5 Favorite Childhood Foods

By Kevin Williams

Ah, Thursday, the internet's memory lane by christening the day a throwback....

Which makes me think of food memories. I shared some food memories a few months ago, but there are always more.  I feel like I eat more naturally as an adult than I did as a kid.  We usually shop the "perimeter" of the grocery store, getting those healthier items with labels that don't have 500 ingredients you can't pronounce  on them.  But, buried in the belly of the store, are foods that I used to eat as a kid.  I'm not going to say that I miss them...I mean, I kind of do...they are a throwback to an earlier, more innocent era so in that sense, yea. I do.  I didn't think about calories, preservatives, price or anything (maybe I should have), I was just a kid and the items tasted good and I liked them.

My Popeye bowl, I found an exact duplicate on Ebay...

Chef Boyardee Ravioli:  Don't know how they kept the meat filling or the cheese filling shelf stable. Don't really want to know.  But, mmmm, this was the quintessential childhood meal.  Probably haven't opened up a can of this in 30 years....

SpaghettiOs:   Mmmmm, I loved this...I'd fill my favorite bowl - a plastic dish with a picture of Popeye on the bottom - and slowly savor each saucy O until finally, O by O, Popeye was visible on the bottom.  Loved that cartoon way too much...Ah, but on a whim I found the very bowl on Ebay.....Won't buy it, wouldn't be the same...

Fruit Cocktail:  It was fruit, so this was healthy, I think I reasoned...my 8-year-old mind ignoring the fact that the fruit was swimming and marinating in a thick, sugary, syrupy sauce....I never cared for the cherry, but everything else...bliss...

Cream Style Corn:  A can of this with corn soaked in a thick porridge...yum....probably haven't opened up a can of this in 30 years either...I think my eating habits must have changed when I went away to college...

Cereal:  I could do a whole post on this: Lucky Charms, Fruity Pebbles, Honey Smacks, Cookie Crisp, BooBerry, Corn Puffs and on and on....I think when the Battle Creek Enquirer picked up The Amish Cook column years ago I was thrilled that all these cereal executives would be reading the column and that maybe we could have an "Amish Cook" branded cereal of granola, etc...but, alas, it never happened....Maybe the best cereal of all was Captn Crunch, crunchy sugar-coated squares of pure sweetness.