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Thursday, August 30, 2012

Thoughts on Thursday...

We're taking another trip down memory lane for back to school week.

What are my thoughts this Thursday...school lunch.

You know how we tend to forget certain things from the past, but there are a few lunches that stick out in my mind. I always brown bagged it. Sometimes I would get "hot lunch" ( so funny typing that...do they even call it that any more?)

My favorite lunch was bologna on white bread with mayo and lettuce, a bag of potato chips (just a few that my mom bagged herself) and a homemade dessert (usually a cookie that I never ate.) The best part about the sandwich was when I put all the potato chips on the sandwich and crushed them in there. OMG I could eat one right now!! Lol  That is probably the most UNhealthy lunch ever, now that I think about it!!

The one thing I always longed for and never had in my lunch was a store bought treat. My mom always baked something for our lunches. Funny how we didn't know to appreciate it then. Only as we grow older do we see how much time it took for her to do that.

My most favorite treat that I would trade something for was the Hostess Ding Dong. Remember them? Little individual bundles of joy all wrapped in foil. Ahhhh, my mouth is watering.

Look at the package. You can faintly see on the right where it says "Vitamin Fortified". Yeah, right...what vitamin could survive in that sea of sugar!!




I remember spreading out the foil wrapper and rubbing it smooth with the back of my thumb nail until it shined like silver.

Why is all this coming back to me all of a sudden...so funny!!

Now it's your turn...

  • What was in your lunch box? 
  • Brown bag, lunch box or hot lunch? 
  • Did you eat the same thing everyday?


Happy Thursday,
~Karen~

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38 comments:

  1. My mother never bothered to make us lunch and we had to " earn" lunch money. So sometimes when I couldn't get an odd job from neighbors I couldn't buy lunch at school. I had a teacher one year who felt sorry for meand would pay the nickel for a carton of milk for me sometimes.

    My mother was strange. Because we had the money.

    glen

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    1. We couldn't take our lunch because we didn't have money and qualified for free lunches. It was mortifying. They gave you "special" tickets that showed everyone you got them.

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    2. awww....life can be so hard. That's sad.

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    3. My mother was pretty b\weird but not like this. So sorry.

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    4. I went to a small country school with 8 grades.I remember having dark Karo syrup and butter on homemade bread and maybe a piece of fruit and we got free milk.I was born in 1952 so people are amazed when I tell them this-sounds like "Little House On the Prairie!"Oh,we also used lard pails for our lunch containers!!We walked two miles also!!

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    5. so sad. I would have befriended you at lunch and shared mine. my mom had 5 kids and we each got lunch and what we needed. we were poor and raised our own food on the farm but we had what we needed and we were happy. learned about sharing too and teamwork
      ((((hugs)))) want some of my fluffernutter?? :-)

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  2. My mother only let me take my lunch in the first grade. I always took a ham sandwich. I then traded half of it for a pb&j (which I don't like!) to a little boy I was sweet on. He had no front teeth and I thought he was cute! When we took field trips I always had ham sandwich, potato stix (like shoe string potato chips) and a Ding Dong. I still like them. Frozen is best.

    I have a great recipe for a Suzi-Q cake. It rivals Ding Dongs and is homemade!

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  3. I never got to bring a lunch cuz the whole school walked home for lunch. No one was further than a mile. We used to get so excited when we had a field trip cuz we got to ride a school bus (that was borrowed from a neighboring town)

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  4. When I was little, my favorite lunch was packed by my mom. Tomato soup in a thermos and a cheese sandwich. There was always a cookie or brownie in my little metal lunchbox. As I got older, we were allowed to buy lunch. The best thing they made was spaghetti with meat sauce. They had the BEST rolls! Just thinking about them makes me hungry!

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  5. I went to a small Catholic school with no hot lunch, so we had to pack our own. I hated packing my lunch, still do! I remember in 8th grade, most of the girls went off to help the younger kids with lunch and recess to give the teachers a break (no teacher aids either). Since I had kindergarten duty (they left before lunch), I always ate with the boys. We used to play poker in our classroom while we ate. Since the grapefruit diet was popular then, I remember eating just a grapefruit for lunch. The boys always had plenty of junk food to counteract my "healthy" diet!

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  6. Oh my Goodness! I thought I was the only person who rubbed the foil smooth, only my foil was from a Ho Ho, not a Ding Dong. I don't think they sold Ding Dongs in my part of the country.

