TheSnackHound

You are probably beginning to think that after my nostalgia over Charlie’s Shake Shop (Click Here to Read) and my horror over a baby cone costume (See That HERE), it may lead you to believe I am somewhat ice cream obsessed. Maybe that is because I was somehow psychologically damaged in connection to ice cream.

When I was in fifth grade, our teacher told us that the main ingredient in McDonald’s softserve ice cream was also the main ingredient in plastic.  Nowadays, we know that fast food, but McDonald’s food in particular, is no good for us nutritionally. However, back then we were no less horrified to hear that implied.  In fact, the entire class was shocked and thought Mrs. Anderson was lying or being mean to us on the very first day of school, no less.  I mean, accusing us of eating plastic was something only our siblings would do and certainly would have never come out of the mouth of an authority figure like a teacher.  In fifth grade, also, you were almost in junior high so you thought your teachers were going to treat you a little bit more like grown ups.

Of course, later on, we recapitulated the shocking news and realized that it wasn’t so bad after all.  The key ingredient in producing both soft serve ice cream and plastic is………………water.

What a let down that was.  Even though there could have been a little bit of relief there, we no longer had one more gross or disgusting thing to hold over or scare our younger siblings with.  Certainly, even if it was no longer poisonous or disgusting, it is all mental.  As long as we could keep them going for a little while, we could get some satisfaction out of it until we felt just a little bad about pulling their leg.  Of course, the other alternative was when they found out for themselves and then we were no longer the older brother or sister who “knew everything” and were knocked off our pedestal until the next time.

Ever since Aunt Jemima got her pearl earrings makeover, we thought it was inevitable other breakfast time friends would want to keep up with her and follow suit.We understand we are a little late for this to be fast breaking news, but the gent on the package of Brawny paper towels got a major makeover in the past two years.He had two minor makeovers since his debut in 1974 (in right of the photo – his shirt was changed to blue denim in 2000.  The original is below at left), but otherwise has maintained his recognizable mustache and his pine trees. In the meantime, fashion trends came and went. He somehow resisted feathering, “hair band rocker hair,” spiked hair, skater bangs, the return of the flat top, the caesar and any other men’s coiffure trends between now and then. He might not have been on the cutting edge, but you could depend on him to be a constant that never changed.

Now, he has been madeover. In fact, it is not a makeover but someone has been recasted. He is now cleanshaven, has dark gelled hair and has a more muscular physique.

This may or may not be a good business move. In fact, with all of the trends making folks nostalgia for times past, and for the 70s inspired fashion that many shops are carrying, Brawny should have considered returning to the original 1974 version as a “collector’s issue.” I bet sales would go through the roof with folks thinking they had the next Quisp on their hands. Or maybe not….

My dad and a friend of his always used to joke that they were going to retire and open up a Dairy Queen.  They thought it was the best business because you would be open just after Easter to before Halloween and you would have the other months off to kick back.   I don’t think it was really about business model, but more so that they both really liked ice cream.  My father is not a heavy nor particularly indulgent man, but an outing usually doesn’t end without an ice cream.   I was always Miss Boring Vanilla until I later discovered Peppermint Stick and Cookies N Cream.   Until then, I was a Vanilla girl probably for fifteen years running.

When I was in grade school, Charlie’s Shake Shop in Mukwonago, Wisconsin, was pretty legendary.   Charlie was actually named for a Charlene.  They had booths as well as the expected little tables and “ice cream shoppe chairs.”  They served every flavor of ice cream someone in second grade could have ever dreamed up, scratch n sniff stickers, and candy sticks.  In the back hall, there were a few arcade games.  I remember Pac man and Joust, and a pin ball machine.  I remember the jukebox, and the times we used to try to trick our siblings into smelling the old shoe or skunk scratch n sniff stickers.

Every year, the student who won the Listening Competition got to go their with the music teacher, where they were treated to the ultimate situation.  What was the Listening Competition?   We prepared for it all year.   We were heavily versed in music appreciation from the standard classical pieces, show tunes, to orchestra pops.   We were played a very short, short snippet of the record and had to identify it the quickest.  But the needle could go anywhere in the record.  Kind of like “Name that Tune” without Kathie Lee.  In otherwords, if you are the type of person to only remember snippets of bad 70s ballads because you have seen too many Time Life music commercials, we had the classical version in our heads.

There was a dish that was seldom ordered, but was heavily entrenched in the Clarendon Avenue Elementary School lore.  It was literally a bucket that contained a scoop of every single flavor Charlie’s Shake Shop served (and it could be plain or have any toppings you wanted).    The winner would get to go to Charlie’s and actually order anything they wanted on the menu, but that is what traditionally was ordered just because you could. No one ever finished it, unless they were lying.   You see, the selection put Baskin Robbins to shame.  If you were thinking about just 31 flavors, that would be the appetizer.  You were just starting to warm up at that point. They happily wrapped it up “to go” if you could make it back to your freezer in time.   In a small town, nobody lived to far, so one could actually make it.

