Food Flashbacks

Ohhh I just had a random food flashback to my unhealthy past.  I remembered how my dad used to fix me and my brother huge platefuls of deep-fried potatoes while we would play video games for hours.  He would make us plate after plate of these delicious potatoes that had been deep-fried and covered in salt!  If we wanted more, he'd make it.  He always loved to see his kids eat good--he grew up in a third world country where they hardly ever had food, so he thought the more the better.  I never thought anything of putting away a shameless amount of those potatoes!  But damn they were good!

Anyway, I had totally forgotten about that until just now, and it makes me cringe.  Have you ever randomly remembered something scary you used to eat?  Care to share your nightmare?

(I know there are already posts like this but I think they're fun :)

Original Post by perfectpanda:

Ugh I remember I used to eat sugar right out the bag. How disgusting is that? *Shudder*

I did that, too.

I have SO many of these, and like you ratinhat, it seems like my Dad was often the instigator!!!  He used to feed my brother and I all the time, and never with anything healthy.  I know he meant well, but, well...Ew.  Some of the most egregious (i.e. delicious!)  things I can remember:

• Beautiful fluffy pancakes made with butterscotch and milk chocolate chips
• Homemade potato wedges deep fried in peanut oil and covered in salt
• Homemade nachos--he would actually take storebought chips and deep fry them again to make them crunchier...then add cheese, sour cream, taco meet and salsa
• This wonderful "pretzel salad" that doesn't, on any level, resemble any kind of salad.  It's a base of pretzels cooked with butter with a mixture of sour cream, cool whip and sugar on top.  It is so good it's literally sinful.  And also about a trillion calories per serving, at least.
• Strawberry malts.  Enough said.

Dc_runner81, I think this is a case where father doesn't know best!  Got to love our dear old dads, lol.

By the way that pretzel salad sounds absolutely divine.  But I think I'd have to go to confession after eating it.

after seeing the Parent Trap (the Lindsay Lohan version) when I was around 8 or 9, my sister and I used to eat oreos and peanut butter, in excess. We literally used to eat at least half a bag of oreos between the two of us, dipping them straight into the peanut butter jar. So good, but now that I look back on it, I can't believe I used to do that.

Okay, as a child in a Southern home, I watched my Dad dip a piece of bread in the grease left over after frying meat.  I did the same thing.  It is delicious, but I swear you can feel your arteries quiver.

I remember as a teenager, not overweight at this time, ordering a 10 pack of chicken soft tacos at Taco Bell and asking for sour cream.  The kid behind the register said, "Just how much sour cream are you going to need?"  We were eating in the restaurant, not taking it to go, so he knew they were for me.  I ate seven and a half of them with a Diet Pepsi, then ordered a medium popcorn and another Diet Pepsi at the movie theater.  Those were the days!

Other unhealthy snacks:  funnel cakes at the fair, stopping for a McD's double cheeseburger while on the way home to cook supper, DQ Moo-Latte

I also used to eat dill pickle slices on saltine crackers.  So much salt...

Our favorite treat growing up (six children) was a slice of white bread coated real butter then topped with lots of cane sugar and sprinkled with cinnamon. As I say it I am craving it.  I haven't fixed that for myself for years.  I am a sugar addict I'm quite certain.

When I was a pre-teen/teen I'd come home from school and do one of the following for my daily snack:

 

- deep fry an entire plate of french fries

- pop popcorn in oil and melt butter on top of it...serve it up in a huge mixing bowl

- an enormous mixing bowl full of crappy cereal, such as Cocoa Pebbles or Captn. Crunch Berries

 

 

when I was about 15 or so my best friend and I would "be healthy" and jog two blocks to the Hardees down the street to order GIGANTIC real milk shakes covered in whip cream lol we thought we burned off all the calories running TWO BLOCKS!

We also use to buy huge containers of cool whip and eat it with a spoon and make a double batch of cookie dough and eat it until we got sick we were SO STUPID!

