“LUNCH KEBABS WITH MORTADELLA, ARTICHOKE AND SUN-DRIED TOMATOES” Has the person who made this list ever met a child?
— Sophie Beach (@sophie_beach) September 21, 2021
It’s an aspirational article, I guess — My young Twyla and Gawain not only appreciate mortadella, but can tell the quality imported stuff from the mere local supermarket variety!
On the other hand, maybe T&G are dumping the antipasto & trading the kebab skewers (until the lunchroom ladies confiscate them) for half a pepperoni Hot Pocket and some store-brand cheezits…
I'm also trying to imagine myself, bleary-eyed, assembling kebabs or stuffing peppers in the predawn quiet. sometimes a sandwich takes all of my brainpower
— Gerry Doyle (@mgerrydoyle) September 21, 2021
Peruse this nonsense for more "kid-friendly ideas" worthy of ridicule: https://t.co/HQCmkGcHxo
— SpacedMom (@copymama) September 21, 2021
Among the replies:
— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) September 22, 2021
Exceso azucares, indeed.
Keith P.
I see your Krispy Kreme cereal and raise you a box of Thin Mints cereal.
debbie
The grilled peach, prosciutto, and mozzarella sandwich is a bit much, but those pinwheels seem like great ideas that could be done the night before.
Kropacetic
@Keith P.: Those both sound delicious. I wonder though, is their nutritional content that much different from actual thin mints or krispy kremes?
Seems like that would be more satisfying while similarly unhealthful.
@debbie: I don’t have any school lunches to pack, but I bookmarked those meal ideas for myself.
Tom Levenson
@Keith P.: Dear gods.
End times are indeed upon us.
hells littlest angel
As a child, I got fed all the normal stuff an American child gets fed.
It was horrible.
debbie
@Kropacetic:
I bookmarked the whole page. My cooking is boring me.
david
So, TCG is going to stick people of color back in Gitmo?
Good, good, can’t see how that could go wrong…
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/biden-admin-seeks-contractor-run-migrant-detention-facility-gitmo-guards-n1279886
From the article: “A little-known immigrant holding facility on the base has a capacity of 120 people, the records say, and it “will have an estimated daily population of 20 people,” according to a solicitation for bids issued Friday by the Department of Homeland Security.”
OK, we’ve got THOUSANDS at the border, so why are we going to peel off 20 to fly to Gitmo when that will instantly become an issue that will last all the way up to the 2024 elections? And how much is this going to cost to hold all of 20 people? Fuck, rent 5 rooms with double kings at the local Motel 6 and save us all several millions of dollars and shitpiles of Gitmo articles over the next 36 months.
eclare
All my friends and I just bought our lunches in the cafeteria. Do kids still do that?
Barney
Anyone shaking their head at the “simple” things that “children will love” should check out the sitcom Motherland. Apparently they’re thinking of an American remake.
MattF
It’s occurred to me that I have no memory of eating lunch in school. Ever. Now I’m a little worried.
CarolPW
As a kid I adored bologna sandwiches (w/Best Foods mayo) and at some point became too embarrassed to eat them because it seemed, I don’t know, either low rent or infantile. And then I discovered mortadella. Fuck you mental monitors, I got posh bologna sandwiches!
NotMax
“No sandwich in your lunchbox today, little Billy. There’s a special surprise in your Thermos instead.”
HumboldtBlue
@CarolPW:
Me too.
JoyceH
@debbie: yeah, the suggestions with pictures look pretty yummy to me, but a lot of them seem to be well beyond the average grade schooler’s taste preferences, dexterity and table manners.
VOR
@CarolPW: We used to call grilled cheese sandwiches “bricks”. Grilled cheese with bologna was “bricks and rubber”. Despite the names, they were favorite cafeteria lunches.
jackmac
@Keith P.: How about Twinkies breakfast cereal?
kindness
I hadn’t ever had an avacado or an artichoke till I moved to California in ’77. They did not have that stuff in the NY supermarkets back then.
Jager
Since I do all the cooking, I do bag lunch for my Executive Wife a couple of times a week, yesterday it was homemade leftover beef noodle soup with a chunk of French bread, a banana, and a short can of V8 juice. I asked her what she wanted today, she wanted a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, with the crust cut off, cut into 4 pieces. I looked at her and said, “Are you 9 years old?” I packed it up with an apple, a banana, and two chocolate chip cookies, and a tiny can of Coke. And I refilled her trail mix jar.
