunch and Cinnamon Toast Crunch (I would eat entire boxes of these cereals for breakfast somedays)
• Angel food cake – I would rip off handfuls and eat it plain whenever I saw it in the kitchen
• Cool Ranch Doritos
• Any King Size candy bar, but especially Butterfingers and 100 Grand bars
• Star Crunch
• Little Debby Nutty Buddy bars
• Chief crunchie 
• Taco Bell every day my senior year — Two Double Decker tacos and a bean burrito no onion

What foods take you back to a certain time or place? Which foods did you love that you wouldn’t touch nowadays? Which foods do you wish you could find that don’t exist anymore?