Today, no one would dare serve something like that.  It would just be a major health issue waiting to happen, but you sure wouldn’t die of a calcium deficiency!    It could make any person lactose intolerant for life in twenty minutes.

A few years later, we moved away, and Charlie’s closed and became a bike shop.  Or did it used to be a bike shop before Charlie’s?  I can’t remember.   But the fact remains, is that Charlie’s became history, for a reason we don’t know as it always seemed busy.     Back then, which was not that long ago (the 80s), it was the only ice cream place at the time in town in a “one grocery store/one restaurant/one pharmacy” town.    Today, there are over 25 restaurants there.  I guess we would have been considered like “pioneers” compared to what it is today, except we wore jelly shoes and carried trapper keepers instead of carrying muskets.

Now, I am sure I will hear from someone else who remembers Charlie’s, as I found zero reference to it on the internet.  Well, now something about it is on the internet.

Lauren recently talked about an “Iron Chef style” Battle that occurred at her house. It sent me into a reminiscent state over the original Japanese Iron Chef tv show.

Sometimes, I miss the original Iron Chef show.   Of course, you can still see it airing in reruns, but you can only watch the same episode so many times.   The thing I did not like about it is their regard for eating the unthikable bits of popular food items  and the way they treated seafood on the show.   I just don’t understand that part of Japanese cuisine culture.

The part that has not been able to be duplicated by the American version is the perhaps unintentional camp element, including the ability of the chefs to walk around in outfits that were a cross between pajamas and superhero costumes.   The other thing that the American show misses is Kazuko Hosoki.

Who is that, you say?

She was the frequent visitor to the Iron Chef “tasting and judgement” panel who was introduced as “The Fortune Teller” during the “Tasting and Judgement” portion of the show.  She sat next to countless starlets who noted how the food “tasted in their mouth.”  If they were the ‘tasting’ part, she was most definitely the ‘judgement’.    The chefs would politely nod while she completely contradicted herself sometimes, but more often than not, uttered the oft used, “I would not serve this!”

Some of her commentary was so off putting that it was laughable.   It made one wonder “where the heck did they get this lady,” and of course, what qualified her to sit there unless it was just for entertainment purposes?  Come to find out, that she actually was a chef herself and owned a restaurant at one point. It was something that never came to light in the show.  Perhaps she was introduced as a Fortune Teller because it was much more sensational than another chef on a show about chefs. They wanted us to have the impression that she was a little “out there,” almost to excuse her behavior.

There is always at least one person on a reality show, that is there for the sole purpose of stirring things up. While she didn’t exactly throw the whole show on its ear, I am convinced that she’s a ringer.

If she was highly critical of world class chefs, I can only imagine what she would say about me.  I sometimes underbake my cookies because I am so afraid of burning them.   I’ll just present them as peanut butter cookie dough sushi.   Afterall, even if its risky to undercook or underback something with eggs in it,  that would be child’s play to people who eat blowfish.

No discussion of hospital food would be complete without talking about Jello.   As a child and young teen, my sister was in the hospital quite frequently for an ongoing medical problem.  She was so jello-ed up that afterwards, she did not want to ever see another cup, bowl or saucer of the jiggly stuff again.

I was surfing around and found a few 80s Jello commercials online for your viewing nostalgia.  I came to the realization that the problem with the “new generation” of kids is that as adults we just don’t know how to handle them.  If we only followed Bill Cosby’s lead, we would have known to go back to the child rearing philosophy that a Jello Pudding Pop quickly resolves any unruly behavior.

If only Mr. Cosby would have been hired as Police Chief in a major US City.

Click Here to see why:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq3m6CoUhoo

However, on a serious note. The children of the 70s and early 80s now have children of their own. Due to all of the sugar saturation, just like an infant of a drug using mother can be born addicted, the infants of the new millenia have been born half with an addiction to sugar, and half with total immunity so no amount of Jello Pudding Pops could get through to them.

Who the heck is “Dinah?”   The second question that begs to be answered is : Who is in the kitchen with her, and why is it significant?

You may wonder just what I am going on about.
Remember the folk song?

Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah
Someone’s in the kitchen I know
Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah
Strummin’ on the old banjo!

The song is a temp change section of “‘I’ve been Workin On the Railroad.”   Kind of like how in “Last Dance,” Donna Summers starts out one way, and then everyone has been waiting until she gets to the uptempo part of the song.    Okay. Not really.  Bad analogy.   Truth be told “Dinah” had her own song, penned around 1840 and published in London.   We must travel back through history to have all those burning questions answered.

1) Does the “Someone” in the kitchen with Dinah, i.e, the phrase “Someone’s in the Kitchen I Know,” mean that someone is in the kitchen that the singer is well aquainted with?    Or does the singer imply that he/she “knows” that someone is in the kitchen.  They are aware of they whole “state of affairs” but they do not indicate who it could possibly be.