NotMax
@CarolPW
At random intervals one can find Hebrew National bologna at the market here. The Rolls Royce of bolognas.
Spanky
Let’s get Uday and Qusay on the case!
JPL
Grand Imp had a Happy meal when he visited. I did ask permission first though, and then went online to see how to order happy meals. That was not a staple in out house. The kid was impressed because he’s all about the condiments.
The greek yogurt chicken salad would be okay with him though. He does love yogurt.
Nicole
I want to see the step in the recipe where all the ingredients are separated out again because the kids don’t like any of their food touching any other different food.
phdesmond
@HumboldtBlue:
i still like bologna! and liverwurst, with brown mustard.
Cermet
I thought the joke food were the first two; certainly the cereal is all amerikan breakfast fair
Another Scott
@MattF: Lucky you!
A staple at one of my many grade schools was succotash. I hated it and still hate lima beans.
Around 3rd grade I was in a school that would always serve the normal lunch and then when everyone was done the cook would come by with a huge pot of sweet rice to dish out to those who were still hungry. Yummy!
Cheers,
Scott.
JPL
@phdesmond: ha Fox Brother’s in Atlanta still makes their own bologna. btw it’s still bologna
My son was disappointed that I wasn’t impressed. Bologna wasn’t a staple in our house when he was growing up so it was new to him.
HumboldtBlue
@phdesmond:
I do too. One of my first girlfriends made a mean fried baloney sammich.
Rusty
Having kids takes up all your time for fancy lunches (or dinners or breakfasts). Our freezer is stocked with frozen PB&J’s, that an apple and a granola bar and don’t you dare complain. It’s my lunch too! Cereal for dinner is not the end of the world either.
karen marie
@NotMax: If you can’t find that but your grocer has Boars Head in their deli, try their beef-pork bologna. That’s what bologna is meant to be!
debbie
@Jager:
Some days, you just want to feel like a kid!
hells littlest angel
@Barney: Apparently they’re thinking of an American remake.
[shudder]
JPL
@debbie: I’d rather feel like a nut.
Matt McIrvin
A fact that I think is getting less attention than it should: Puerto Rico is absolutely owning COVID vaccination. Doing better than any state in the US and their case rates are lower now too.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
?
raven
When my old man and I lived alone for a while he made Banquet Canned Chicken
(this is sweet sue but it’s the same, yucky!)
JPL
When I introduced food to grand imp’s dad, he had severe reactions, which meant I nursed him until he ate solids. Anyway the pediatrician suggested introducing small amounts of foods early on to grand imp, including peanut butter. It worked with grand imp. He loves yogurt and a wide variety of different foods.
Frank Wilhoit
Aldi’s house-brand Cheez-Its are actually almost good; they even have the “extra toasty” flavor, which are very like, except (like many Aldi knockoffs) less salty.
mrmoshpotato
@Spanky:
It would be interesting if a zebra shot both of them.
Kropacetic
For American cheese, I love the Land O Lakes low salt kind. I generally find American cheese tastes too strong and is somewhat off-putting. The low salt variety suits my taste way better.
@Frank Wilhoit: For good store-brand stuff, I never found a honey-roasted cashew I prefer to the CVS brand (small bag, not cans; those are different)
eclare
@CarolPW: Fried bologna is awesome. Even better, smoked.
Darkrose
A lot of the recipes look good to me as an adult–not so much me as a kid, because they’re all way more complicated than anything I liked to eat. The real trick, though, is the prep time, which I’m really beginning to appreciate this week as I’m back on campus and trying to eat reasonably healthily.
Baud
@mrmoshpotato:
Can you give zebras the Medal of Freedom?
Major Major Major Major
We just rolled out the new office catering policy. You can pick entrees from a few different restaurants the morning before and then it’s delivered. I like it better than our old buffet style cuz it’s every day.
Speaking of the office! Today the new guy deleted the kubernetes clusters that run all the team’s production apps. Outage still ongoing, has taken down maybe half the company.
I’m loving it though, because he’s been bugging the crap out of me trying to fix things that aren’t broken, and it finally bit him in the ass to an exceptional degree!
