your favourite foods/flavours as a kid

spaghetti and meatballs from howard johnson's with the plastic envelope of parmesan cheese!

anything AT ALL from friendly's

that gum with the rainbow horse

Butterscotch, and "plain" ice cream. Like, not vanilla ice cream, but the vanilla beyond the vanilla: the interstitial ice cream that lay between the chocolate chips in chocolate chip ice cream. Straight-up no-kidding plain.

a bowl of ice cream mixed by hand (by moi) with a spoon to the point that it became "soup" (i used to constantly debate whether to do this or eat the ice cream "whole")

The gum was Fruitstripe, iirc.

Bonkers.

Nerds, before they changed the flavor and size of the Nerds.

Caramel Jolly Rancher stix.

Polar birch beer.

We used to mix sour cream with garlic powder and a bit of salt and pepper, and then just eat it like that. You'd think it would be a chip dip, but it was just as easy to dip into it with a spoon!

nerds were SO GOOD! and yeah, those weird jolly rancher sticks were amazing

cheddar cheese melted on triscuits!

C.W. Post cereal, cheeseburgers with octagons of cheese from the square having its corners turned back, meatball grinders because for seven or eight years I refused to eat pizza, Tropicana pure premium orange juice mixed with 7-Up, Campbell's meatball alphabet soup, Ruffles sour cream & onion or Cajun spice potato chips.

(jess is gonna hate us again maybe)

lucky charms cereal! actually any really sugary cereal. i think the best was ghostbusters cereal!

as a kid, anything to do with ghostbusters was A-OK with me.

actually, that probably still applies.

Hot dogs:

* slit down the sides but left intact in the middle so that when you boiled them, they curled out and made OCTOPUSES/OCTOPI/OCTOPODES/GIANT SQUIDS OF MEAT

* From the vendor at Fenway Park, ketchup no mustard no relish and you had to SAY so or you'd get all three, and eww relish

* Placed on a square of bread diagonally from corner to corner, with a slice of cheese and some salsa on top, corners folded in and held in middle by toothpick, toaster-ovened until cheese was melted and bread was toasted

Pepsi from a 750 ml glass bottle, filtered through a two-ton chunk of Double Bubble!

WOW!!!

Piece of bread, buttered, sprinkled with sugar, toasted until the butter melted and sugar dissolved in it some; mentioned in John D Fitzgerald's Great Brain books, recreated by childhood me.

Blueberry pie flavored bubble gum, but only in theory, thanks to Roald Dahl.

Giant peaches, likewise and ditto.

Mud pie, at Say Cheese, in Amherst New Hampshire; I always associated it with the ice cream mud puddles from the Raggedy Ann & Andy books. Later years, after the pizza ban, same location, different restaurant: Lone Star pizza, which was a cheese pizza on which was heaped first chili and then unmelted cheddar cheese.

Whoa, Crudders.

that first one reminds me of another beloved treasure: cinnamon toast!

salami sandwiches on rye (w/caraway) bread, with yellow mustard! yum!

Is it just me, or did Nerds taste more sour awhile back? Because I had some a few months back and I was surprised by how I could only eat the strawberry flavored Nerds because the grape flavored ones didn't have that hint of a sour kick that I remembered them having.

Anyway, Nerds ca. the '80s was my favorite candy as a child.

I remember really loving apple as a kid as well -- not just apples themselves but also apple juice, applesauce, apple pie, and just about anything else apple. And grape. I loved grapes, grape-flavored Nerds, raisins, grape-flavored raspas, grape juice, and the grape part of fruit cocktail. Oh yeah, I really loved fruit cocktail as a kid, too. And watermelon, which I'm still absolutely crazy about. One guaranteed way of keeping me happy as a toddler apparently was to hand me some fresh broccoli and I'd chew on it as if it were candy. And carrots. I still love broccoli and carrots.

On the fattening food front -- non-McDonald's hamburgers, lasagna, and pb&j sandwiches. That's about it.

Hmm. New concept for me -- eat as if I were a kid again! Fruitfest!

oh yeah, FRIENDLY'S!!!!!

nerds were really the best. oh, that agonizing choice of which side to eat first!

Dude, and Cinnamon Life. Do they have the Life cereals in Canada? I'm not sure they're worth exporting. But still. Cinnamon frickin Life.