    As for lunch, I was lucky. I went to school in a small town in South Dakota and the head of the school lunch was an awesome cook. I ate the hot lunch everyday. My Mom would send in a check with me or my sister and we would take it to the office to pay--there weren't any tickets. On every Monday, the Superintendant would stand at the head of the line and tell every kid how much the owed or had credit. The poor girl in front of me always owed all year long. I would have died of embarrassment. However, they never turned anyone away, the kids could still eat. We also ate on the plastic trays with the differnt compartments. Everyone wanted a blue one, but you usually ended up with beige or pink. The food generally very good. All the bread was homemade, and there was always bread and peanutbutter in case you didn't like the hot lunch. My favorite was the grilled cheese. It was made with the homemade bread and baked in the oven until it was really crispy. Yum!

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  7. How similar we are in the school lunch category...I, too, took a brown bag lunch with hand-bagged chips and homemade 'dessert'.....my favorite sandwich was tuna fish and i would put my doritos on it and it was SO good!! I still do that occasionally! Only, my mother bought generic doritos back then - yuck! Never had ding dongs, though...we had Zingers if available! :)

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  8. We always had the "hot lunch" at school. My mom (and dad) worked full time, so packing lunches wasn't on the agenda. We had good lunches though, and since it was a small school (one traffic light town), we knew the cafeteria ladies as well as we knew our teachers. Baked chili was my favorite. Yum.

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  9. I wasn't a great eater as a child, so I don't remember careing. I do remember loving cream cheese and grape jelly on white bread in grade school. It sounds horrible now. I'm sure I had a snack also, but I don't remember it, I probably did't eat it. I do remember having a cartoon metal lunch box, with a beach buggy on it, I don't know which cartoon. ;-> Toni Anne

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  10. Had metal lunch boxes in the early days, then sack lunches later on. I hated bologna, still do too. So I usually had Tuna fish or PB&J, or mayo, lettuce and cheese only with every once in awhile we would have ham or roast beef that I could put some on my sandwich. In the winter I would sometimes take tomato soup in a thermos with oyster crackers. Sometimes we would have homemade cookies, or brownies or chips we would bag ourselves, fruit pies from the discount bakery, or my all time favorite, Ding Dongs, and Ho-Ho's!!!! Remember when they changed the name of Ding Dongs to King Dongs or something like that because the name Ding Dong offended someone or something stupid like that. A year later they change the name back to Ding Dongs!!! My brother always had Twinkies, I still hate those too.
    I had hot lunches too every now and then, we had to mark the hot lunch menu with two choices per week, and my dad who worked nights, would leave the money on the table when he got home from work for us if we were eating hot lunch that day.

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  11. I always ate the hot lunch, which I remember loving. Kids would beg me to eat their slimy canned spinach, which was delicious. My mom gave me an extra dime every day so I could get an orange juice with crushed ice. I was envious of the kids who packed lunches and one time sneaked my own. My mom busted me, but after that let me bring a packed lunch every now and then.

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  12. Seems so funny to think back to lunch time when I was a kid! I always had the school lunch because my mom wouldn't take the time to pack our lunch! We would carry our lunch money everyday!~ We had a lunch lady that patrolled the cafeteria that tried to make us eat everything on our tray because you weren't allowed to refuse any of it when they were dishing it out! LOL Most of the kids would just stuff what they didn't like in their milk carton so the lunch lady didn't try to make them eat something they didn't like!
    It is SOOOO different now in the schools with my kids! My daughter used to eat the school food most of the time but my son packs everyday. He is a picky eater so its best I pack what he will actually eat! These days, we have to put money onto their lunch account & when they get their food, they tell the cashier what their lunch number is & it is deducted off their accounts! No more carrying money to school everyday! I guess with all the bullying that happens these days, its better that the bully cannot steal anyones money these days! But bullying in schools is at a whole different level than it was back in the good ole days when I went to school!

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  13. I had hot lunch through jr high then I packed my own lunch for high school. My mother did not cook so she was more than happy to pay for my hot lunch at school. Unfortunately she stoped wanting to pay in high school when I had a friend that would drive a group of us to a fast food place for lunch. Sigh...

    I pack my kids lunch even though he would love to eat hot lunch like so many of their classmates. Our school district has a central kitchen and trucks in food to each school from there. No more walking down the hall and smelling something good cooking in the cafeteria for the kids here. Plus the district thinks that breakfast means funnel cakes more often than not and the corn dog is stared on the menu as being the healthy lunch option. Good grief. I added it up and it comes to about $50 a month to feed one kid hot lunch everyday. I spend a fraction of that and I am able to send a healthy and enviable cold lunch with my kids. To some interest I add a little plastic cupcake ring in too. Every month or so I go the the grocery bakery and they sell me one or two of each new cupcake decorator rings they have in stock. I have quite the collection now and the kids LOVE the surprise in their lunch!