Say what you will about my development velocity, I have never once deleted prod.
mrmoshpotato
@Baud: Well, they do have necks to hang the medals around, so I say yes.
mrmoshpotato
@Major Major Major Major: Oops!
Chetan Murthy
@Baud: Wouldn’t they be happier with the mounted busts ?
CarolPW
@Nicole: @Another Scott: Agree with the food touching part, and I still can’t stand it for a lot of stuff (it is OK for the gravy to touch the mashed potatoes but not the green beans). I liked everything in succotash but not together, and I sat alone at the dinner table (couldn’t leave until the plate was clean) separating the corn from the lima beans (or peas) from the carrots and then happily eating each group.
Chetan Murthy
@Major Major Major Major:
I’m surprised that the capability to affect prod is granted to newbies. You’d think you had to go thru a serious vetting process …..
Tarragon
@Major Major Major Major: there’s still time
We have a guy on his way to retirement. He’s done in a few weeks from now and has been noticeably checked out for a few weeks already. There is just enough on the edge of malicious that I’m wondering if we’ll be having to test our backups on his last day.
CarolPW
@eclare: Sauteed mortadella glazed with balsamic vinegar is spectacular, even fried Spam is not terrible.
Major Major Major Major
@Chetan Murthy: we’ve < 200 engineers so we’re still getting our big boy pants on.
This particular change did undergo review so he’s at fault too but mostly I blame the guy who wrote it for trying to do something that didn’t need done in the first place. And now everything is farpotshket.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Major Major Major Major:
So I take it he’s probably fired lol? “Taking down half the company” sounds pretty serious
VeniceRiley
lima beans … I’m triggered. Kids sat at folding card table. You know, the kind with hollow legs.
trollhattan
Aw hell, somebody pointed the camera at Susan Collins today.
Kattails
@mrmoshpotato: (as per the duck in the previous thread?) Beat me to it.
Annie’s cheddar snack mix, with pretzels, cheezit type things, tiny bread sticks, cheddar bunnies as opposed to goldfish. Add your own peanuts or cashews. Stop half way down the box if you have some self control.
School lunches were a long time ago. Probably more concerned with the politics of seating than tape actual food.
Someone I knew called PB&J “chokers & gaggers”.
Major Major Major Major
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I suspect we have just spent ten million dollars training him, it’s pretty hard to find competent coders right now.
ETA looks like they just got the core suite back up and running, four hours later
trollhattan
@VeniceRiley:
Those poor kids had hollow legs? You know what’s good for hollow legs? Lima beans.
Mary G
Way back in the day when the government issued cheese and peanuts as free supplements to schools, my mom got a job as the director of food services for a 14-school district. When she first started she was required to go to board meetings. The first one was full of parents complaining about stuff like this – my child loves (whatever the 70s version of sashimi or sushi was), why don’t you serve better things than pizza, tacos, hotdogs, burgers, and fish stickers? They also demanded better vegetables, like broccoli. My poor mom, who had to struggle with getting the required amounts of protein, etc. into a meal budgeted at no more than $0.74, stewed for a couple of days, then started serving some of the less cray parents’ suggestions, starting with broccoli. She had her ladies take photos of the cafeteria trash cans that day, full of you guessed it, broccoli. At her second board meeting she laid into the parents with her proof that the kids would just toss better but yucky food. She was excused from ever attending the board meetings again.
MomSense
@hells littlest
Kids will eat what you feed them.
I remember an extended family visit after Christmas at my sister’s house. There was a lot of leftover ham so I made homemade split pea soup. Right before it was time to eat my sister and cousin in law made chicken nuggets and kraft mac n cheese. They said “the kids will never eat split pea soup”. Not if you never ask them to. Oh well. My kids ate it and loved it. I hate the separate and unequal dinners for kids. Major pet peeve.
Major Major Major Major
@Tarragon: Ugh, just buy him out lol
eclare
@trollhattan: One of my favorite lines from a book is appropriate here: once a bitch, always a bitch.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
I remember looking forward to when the pizza was catered in on Wednesdays at school. Otherwise the school lunches pretty much sucked. I’ll never forget the tacos that kinda sorta smelled like body odor lol
dr. bloor
I am dead.
eclare
@MomSense: My parents were firmly in the “this is not a restaurant” camp, not that complaining would have occurred to me. I could eat what was on the table or not. Fini.