Always without milk. I've never liked cereal with milk, and stopped putting it on pretty much as soon as I realized it wasn't "required" or whatever.

they have life (it's actually my favourite cereal), but, uh... WHAT THE HELL THERE'S CINNAMON LIFE HOLY SHIT!

speaking of lack-of-milk, kraft dinner made without milk! (just a little butter)

holy shit i just remembered my favourite snack ever, ants on a log! a stick of celery with all sorts of peanut butter on it, topped by raisins!

(by "all sorts" i just mean "a lot")

You don't have to put milk on cereal?! HOLY SHIT!

Yeah, I miss Friendly's. We used to go there when I was little because my picky-as-hell little brother wouldn't eat hamburgers, and Friendly's had hot dogs.

(But Denny's had masks you could make out of the kids' menus.)

And yeah, Dee, I think Nerds used to be more sour. I don't really remember what the change was, but I remember (this is years and years ago now, sometime in the 80s) the packages having "new flavor! plumper Nerds!" stamped on them around the time they made them larger so we'd stop snorting them and trying to get high. This was back when there were like a dozen Nerds flavors. Back in the day.

Oh. Speaking of Friendly's. Peppermint stick ice cream. And those rolls they did (do?).

but then your mouth gets all dry and pasty (xp)

I miss friendly's so much.

The milk is optional! Spread the word!

And get some Cinnamon Life. Damn. Get hooked up. It's so much better than the regular stuff, and it's got real cinnamon, not that weird "cinnamon flavor" some stuff has (or the notcinnamonatall red hots flavor. But that might make a good cereal.)

Candies that came in plastic droid heads.

can i get it on amazon?

Moxie, of course, and Coca-Cola (never Pepsi, and Coca-Cola Classic when that applied), and Dr Pepper, which I had for the first time as a reward for putting away my temper tantrum when my aunt told me I had to go see The Black Stallion, a movie about a damn horse, instead of going to the Red Sox game.

Apple Slice. Welch's grape soda.

Nestle Strawberry Quik, one of the only flavors on this list so far that I can't stand now.

Apple cider that's been left in the back of the fridge long enough to "get bubbles in it," which I didn't realize for sometime meant it was alcoholic.

cinnamon ruggalah

Crunchberries cereal. Awhile back they had some kind of insane Cap'n Crunch thing where they had boxes of nothing but the Crunchberries, so I bought one, but never actually ate any of them. I would probably still have it if I hadn't moved.

i remember crunchberries!

If bland was a flavor, that would be it - I hated sauces and syrups and anything with much flavor.

Plain pasta was my favorite dish.

"Cajun catfish" -- these fillets of catfish that had been marinated or coated or God knows what with some kind of Cheetos-colored -- oh, yeah, add Cheetos to the list, crunchy not puffy -- spice blend that had a little high note of cayenne heat to it. One of the first things I learned to cook.

whoa

I'll just say this: Power Dew. This was accomplished many times in the parking lot of 7-Eleven in my teenage years.

Recipe:
1. unscrew the top of a 2-liter plastic bottle of Mountain Dew
2. start drinking 2-liter
3. have a friend HAMMER the sides of the bottle, forcing most and/or all of the 67.6 fluid ounces into and down your throat at once
4. roar in victory and/or groan in agony

Oh man. I loved Welch's grape soda. The only non-diet soda I remember drinking as a child, BION! (This will tell you how much I enjoyed that great grape taste, FYI.)

Tep, thanks for confirming my hunch. I'm disappointed that Nerds aren't as sour as they should be, and yes, it would be nice if they came in the thousand flavors they used to come in (though the one I did manage to find is the one I enjoyed most anyway "back in the day"). Also, thank you for reminding me of the joy of snacking on Life cereal! Yeah, that's the only cereal evah that tasted really good without the milk. For me, at least. And then I'd end up washing them down with milk. Ha.

*stares at The Artist Formerly Known As Haikunym*
*blinks*
*blinks again*

*smile*

Similar to Tep's story: My dad made me read the General Schwartzkopf autobiography "It Doesn't Take A Hero" when I was young and in a passage Gen. S. writes about how as a child he once camped with his chums and boiled potatoes and although they "felt like biting into apples" they were the best meal they ever had because of the sweat and camaraderie. When I camped in the backyard I started cooking ramen on hot plates to recapture this essence (instead of yelling at Mom to order me pizza) and it was dope, though it was probably the root of my trustafarian guilt streak and ghetto lifestyle transfixion. My dad also forced me to read Anne Of Green Gables and even gave me a little test at the end of it to make sure I did. The problem is, I liked it.