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  14. In grade school, I had the metal red plaid lunchbox, but brown bagged it in junior high. My mom always put those short little thermos jars in with fruit cocktail or pudding! We usually had a pb&j or sometimes a splurge of the Buddig lunchmeat. Sometimes mom would put a little handful of chocolate chips and mini marshmallows in folded up wax paper. We never had baggies or plastic wrap....that was too expensive.....it was always waxed paper. Later, in high school, I remember all my friends going crazy for my mom's turkey salad sandwiches after Thanksgiving, so she would make me several of those, and all 4 of my friends and I would eat them like they were dessert! They were awesome, and I make them now, too! My mom would bake every day when I was growing up, and when she did cakes, she always trimmed off the tops to make the layer even, and the trimmed off top would be made into a cake and frosting sandwich, and she's put wedges of that in our lunches, too! I used to do that for my kids, as well. They loved that the frosting didn't get stuck on the wrapper!

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  15. We lived across the street from school so went home everyday. If there was something special going on we took our lunch in a brown bag with 3 pennys tied in the corner of a cloth hankie for our milk.

    Robin in Washington State
    assweetaspeaches hotmail

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  16. I remember walking home for lunch a lot of the time in elementary school. I used to sing "Sing Your Way Home" while I walked. The only thing I remember eating at home was canned Cream of Mushroom soup, which was my mom's favorite, but I HATED it. Hot lunch was a mixed blessing. I loved the food (and still get nostalgic when I smell a school lunchroom...lol), but my mom would tie my lunch money in a hankie and pin it to my dress. She tied the knot so tight, I had a terrible time getting it untied! I used to love it when she made me lettuce sandwiches, usually on the weekends. Just the ubiquitous white bread, mayo, and iceberg lettuce. I still like them! I also like the baloney and potato chip sandwich, and Fritos are good on tuna salad...yum. Tuna salad is also good on raisin bread, and, believe it or not, something I learned by accident one day at work, after the "roach coach" came by, was that barbecue potato chips taste great with chocolate milk! Who knew....8-) I also remember the wonderful new invention that I tasted at a neighbor's house one day. It was Lipton Chicken Noodle Soup, reconstituted from the packets. We were astounded at this modern miracle!

    Thanks for the walk down memory lane! It was fun

    xo Linda

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  17. Almost forgot the one sandwich I loved the most, but the looks of it grossed out my friends. My mother had a meat grinder -- she would be bologna, velvetta cheese, sweet pickles and onions through the grinder. Then she would add miracle whip and stir it together. It made the most delicious sandwiches but my friends thought it looked like dog food :-) The other big memory was my Mom wrapped everything in waxed paper -- no baggies in those days (I'm certainly dating myself).

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  18. My favorite treat was the Ho Ho. I remember eating the chocolate off then eating slowly as it unrolled. We packed and bought lunches. My favorite school lunch meal was the mac and cheese. My best friend brought a plain cheese sandwich everyday. I thought maybe she was poor and just felt so sorry for her until I had a child who wanted to take a plain cheese sandwich everyday! I still put potato chip in my sandwich!

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  19. I don't remember anything in particular except ham salad (and I remember waxed paper too!!). When I was in high school, we didn't have a cafeteria, so I would walk home for lunch. Occasionally two of my non-townie friends would come with me. The one girl's mom always packed a cheese sandwich and my mom would turn it into a grilled cheese sandwich. I just saw her for the first time in almost 30 years, and she said that was one of her favorite memories.

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  20. Since my dad worked for Hostess, I always had a Cherry Pie in my lunch, the thought of a Twinkie or Ding Dong just grossed me out! My mom always baked cookies those were for after school!

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  21. We called it hot lunch too, and very rarely had $ for that, in a family with five kids! Chips were a rarity too. Mostly it was a sandwich, piece of fruit and a dessert. My mom would buy bread and Ding Dongs at the day old bread store and put them in a chest freezer in the garage. We would take a frozen Ding Dong and it would keep cold until lunchtime. My brothers loved Twinkies but I never did :) We were always embarrassed when Mom ran out of brown lunch bags and we had to take our lunches to school in plastic bread bags she saved!!! I don't ever remember having a cool lunch box like some of my friends did.

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  22. Mom believed in hot lunch so my brother and I went home for lunch every day. We were the fastest walkers in town!! (There was no hot lunch at school but even if there had been, I don't think it would have changed things.)

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  23. My Dad made my lunch, since my Mom worked nights. Back in the day, Catholics didn't eat meat on Fridays, so my Friday sandwich was always PB&J. One of my friends had tuna fish. Her mother never gave her peanut butter. So we switched. I can taste that tuna salad even after all these years; it had celery in it. YUM!!
    We didn't have a cafeteria in my elementary school, so I didn't know what a hot lunch was until I got to High School.