RaflW
@trollhattan: Susan Collins has decided to just fully rip the mask off. Clearly her “pro-choice” schtick was a lie.
Now we know she’s just flat our racist. There’s no way to freakin’ sugar coat this. LePage in 2016: “The enemy right now” is “people of color or people of Hispanic origin.”
Susan Collins entire ‘moderation’ thing was garbage. A lie from start to finish. Hopefully the voters of Maine will shut the door on LePage, and (damnit, in 5.5 years) close out Susan’s career.
JPL
@trollhattan: I’m shocked, just shocked that Collins would be such a fucking liar.
rafl might have said it better, but I was succinct.
dr. bloor
@Tom Levenson:
And I am HERE for it.
Baud
@trollhattan:
I like how it says that Democrats have lost her support, rather than she has refused to live up to what she says she believes in.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@trollhattan:
And what exactly are that phony fuck’s reasons for that?
prostratedragon
In grade school, Dad made lunches because Mom was herself off to school (teach) early mornings. Neatly-made sandwiches with bologna-type lunchmeats, or leftover meats. A favorite was leftover chicken. Usually fruit rather than sweets, though we did have sweets at home. And soup. I had a lunchbox that was metal, in the shape of the classic workman’s box, but painted like a red barn with a tile roof. It came with a red plaid soup thermos, which Dad filled with hot tomato (still a favorite, though I sometimes make it from scratch now) or other Campbell’s soup. The good old days.
Those recipes above sound pretty involved for kids’ box lunches, both in preparation and ingredients, but there are some very good home lunch or dinner ideas there, including some already in my repertoire, like stovetop fritattas.
Baud
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
She’s confident Texas has learned its lesson.
Elizabelle
I love this WaPost headline. We could have written it.
Losery loser loser.
eclare
@prostratedragon: That lunchbox sounds wonderful!
Delk
Grades 1 to 3, I walked 2 blocks home for lunch. That school closed and starting with 4th grade I had to bring my lunch. I was so excited at the idea and spent forever picking out the right lunch box.
First day of school I was the only boy with a lunch box.
Ruckus
@NotMax:
Their dogs are the best as well.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Major Major Major Major:
Well, at least the core suite is back up and running
Steeplejack (phone)
@CarolPW:
Same for Leberkäse (which contains neither liver nor cheese). It’s designer bologna! I get some every so often at the German bakery/deli.
dr. bloor
@Elizabelle: It shows how much suing someone is just a reflex-arc response for Trump. It’s not going anywhere; Mary knows allllll the closet doors to open during discovery.
Kattails
@CarolPW: wait, it’s ok for the gravy to “touch” the mashed potatoes? As opposed to being poured over as, basically, a second helping?
A diner we went to in my youth did a great open faced hot turkey sandwich and I would order fries and dip the fries in gravy instead of ketchup. I have been fantasizing about this lately, having forgotten it for years.
WaterGirl
@MomSense: Many moons ago, I used to take my sister’s kids for a week – parents and kids got a vacation from one another.
Sister drove the kids to my house, was staying over that night and leaving in the morning. I had gotten some white bread because I knew the kids weren’t used to whole wheat, but it wasn’t Wonder bread, it might have been oatmeal bread or something like that.
And my peanut butter was the natural kind, not JIf.
I’m getting lunch together, and my sister says – in front of the kids (!) that they will never eat that bread or that peanut butter because they were too weird.
My instant reply : well, they sure won’t eat it now that you’ve said that. Maddening.
Steeplejack (phone)
@NotMax, @Ruckus:
Yes to both of these.
Ruckus
@Nicole:
Those kids needed my mother. “You will eat it and you will like it.” The very, very, very least liked was Brussels Sprouts. Turns out mom just had no idea how to properly warm them up. Once had to go without dinner for 3 days before she threw them out. They aren’t my fav but I’ve had them properly prepared a couple of times in the last 10 yrs and they weren’t bad.
Shana
@VOR: My elementary school, mid to late 60s, had an actual kitchen attached where they cooked from scratch or near scratch every day. It was the era of Fish on Friday for Catholics so we frequently had something they called Tuna Bunsteads which was a hot dog bun with tuna salad instead of a hot dog and american cheese on top and run under the broiler. We loved them.
