Apropos of Nothing …

When I was a small child in the ’60s and ’70s I absolutely loved canned spaghetti with Oscar Mayer hot dogs cut up into it.

Some time in the early to mid ’90s, I was feeling nostalgic and made myself some for dinner.

It was absolutely foul.

The ravioli always gave me the creeps because of their mystery meat. They never passed my lips.

@karen marie has her eyes tight shut: Guilty pleasure at one time: Hormel canned tamales.

RML’s easy nacho recipe: Spread tortilla chips on plate. Cover layer with Wolf Brand Chili and shredded cheddar. Cover with a second layer of chips, Wolf Brand and cheddar. Microwave for four minutes. Devour.

Another great snack: Wolf Brand with Hebrew National weenies. Brown dogs in skillet, add Wolf Brand. Chow down.

@karen marie has her eyes tight shut: They never passed my lips. I have nothing to add.

But, people darlings, tinned spaghetti can only be eaten correctly when served on toast. A delicacy much derided by those who have never experienced it.

Open can of spaghetti. Heat in battered tin saucepan. Meanwhile, toast till blackened slices of thick white bread. When done, scrape off more egregious burned bits and butter liberally. Spoon hot spaghetti over toast and serve with hot strong tea.

Dish can be adapted for baked beans.

For extra special occasions, garnish with slice of processed cheddar or fried eggs.

To get an idea of correct milieu you might want to see this.

Next week: Food for Romance; Sardines on Toast. And Chip Butties: Food of the Gods.

@karen marie has her eyes tight shut: I used to love Spam as a kid. I don’t know what happened to it, but it didn’t taste the same when I had some (obligatory) Spam in Hawaii a couple of years ago.

@Benedick: You guys put everyfuckingthing on toast. ;-)

@Benedick: toast till blackened slices of thick white bread

During the summers my older siblings and I had to find our own meals, which meant a lot of grilled cheese for lunch. I was always given the most burnt specimen, and told it was “black cheese.” I believed it for far longer than I ought to have.

SCRAPPLE! Not on toast.

Before my brothers were born, my dad and stepmom didn’t seem to understand that kids like, oh, milk on cereal and maybe some bread or something. Dad was making me a sandwich (probs PB w/o the J), and the bread was moldy.

Here, I’ll just scrape off the bad parts and put it in the microwave.

Uhhhh, I don’t think that’s going to sterilize it, Dad.

Sure it will. Watch…

Okay — you take the first bite.

Let’s go to the store.

@mellbell: Boo! The cook always takes the worst piece!

Oh, fried bologna!

@JNOV: One of the great features of trips to Scranton. With eggs.

@JNOV: One of the great features of trips to anywhere in Australia. Beans on toast. With eggs.

I never could get into the swing of canned spaghetti on toast.

@Benedick: HAHAHAHA! What was the captain doing with that ferret?

@FlyingChainSaw: Ah. Come over for some Scrapple! And eggs. After last week’s Chili Incident, we won’t be eating beans for some time.

@FlyingChainSaw: Oh, can you change the name of your FB group to the immense evil of Sarah Palin? No one gives a shit about Christine for now.

@JNOV: Always ready for Scrapple and eggs! It’s not just a Scranton thing?

@JNOV: Lemme see if I can change that without losing my Immensely Evil acolytes.

@FlyingChainSaw: Hell no! Man, the PA Dutch live right up the road from Philly. I even found Scrapple in CA. Frozen, but still.

@FlyingChainSaw: Eggscellent.

Damn, there’s hope for California!

We are a hardy island nation which has grown strong on spaghetti on toast and Branston Pickle.

@Benedick: Okay. This doesn’t sound Glatt

Branston Pickle is made from a variety of diced vegetables, including swede [WTF?], carrots, onions, cauliflower and gherkins pickled in a sauce made from vinegar, tomato, apple and dates with spices such as mustard, coriander, garlic, cinnamon, pepper, cloves, nutmeg and cayenne pepper with sugar. In recent years high-fructose corn syrup has replaced sugar in the product sold in the American market. Sugar is still used in the British version.

I went to high school with Gottalaugh.

@JNOV: OMG! I did my sophomore year of HS in Las Palmas, Gran Canarias. The dormitory had like 16 kids (grades 9-12) and we had the run of the kitchen. There was always a whole bologna in the fridge that we would slice thick and fry on the commercial griddle.

Bread was delivered every day. The most wonderful rolls. I would have my ass outside most mornings when the delivery arrived to snatch one up for a pre-breakfast appertif.

The woman who ran the dorm and did the cooking would make giant loaves of banana bread every week, having them ready to come out of the oven just before we got out of school. The hot slices would be slathered with fresh local creamery butter.

The milk came in glass bottles and had cream on top. We would shake it and poke holes in the tinfoil top with a fork to strain it out when pouring a glass.

Dinner always included soup. With a roll.

Those were the days, my friend.

The sauce in the ad looks and pours like the shit that oozes out of camel’s assholes.

