Coming Out of the Closet: You Ate What?

Katie of the blog Thyme for Cooking has come up with a cathartic idea: exposing formerly well-hidden information about your past eating habits or current lapses in your usual haute eating mode, for the good of all. I'm game. Can we talk?

Today you know me as a forward-thinking, organic-meat-buying, flaming-dessert–making gourmet type, but it hasn't always been that way. Where to start?

Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. And by that I mean the original Kraft Dinner—the one with the packet of powdered processed cheese in the box. My best friend in high school and I used to split a box nearly every day in the summer. We'd get home from the beach in the early afternoon (and by the way, we used baby oil—no sun screen), make the mac and cheese, and wash it down with cans of TaB (I've got more skeletons rattling around in the closet than you can imagine). I made the Kraft Dinner again the other night to see if I still liked it. Eh. Probably should've gotten the one with the gooey Velveeta, but I was being a purist.

Fried bologna sandwiches. This was kind of a staple around our house. What you do is you make a slice in a piece of bologna, from the center to the outside (which prevents the bologna from puffing up like a little hat during frying), then you put it in a skillet and fry till it starts to get crusty. You then sandwich the bologna between two pieces of mayonaise'd white bread (Wonder bread is traditional) and enjoy! (My husband's family ate theirs with mustard, and no mayo—no surprise there.) We thought we were the only ones who ate fried bologna, but look! Even blues great Muddy Waters did, although he put his on a Ritz cracker and topped it with Tabasco.

I made the mac and cheese and fried up some bologna, for old times' sake, and unwittingly came up with a great new dish—bologna mac:C'mon—you know you want to eat that!

More skeletons:

In high school, when I wasn't eating Kraft Dinner, I also loved the Taco Bell bell beefer. The chain doesn't offer this tasty treat anymore; it was taco meat on a bun with taco sauce, onions, and cheese (I eschewed the lettuce). This item has been off the Taco Bell menu for more than 20 years, it turns out—although on Chowhound I read that at least one L.A. location still sells them. El Monte, here I come! I also stumbled on info about a taco stand called Henry's tacos that we used to go to all the time when I was a kid. It's still there to this day, and they serve a taco burger that sounds very similar to the bell beefer. I can't tell you how nostalgic I felt upon seeing the photos of that stand. My mother would often stop there for tacos on weeknights after work; tacos and cups of refried beans. Hey—I wonder if Fightin' Mad Mary eats there?! (She lives in the general area.)

Then there was the Jack-in-the-Box taco (described in a JitB press release as "as American as baseball and apple pie"). Man, was that good. They got the tacos already made (meat inside the corn tortilla) and then individual stores would deep-fry them and add (American) cheese and taco sauce (I eschewed the lettuce). They would be wrapped in sort of a waxed-paper pouch, and as you pulled back the paper and ate the taco (in the car, of course), the grease would just roll down your hand. Yum.

But probably the winner of the skeleton-in-the-closet award goes to a concoction of my own creation: let's call it Bisquick paste. I'd spoon some Bisquick into a small bowl or coffee cup, add a soupçon of sugar and enough milk (or water, if things were bad) to form a medium-thick paste (acheiving the right consistency was sometimes tricky, but essential). I remember eating this stuff many afternoons after school. The perfect snack!You know what? It's still good. (And give me a break here—if you've ever eaten cookie or pie dough or licked the cake-batter bowl, you have no room to judge).

So there you have it. I've exposed some of the skeletons in my gustatory closet. I feel cleansed! And in spite of everything, I'm still around, digestive system intact, to tell the stories.