RobertB
@Major Major Major Major: I ran a script who’s first line was rm -r * . Worked great when you were in the folder it was in, not so great when you were in / . And whoever set up the build account I was on gave it root privileges. Bye-bye build machine. A coworker was responsible for the script, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
Another nerd story; I was an intern working for the US Army Corps of Engineers. They ran Harris minicomputers, meant to be high-performance Fortran machines. Their OS had a notion of ‘fast open’, where the file was opened but the metadata (last time opened) was untouched. So one of my fellow students wrote a script to archive and delete old, untouched files. So his job was running happily along, writing files to tape and deleting them. Little did he know that all the executables were read using fast open, so all these files had really old last accessed dates. Pretty soon the machine came to a screeching halt.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Keith P.:
@Tom Levenson:
Dunkin Donuts Coffee Cereal is a thing. Just saying
RaflW
My freshman year in H.S., the cafeteria sold a longjohn donut they called an eclair. It was, however, a fried raised dough item, with chocolate frosting and a white, twinkie-like creme filling. We, uhhh, being boys of a juvenile age and mindset, called them donkey dicks. They were amazingly tasty. Well, at the time they could amaze a 13 year old.
42 years later my tastes have matured considerably. Now I enjoy a top-notch, supermarket boston cream donut. Vanilla pudding is a far better filling! And its round, so it avoids any unsavory anatomical nicknames.
Baud
FDA approves Pfizer booster for the olds.
RobertB
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Isn’t there an anecdote? “Fire you? We just spent a million dollars training you!”
JPL
@Baud: As an olds, I say good.
NotMax
@eclare
Difficult to keep it lit, though.
Starfish
@eclare: Yes, but if you are into performative helicopter parenting, you are buying a $60 PlanetBox and making custom bento boxes that you can post on Instagram and Pinterest. Who cares if your child eats it. You just have to show these other moms that you are better than they are.
Matt McIrvin
@RobertB: The worst I ever did was to somehow bring down a VAX 8530 using a fancy 1980-vintage graphics terminal connected via a DMA interface. Not sure how I did that to this day. But there was no data loss.
RobertB
@RaflW: There’s an “Amish” restaurant near my house that sells eclairs/longjohns that are about as big as a size 12 tennis shoe. One of those things will put you in a sugar coma.
Chetan Murthy
@Baud: I have read here-and-there that the optimal time to get it is 8mos after second shot. Also read that people go to the friendly neighborhood drug store and claim to suffer from Crohn’s Disease, are on “Remicade” and hence need the booster.
Gotta say, if they don’t approve boosters for 55+ [I’m 56] by the time 8mos expires, I’ll probably cheat. To assuage my conscience, I’ll give money to some covid charity that distributes shots in Africa, I guess.
Chetan Murthy
@Matt McIrvin: Heh. Working on the Atlanta Olympics website, a guy on our team did “rm -rf *” in root. He realized his error, killed it. And then proceeded to copy files from another should-be-identical machine on the same network, to try to rebuild what he’d blown away. It even worked.
Redshift
@RobertB: A while back, a friend was hired on a high-priority contract where they “didn’t want anything to slow people down,” so they have everyone root access. So of course one day someone typed “rm -r *” in the root directory, and that was the end of the project. Also of the evidence of who had done it, I think. (Before the days of frequent automatic backups, if I recall correctly.)
Jay
When I was a kid in the Maritimes, lunch was often either a Cheese Whiz and sweet pickle sandwich on Mom’s homemade bread, PN&Jam, (Damson Plum homemade), or lobstertail with mayo.
Marked me as a poor kid,
baloney on Wonderbread was what the richer kids ate, with either mustard, ketchup or mayo.
I envied them.
Chetan Murthy
@RobertB: Indeed there is, but I would hope it only applies to people who make “interesting” mistakes, not the boneheaded kind. The entire point of being a smart, highly-trained software engineer, is that we’re supposed to think thru all the ways something can go wrong. And to have figured out ways to test our work before applying it to …. production (ffs, ffs).
NotMax
@RobertB
The new generation: “File? Whuzzat?”
Tazj
PB &J is underrated! I will die on that hill. I once saw a show on the Food Network that featured a restaurant in NYC that featured peanut butter sandwiches. They made their own bread, peanut butter, jam and marshmallow fluff. I’m one of the weirdos who would have gone there at least once.