2)  In the 1800s, it would seem that kitchens were quite more utilitarian.  There were no large L-shaped counters with breakfast bar stools back then.   It was also awfully hot without air conditioning.  In otherwords, we do not “buy” the concept that Dinah regularly “entertains” in said kitchen.  The presence of a banjo playing person, or the fact that a person who is normally in the kitchen who suddenly breaks out the banjo, therefore, is highly suspect.    However, since Dinah would not have a radio to listen to while washing dishes, it is possible she sought alternative entertainment. Does this qualify?

This all leads me to believe that the song’s point was that this was not a usual occurence.  Otherwise, no one would have written a song about it.  Unless they just needed something to rhyme with “know” and   True there are other folk songs where not much happens out of the ordinary.   But it had to be something that stuck out a little in the writer’s mind to actually put pen to paper.

The original name of the song, I have discovered, was Old Joe or Somebody in the House with Dinah.  Ah-HA!   So it was JOE who was in the kitchen and strumming said Banjo.    When one question is answered, it opens a floodgate of many more!   Was he her dad?  Was he a wandering minstrel?   Was he trying to court her?   Was he the local crazy person?   Was this a commercial establishment and he worked there? We need to know!  It he was “Old” Joe maybe Dinah was very young and thought it was gross that this really old guy was interested in her.

Maybe I have left you with more questions than answers.  Never trust someone who seems to have a “useless information” area of their brains with this sort of thing.   Don’t trust anyone who just casually seems to always be carrying around a banjo…or a mandolin for that matter.

Everyone who has ever been a descendent of a married person within the last fifty years has one. No, I don’t mean a blog. I am talking about the item you see to your left.

No, I don’t mean “in the room.” What I mean is, please direct your attention to the left of your computer screen. No, not the Youtube of a cat sitting like a person. Close all of the extra windows you have going.

Ok, I guess I need to be really specific. I am talking about the item that is on the left side of this blog page. It’s a knife. I heard someone say somewhere back there that “it’s a PICTURE of a knife.” Ok, I guess if I am being literally, you can be that way too.

Anyways, it is not just any knife. It is the Random Knife. More specifically, its my Random Knife.

Everyone has one, even if you are not aware of it. You are cleaning up after dinner and amid a sudsing, you hold it up and ponder this oddball that stands out with its roses or its curliques amid the sea of streamlined utilitarianism that typifies your maritally selected good china. It travelled with you from the home of your parents when you went off to college or you otherwise moved out, grabbing a spoon, knife, and fork as you packed up the car, albeit mismatched. Later on, you met someone and it necessitated having a full set of silverware, so off to the discount store you went and bought a service for six. The Random Knife hid among the mishmash as it mingled amid the newcomers and the flatware of a series of roommates, and “let’s move in togethers,” and was naturally singled out to stick in the aluminum foiled cake in the fridge or to open a box unsuccessfully with its dull blade, until the day happened that every Random Knife both rejoices and shudders at: the wedding registry.

You newlyweds start off with a whole gleaming new set, but somehow the Random Knife survives. Too nice to throw out, and who donates “just one knife?”

The day you take notice, a few years have gone by with your memory completely erased on how the Random Knife came to be. Could have been accidentally left at your house by somebody? But the pattern looks vaguely familiar. It had to have come from home. If it did, you could find out, because your parents had not changed a thing in their kitchen since 1988 (1988:Two Words…Geese Wallpaper.)

On Thanksgiving Day, you covertly open the silverware drawer and much to your surprise, there is no drawer full of family members akin to The Random Knife. It is a whole different set.  But, hiding behind them all is a single spoon, who bears the mark of the family of the Random Knife.

So, the conspiracy goes back to at LEAST the early 70s! Your The Random Knife was actually your mother’s Random Knife, and somehow you selected it from the drawer that fateful day when you moved out. You could have chosen any knife in the drawer, but your hand somehow was magnetized to it in mock Arthurian fashion.

Indeed, recollection suggests it and a 1951 House Beautful Magazine touting its virtues confirms it:  The Random Knife started out its life as an anniversary gift to Grandma and Grandpa.   The Damask Rose pattern was a big hit in 1951, apparently.   After G and G bought silverware with rubberized handles to accommodate children and grandkids, the set was split up and profliferated throughout the family.

You clutch The Random Knife close and vow to never let it see the inside of a thrift store just because it is a little mismatched, just like the rest of your family.   You almost want to get on having seven children just to increase the odds that you will have someone to pass The Random Knife down to.   But, if the Random Knife is intentionally given to someone as their birthright, is it Random anymore?

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RollerKaty at the Rollerblog reminded me about Wacky Packs. For the uninitiated, they were stickers that sported messed up versions of household products.   Who could forget such “Darn, I wish they were real!” products like Fang: The Drink for Vampires?

If you are one of those children who later moved on to Garbage Pail Kids when the whole Wacky production screeched to a halt, you might be interested, thrilled, or shocked to know that now there is a coffee table book on the very subject. All the Wacky Packages and the corresponding history are presented in their full glory, finally!

If this thought intrigues you, read more about it HERE.  Do I smell a Christmas present?   I know that it will definitely be on my list.  It is never too early to shop.