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  24. Oh yes, I had the exact lunch as you. Packed neatly in my Bugs Bunny lunch box. I remember those Thermos' that would shatter into a million pieces if you just LOOKED at them wrong;-)
    Unlike your homemade treats you had, I did get the Ding Dong...totally did the same with the foil!!!!
    "Lunch on a tray" that's what my girls call the lunch that can be purchased at school these days.
    Thanks for the walk down memory lane!!!

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  25. I brought my lunch to the Catholic school, and it was bologna on white bread or PB&J sandwich. In the winter I had a little thermos of chicken noodle soup. Sometimes I walked home for lunch for Lipton soup, Spaghettios, or thickly cut & fried bologna meat. That must have been cheap. My favorite thing was the foil TV dinner with Salsbury steak & fries. Once our school had McDonald's hamburgers & one boy would not eat them & had his sack lunch. He 'was' the smartest boy in the class, too.

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  26. Oh, I remember "hot lunch" fondly! I loved bringing home the monthly menu and circling what days I wanted to "buy". I particularly remember Chicken a la King. But, the one thing I still pine for to this day is the peanut butter bars. OMG,they were heavenly. I've never come across anything similar, I so wish I could duplicate them. I don't really remember what I brought when I took my lunchbox. You know, I still get a thrill when the weekly menu is posted for our cafeteria - some things never change! o:)

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  27. I was a fluffernutter girl. peanut butter and marshmallow fluff. We live in New England for those of you who dont know what fluff is. I also packed devilled ham sandwiches. Hubby remembers his dad making apple squares. He was a chef.the family would go apple picking and they would make trays of them and freeze.for the school hot lunch I liked most meals ecept Friday fish sticks. thats when I would bring my lunch. dessert favorite was grapenut pudding and still is today. YUM!

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  28. Those are awesome memories. I always did hot lunch, because it was easier. Once in a great while she would bag me a lunch, but oddly I don't remember a thing. But I loved the schools spaghetti! Would go back for thirds if they would let me. LOL Here in CO some of the schools are checking bagged lunches to see if they are good enough. If not they throw them out and serve them hot lunch which is better balanced. And then send you a bill. Now my question is how did we ever survive our childhood?

    Hugs,
    Vicki R
    sunraesban@yahoo.com

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  29. I did brown bag lunch, always with a homemade treat of some sort, made by my Dad. My favourite was mac & cheese lunch meat (the thought of the chemicals I ingested make me shudder now!)

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  30. I always took my lunch to school. Back then small town schools in Alberta didn't have cafeterias, so we really didn't have a lot of choice in the matter. In fact, I don't think they have them even now.

    Mom always packed us a sandwich of some sort, a piece of fruit (apple, orange, pear) and sometimes a cookie for dessert. My favourite were meat sandwiches. My least favourite was tomato sandwiches. I love tomato sandwiches but by the time lunch time rolled around the bread would have started to get soggy and not so fun to eat.

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  31. My daughter does the same thing with potato chips and her sandwiches! I'd never heard of it before I watched her do it. She still does it even as a college girl. I used to (and still do) like ketchup and mustard sandwiches. For a treat sometimes I add anything else that would go on a hamburger except the hamburger. I don't eat hamburgers but love these sandwiches. I know, I'm weird!

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  32. OMG I loved a bologna cheese and HEINZ Ketchup with Ruffles potato chips in it. I never had this for a school lunch, I always bought lunch at school, this was my favorite lunch at home.

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  33. Great topic! My mother almost always packed my lunch. In grade school I had a Barbie lunch box and I think I ate PBJ almost every day! I too would put my potato chips on my sandwich - awesome! I can't get my kids to try it though, what's wrong with kids today? LOL! I also got a piece of fruit and a small homemade treat. The only days I got hot lunch were "pizza boat" days - which was a half-sub baked with pizza toppings - which I had to beg for. Now I know we didn't have the money for hot lunch but back then I just thought my mother was being mean.

    At the start of each school year, my 1st grade teacher always bought a stack of lunch tickets that she kept at her desk, so if you forgot your lunch or didn't have one, she'd give you a hot lunch ticket so you could eat. I distinctly remember my mother making me march in and give the teacher $.75 to repay her for the ticket she gave me one day when I "forgot" my lunch at home. I suppose our family could have qualified for reduced cost lunch but my parents were very proud and would never have applied. I never knew we were poor though - we always ate well, my mother canned and baked, my grandmother sewed my dresses, and I was happy.

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Thanks so much for taking the time to leave a comment...I just love hearing from you!