My kids probably would’ve eaten the Taco pinwheels when they were little.@Jager:
eclare
@Starfish: I am so thankful that I am old enough to have avoided all that. My mom would have had no patience for that, there was too much bridge to play.
Chetan Murthy
@RobertB: the apocryphal story is that that’s what TJ Watson (head of IBM) said to his chief computer designer who’d just built an expensive paperweight. IIRC, that designer went on to next design the System/360, so it all did work out well.
Chetan Murthy
@Tazj:
PB & “sweet Indian mango or lemon pickle” is even *more* underrated. Also, really salty, so I can’t have it, sigh.
NotMax
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Gotta be better than a different cereal attempt which landed with a resounding thud.
MagdaInBlack
@Tazj: It’s called a “fluffernutter” and if I recall correctly, the “recipe” was on the marshmallow fluff jar. ( Yik, btw)
Dan B
@jackmac: In the 90’s a black gsy guy from rural Georgia threw “The White Trash Potluck”. One of the favorites was a diorama of a trailer park with Twinkies as the trailers, Airstream shaped. Another was a guy who dressed as “Chesus of Nazareth”.
Ther wer many creative uses of hot dogs ?.
Scout211
Since this is an open thread, I’ll post this here. In stark contrast with Texas, California is passing laws to protect reproductive rights.
Lyrebird
@eclare: The current administration is making school lunch free around the country! I think even Stingy Town Wis (Waukesha) backed off from keeeping it away from their kids.
Some fools of parents like me pack a lunch anyhow because ah well some fools become parents.
Lyrebird
@Nicole: we must be related!! jk but yes, all ingredients must be kept separate.
Ruckus
@CarolPW:
Fried spam and eggs. Actually pretty good.
NotMax
@Tazj
Cream cheese and jelly is not to be sneezed at, also too.
I shall forego linking to the bistro in Florida which serves a peanut butter, jelly and lobster sandwich.
Scout211
And in other good news.
Elizabelle
@Steeplejack (phone): Leberkase! Loved that. My favorite sandwich at the bakery in Bavaria
Major Major Major Major
@NotMax: lol, oh wow.
Fun fact: it’s files all the way down.
FlyingToaster
@eclare: If and only if your school has one. My kids doesn’t (too small); there is a delivered lunch service which is truly terrible. The Before Times lunch vendor was a delight, the cafe was 2 blocks from the school. But, it couldn’t survive COVID with most of the local offices and schools remote.
However, Pizza Thursday is returning (we couldn’t use it last year as Middle School was half-day live, and WarriorTeen left 7th grade at 12:30 until May). I just signed the kid up, and should be able to get the workaround for Venmo operational so that I can pay for it.
Major Major Major Major
@RobertB: Wow, well that’s a little more understandable at least, the metadata one.
The thing this guy clicked ‘apply’ on was very up-front, in bold red, about what it would do…
prostratedragon
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Oh my, that does sound like an indelible memory.
MagdaInBlack
@NotMax: Cream cheese, guava paste, and Ritz crackers. Mmmm-hmm ?
Jager
@RaflW:
We called them “Come Buns” in JR High.
The Thin Black Duke
When I’m feeling vulnerable, my go-to is a fried bologna sandwich with lotsa mayonnaise. It’s sinful, greasy and delightful.
Starfish
@Lyrebird: Sadly, I have a child who is allergic to four of the top eight food allergens. We are in a school district with fairly good food with some meals sourced with food at nearby farms. Unfortunately, with the numerous allergies, only two of the ten meals on the two-week rotating menu are potentially safe.
Ruckus
@MomSense:
I must have grown up in another time and dimension because we never, ever had separate food for any meal. Mom made what mom had on hand or had just bought at the store. IOW what mom wanted. End of discussion. OK what discussion? You didn’t like it, you had it for the next meal, and then the next, till you ate it or it rotted. My sister was worse at this than me when we were both rather young. I only had to do this once, told elsewhere in this thread.
prostratedragon
@eclare: I loved it! Became my trademark. You know how kids always want the latest shiny thing? Well, I don’t think you could have taken that lunchbox from me until I went to high school and began eating from the cafeteria.
Chetan Murthy
@Scout211:
Ideas for how to lie to get my booster (when the time comes)!