@FlyingChainSaw: Wah? How come I didn’t know about this?

@karen marie has her eyes tight shut: Okay — that sounds AWESOME! I can still get raw milk — how cool is that? Cream in mah coffee, cream in my tea!

Okay, this is a dumb childhood song (I think we either jumped rope to it or did some hand slapping game thing):

Fried ham
Fried ham
Cheese and bologna
And after the macaroni
We will have some
Pickles and pretzels
And then we’ll have some more fried ham
FRIED HAM!

@karen marie has her eyes tight shut: He’s got like four acolytes. So sad.

@JNOV: He could have had five.

@FlyingChainSaw: Well, I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve been pronouncing the chef’s name wrong for years. He also asked permission to come in. I think he’s vampyre.

@JNOV: Swede=rutabaga.

@karen marie has her eyes tight shut: I’ll send you a link.

@Benedick: How do the Swedes feel about that?

@JNOV: Same here.

@JNOV: I love Branston pickle on sandwiches with sharp cheddar cheese.

@karen marie has her eyes tight shut: Wow, the only food I can remember at school drove outside to smoke cigarettes and make coffee runs.

@FlyingChainSaw: Beans on toast, a.k.a. “SOS” (Shit on a Shingle) per my raised-in-the-Depression grandpa? It was a big night for him and his four brothers when they had SOS.

@SanFranLefty: I can see why. Fortifying. I never understood Vegemite or Marmite, though. I mean, is there food value in yeast and brown food coloring?

@FlyingChainSaw: Perhaps they’re made with nutritional yeast?

@FlyingChainSaw: SOS/Beans on toast is totally fortifying. My mother announced a week after I turned 10 that from there on out, my older sister and I each were assigned a different day of the week to make dinner for the family. (We also had been tasked with all household laundry that week). I was Tuesday’s cook. For the first four Tuesdays I made SOS because that was all I knew, courtesy of visits to Grandpa and Grandma’s trailer (yes, trailer). My mother quickly taught me how to make enchiladas and chili, and I taught myself everything else. Maybe I’ll make SOS this week for the hell of it.

@SanFranLefty: With good eggs over easy. Keeps you chugging all day long. Mmmmm.

@FlyingChainSaw: Goddamn, you’re a master of multitasking!

Word to the wise, trolling with Saw is a fucking good time!

@SanFranLefty: Ah, that’s chipped beef with cream sauce where I’m from.

@Mistress Cynica: On toast? If it gets your seal of approval, I’ll try it. Just not so sure about eating swedes. ;-) Yeah, like I haven’t eaten damn near every nationality.

@mellbell: Heh. Mah sistah!

Hmmm … I’ve got “Madras Lentils” (“lentils, red beans and spices in a creamy tomato sauce”) from Costco. That would probably be great on toast topped by a flipped egg.

But I’ve got bacon, so I’ll be having peanut butter & bacon on toast this week.

@karen marie has her eyes tight shut: EVERYTHING GOES BETTER WITH BACON!

@JNOV: Good goin’! What a hoot! I can’t believe how dumb the Palin moderators are. They deleted people whose notes were incredibly mild and left notes by a guy with a satan avatar raving that Palin is God. Yeah, sure, makes perfect sense and, hey, he’s pro-Palin.

By me SOS is creamed beef on toast. I will now go and hurl.

@Benedick: Oh, but it’s YUMMY! Just gotta rinse all the salt off the jarred mystery meat first.

@FlyingChainSaw: ZOMG! We need that Ana chick in your group.

tj/ The father in law of a friend of Mrs RML’s was shot and wounded yesterday in Tucson. Dude is Giffords’ district director. I met him at the friend’s wedding at some horse ranch outside of Tucson several years ago.

Ron Barber, who was standing next to Giffords, got hit twice and is in stable condition after surgery.

@FlyingChainSaw: Funny you should say that. I just ran across this blog post about the same thing: Palin’s FB moderators taking down anything even slightly negative while leaving up wildly inappropriate “positive” comments.

@JNOV: Right you are. In northern Indiana SOS is dried beef gravy on toast.

@flippin eck: Oh, cripes, it’s freakish. I glanced at it and saw one comment by a guy speculating lewdly ‘oh, the little Green kid, she’d probably grow up to be some kind of liberal. No loss.’

@lynnlightfoot: That’s gross.

@JNOV: Guess when Grandpa was growing up, chipped beef was out of the question.

My father once told be he grew up with the beans version in the 20’s & 30’s. His father was a limey and that was a staple, especially in the 30’s. Creamed chip beef became SOS in the service for him. We had that growing up maybe once a year. I make creamed chipped beef a few times a year and serve it over biscuits and scrambled eggs, sometimes with a little tabasco sauce. Luckily I am genetically predisposed to cancer, not heart disease.

I cook scrapple twice a week too. Yum. Tried making my own one time and that was enough of that. About wore my arm out stirring that hot paste.