Same shit happened to Cam'ron

-frozen bread
-cadbury's creme eggs
-panda licorice
-pizza with ground beef and green olives
-challah
-black bart gum (which has vanished off the face of the earth and is the origin of the line "I tried to break away from you/ with your spit so black from the gum your chew" from David Bowie's "Sweet Head"
-hot beef sandwiches with gravy
-and fucking MILKSHAKES which I can't believe nobody's said yet.

I had some nerds last week (on sale for 35 cents!!! at Duane Reade), sour cherry and watermelon, and I'm happy to report they were tart as well as sweet and a real pleasure to eat.

My favourite foods as a kid were chicken Kiev and ANY shrimp, plus:

Ambassador hot dogs
Poppin' Fresh French Silk Pie
Three pieces of bread, remove crusts, form bread ball, eat.
Cherry Cokes, with the syrup from a fountain, before Coke did their own (strawberry, lime, raspberry, grape also available)
Malts. Because my milkshake really is better than yours, Britain.
Diner cheeseburgers
Swanson's chicken pot pies
Sno-Balls

Back in the day....

Tic Tacs in the UK are so fucking boring these days - mint, spearmint, extra strong mint (they taste like Fisherman's Friends, for fuck's sake), orange and lime). In the 70s, they had green mint, they had aniseed (cyan blue!) and they had cinnamon, which never caught on over here which is why whenever I find a friend is going to America they bring back about 12 packs for me. They were - and still are - the best sweet in the world.

Related to tic tacs, around the late 70s another company tried to make a similar product in a similar case, only 'landscape' rather than 'portrait' boxes, if you see what I mean. They did cinnamon too, plus various fruit flavours, but only lasted a year or so. Bloody marvellous they were.

Moving to the early 80s, I recall eating hundreds of Minty Nibblers, like Wham bars, but green and brown and like eating choc mint chip ice cream, as a chewy bar. I've searched high and low on the Net for some reference and I've yet to see anything about them. They even did Fruit Nibblers (they were Tutti Frutti flavour and equally good). Only ever got them from the tuck shop in my school, mind. Maybe they were a collective figment of my school's imagination. I dunno. But they were great.

Just had a packet of Bissli felafel-flavoured wheat snacks for the first time in about twenty years. I feel a bit rough after the experience, but they are delicious.

milkshakes!!

Pepperoni Pizza and Coca Cola. I still enjoy it occasionally.

Wild strawberries, which I really miss.

i miss picking wild blueberries!

and eating them

you can beat me up now!

No no, I can still get wild blueberries, with effort (well, and the frozen ones I get are wild). Although I remember finding out that what everyone called wild blueberries at the lake where my mother has a place turned out to be either bilberries or huckleberries, I forget which now.

Wild strawberries, on the other hand: there was the tiniest of "patches," like never more than three strawberries at a time, in the corner of the beach on the aforementioned lake. It was destroyed when the homeowners' association hired landscaping (lakescaping?) people to dredge that part of the lake and put sand in to make it look nicer.

(cf. my post elsethread about the goldfish pond being plowed under so we could put a tennis court up; I'm surprised I didn't have some kind of childhood fear of construction equipment.)

my grandparents used to have a much-loved (by myself and my brother) raspberry bush in the backyard

That reminds me of the wild blackberries on my cousins's farm we used to eat, sometimes as a cooked compote plopped over porridge... YUM. Can't do this now though, as they spray the blackberry vines with weedkiller (as theyre a tangly nasty thorny mess that grows like a weed). Shame.

Oh man, we had raspberries at the house I grew up in -- cultivated ones, and then wild blackberries down by the old stone wall where the old well was, and a rhubarb patch, and crabapple trees (the crabapples tasted horrible, obviously, but it was cool in theory and that's where my treehouse was, so it was like, hi, here's my pantry, oh and there's my pal Mr Wormhead) and a grape arbor. Concord grapes, the ones that're like little water balloons.

Fresh raspberries, though, the smell of them always makes me cringe a little: I associate the smell with a) the Japanese beetles that feasted on the leaves, making picking berries a chore because those beetles looked damnscary and you had to reach in and make sure there were no beetles you might accidentally touch or upset; and b) the lanterns of bug-killer which smelled like warm death.

And when I started cooking, I found out that the "edible fern fiddleheads, great for stir fries!" behind one of the porches were, you know, not exactly wild, and planted there by my mother, and it had been a bad thing for me to pick them all and chop them up and pour soy sauce on them while trying to figure out what a stir fry was.

i hate hilter