Ruckus
@RobertB:
Thinking about puts me in one.
Then thinking about a size 12 used tennis shoe puts me right out of the mood.
Jay
SWIMBO was/is still offended that I take the same lunch to work, everyday for months.
For me, it’s just fuel, and something I all too often these days, eat in the hood, one bite at a time between customers.
Omnes Omnibus
I lived two blocks from my elementary school and went home for lunch everyday. I started getting the school lunch once I started middle school.
Redshift
@The Thin Black Duke: One of my favorites when I was a teenager was peanut butter and mayo sandwiches. Haven’t had one in a long time, we don’t really keep mayo in the house because Ms. Redshift can’t stand it.
NotMax
@The Thin Black Duke
One of those sandwich recipes which sounds good on paper….
;)
@MagdaInBlack
Should you come across it, try substituting quince paste sometime for a change of pace.
eclare
@prostratedragon: I adore this story!
Redshift
@Jay: Unless I’m going to a restaurant, i eat the same thing almost every day for lunch (Cabot cheddar on Finnish rye crackers) because I really like it.
Lyrebird
@Starfish: hooooooboy, best of luck to your kiddo! No fooling around with that. And yeah, we are new in this district, and I notice the menu for GF kiddos for example is the same dern thing 8/10 days, and that’s like a yogurt and some cold GF bread thing.
Our family has quite a range of GI issues, but I remind my kiddos routinely that we are so lucky they are not allergic. My high risk niece is now an older teen and is testing out as less at risk from her allergies than as a child. Here is hoping for little starfishes’ good health!!!
Omnes Omnibus
@Redshift: How could you do that to perfectly innocent peanut butter?
Tarragon
I know right!
Unfortunately, I’m the new guy on this team so it’s not my call to make
Steeplejack
@trollhattan:
On what planet does Susan Collins support abortion rights?! Los Angeles Times reporter Jennifer Haberkorn is getting (rightfully) dragged up and down Twitter for this:
Comments are en fuego.
Omnes Omnibus
@Steeplejack: I may have said something there.
RobertB
@Major Major Major Major: Given my level of knowledge of unix at the time (I came from DOS/Windows), letting me have root privileges was a mistake. Given my level of knowledge of unix now, letting me have root privileges without sudo is a mistake.
Another CoE story; the workers all had to use a word processor; no typewriters or secretaries. One gentleman, a high-level manager or director, maybe a year or two from retiring, calls the software support desk, manned by me and the other college kids. He wants to know how to print this document.
Dumbass Student: Turn on your printer, and select ‘Print’ from the top menu.
Old Guy (actually probably about my age now): I don’t have a printer.
Dumbass Student sticks the phone to his chest and starts laughing. He announces to the rest of room, “<redacted> is trying to print without a printer!”
He puts the phone to his chest, and Old Guy says, “You guys are making fun of me.” <click>
Remember, Old Guy was no random GS-7; he was the head of one of the departments. Our boss made Dumbass Student go up there and beg his ass off for forgiveness. That guy was still pissed at us in general (not that I blame him), and when we had to go take care of his problems we all had to tread lightly and kiss ass.
prostratedragon
@NotMax: File? … File?
CaseyL
@Delk: I was able to walk home for lunch from K-Grade 5. Then we moved to a new neighborhood and had a brand-spanking new school to go to. I don’t remember if the lunches were as innovative as the school – this was back in the 60s – but I do remember having an inordinate fondness for the “chocolate cake”: a white sheet cake with a thin layer of chocolate frosting. The cake was moist and I thought the cake-to-frosting ratio was perfect.
I still get cravings for that simple, thinly-frosted cake. No self-respecting bakery would dream of making something like that, much less offering it up for sale.
RobertB
@The Thin Black Duke: I ate enough bologna sandwiches when I was growing up that it’s no longer on the list of acceptable sandwiches. People driving out of their way to eat them is a mystery to me.
I do still eat deviled ham from time to time, which is one step removed from eating a dog food sandwich.
Jay
@RobertB:
a treat for me is mashed canned sardines on buttered toast.
Steeplejack
@MomSense:
My brother (foodie and good cook) takes a gentle but firm line with complaints. “Sorry, but this is what’s for dinner. Try it, see if you like it. You don’t? Oh, well. You don’t have to eat it.” But no dessert, no snacks, no substitutions. Philosophy: “No kid is going to starve to death before breakfast tomorrow.”
And he’s not a tyrant. Mac and cheese (homemade) is in the rotation, along with other kid-friendly stuff. And he’ll often give them some control. “What do you feel like tonight—A or B?” Sometimes A, B or C.
He has noted that they like anything that they can eat with their hands. “Gnawing like angry beavers” was the phrase, I think.
NotMax
@CaseyL
Frozen food aisle. Sara Lee.
;)
azelie
@Nicole: This is exactly right.
James E Powell
@RaflW:
I worry that the unbearable whiteness of the state will overcome any policy objections. Is Maine going to go the way of Iowa?
James E Powell
@Baud:
Great. Where can I go to get one?
Uncle Cosmo
@Shana: I used to hate the lunch Mom bagged for me on those baaad ole meatless Fridays. Then one day she had an inspiration:
I looked forward to Friday lunches happily ever after!
** Margarine, actually – we were too
frugaldamn pennypinching to spring for butter.*** “Processed cheese food,” actually; see above.
debbie
@Redshift:
Seconded!
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@trollhattan: She’s endorsing the human bowling shirt? Consider me shocked!
debbie
@James E Powell:
My neighborhood CVS has them.
Steeplejack
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Sounds like heavy on the cumin.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Major Major Major Major: oh my god!
Scout211
@James E Powell:
Apparently, there’s more steps in the process. Sigh. I thought this step was the final one. I’m so confused . . .
sxjames
Probably dead thread but…
I had sever food allergies (wheat & milk) as a kid so in elementary school my mom packed my lunch. It consisted mostly of soy pancakes and soy milk (soy was the only alternative to wheat back in the ’60’s). I do remember kids being curious why I had pancakes for lunch. As I got into Jr. high I was able to switch to school cafeteria food. It was edible…most of the time. However, for the first year of high school It was in a brand new building that didn’t yet have a cafeteria so they brought in food cooked at the old high school downtown. One day the had served some concoction of ground beef covered in cheese and it was the most greasy, disgusting, cold mess imaginable. Its the only time in my life I can remember not eating what was served.
debbie
@raven:
So what did you think about Ali? My favorite moments were of his daughters talking about him.
Ken
@Major Major Major Major: Two words: Blue. Green. (And I don’t mean the algae.)
Admittedly, it doubles your costs…
Ken
It melts better than Cheddar, I’ve heard.
Jay
@Ken:
oil byproducts do that,……
NotMax
@Uncle Cosmo
For reference purposes, FDA definitions for labeling:
Pasteurized process cheese = contains 100% cheese
Pasteurized process cheese food = contains at least 51% cheese
Pasteurized process cheese product = contains less than 51% cheese.
dnfree
When my kids were young (70s and early 80s), they had to make their own school lunches starting in second grade. They did it, too. One of them told me years later she used to lie and say her mother had packed her lunch because she didn’t want people to think I was a rotten mother.
dnfree
@Major Major Major Major:
I once deleted an entire client system that had not been backed up for two months. (I didn’t know that part.) This was on a DEC PDP-11 back in 1979. I was newly assigned to the project and was supposed to do a backup. The method was to do delete *.* on the backup target disk. Instead I deleted *.* on the main system. I heard the drive clicking and knew what I had done. We made up some excuse for the client, turned off the system so nothing would change, and used a product called Lazarus (resurrect the drive, get it?) to completely reconnect the files and directories.
JAFD
@NotMax: Quince marmalada is usually in stock in the Seabra’s* supermarkets in the Ironbound and other North Jersey places. IMHO, it’s very good instead of grape jelly in peanut buttr sandvitches.
*Pronounced Cee-ah-bruhs**
**You’ve all heard the Little Mermaid joke, right ?
Tehanu
@NotMax:
And of hot dogs and knackwurst, which we had last night. Yum!
jonas
As the parent of kids who will — despite their widely-traveled and culinarily-trained parents’ attempts to acculturate them to many different foods and flavors — will still only tolerate only certain *kinds* of pizza and mac-n-cheese, the less color the better, I can empathize with these tweets. One actually scrapes topping off school cafeteria pizza before eating only crust. Claims toppings are “gross”. We assume this will get better as they get older, but it’s starting to worry us…