When I was young and foolish I helped my Dad cook a big fatty piece of whole bacon, put in 1/4" slices, in these slices we put butter, garlic, pepper and paprika.  Then we would boil it.  (It was a greasy fatty mess)  Immediatly, we would put in the fridge (covered) to cool.   By evening, it was "ready" to smear all over thick peices of rye bread.  It was great at the time.  Knowing what I know now, it was a recipie for a heart attack!  But, we were what we were and ignorance was bliss.  I think back at that time and how delicious it was.  Now I realize it wasn't that fat peice of lard that was tasty, it was the time my Dad and I spent together.

Live and learn.

When I was little, I used to eat this every single morning...

• 3 Eggo waffles
• 2 tablespoons of peanut nutter
• 1/4 cup 'fake' syrup

That sounds gross now...but it a daily thing back then! Hahah xD

three things come to mind when I look back at what I used to eat in high school (four years ago).

1- after school my sister and I would take WHOLE rolls of chocolate chips ahoy  cookies and dip them into giant glasses of milk. When we finished we felt stuffed beyond belief.

3- for lunch: since we had off-campus lunches fast food was the only option in my mind for lunch. so it was either jack in the box, wendy's, mcdonald's or taco bell. EVERY DAY haha

2- for dinner our dad would order us a pizza... We would split a medium pepperoni cheese pizza without sauce (I would I was weird) right down the middle. There was no discussion about the meal.. it was just a fact that every ounce of the pizza would be gone once we were done eating. haha we would even eat ice cream afterwards as well.

its crazy how different I am about food now. I couldn't imagine being that unhealthy today.

three things come to mind when I look back at what I used to eat in high school (four years ago).

1- after school my sister and I would take WHOLE rolls of chocolate chips ahoy cookies and dip them into giant glasses of milk. When we finished we felt stuffed beyond belief.

2- for lunch: since we had off-campus lunches fast food was the only option in my mind for lunch. so it was either jack in the box, wendy's, mcdonald's or taco bell. EVERY DAY haha

3- for dinner our dad would order us a pizza... We would split a medium pepperoni cheese pizza without sauce (I would I was weird) right down the middle. There was no discussion about the meal.. it was just a fact that every ounce of the pizza would be gone once we were done eating. haha we would even eat ice cream afterwards as well.

its crazy how different I am about food now. I couldn't imagine being that unhealthy today.

Back when my dad used to cook to his full ability (aka before he would get so drunk his food turns into a greasy, burnt mess) he used to make the most amazing fajitas. :[ It's sad, because he can barely cook like that anymore - you'd have to ask him to make them in the morning so he wouldn't be affected by alcohol. Ugh.

Thankfully, my mum (who has been eating healthily for over a year and gone from a UK 24 to a 10-12 :D) has become a brill cook in his place. She made fajitas the other night in the way he used to, brought back many memories.

When I was 4 or 5, I stayed with Granma and I would eat butter from the dish with my fingers. She had to hide the butter.

Homemade biscuits with lots of butter and strawberry jam.

Frozen fish sticks right off the pan before they went into the oven.

As a teen, I would eat anything from the local grease pit, fried oysters to pineapple milk shakes. I burned my mouth on the pizza from next door so many times.

I ate a 5 lb box of Russell Stover chocolates by myself. I was sick.

When i was a kid, when i came home from school i used to eat tons of cookies... from oreos to vienna fingers. Also loved those chocolate cupcakes w the cream in the middle, and twinkies. Also, my mom always used to buy us Burger King kids meals too.. no wonder why i was so fat! lol...

If you look at the picture of my mother and me in my profile you'll see a thin little woman next to a big fat woman.  Mom was once as fat as me, so I figure I'll eventually be thin if I live long enough.

There's a reason for the fat.  She loved to put butter on everything (still does) and never met a cake she didn't like.  One of the snacks she'd fix for us after school was white bread spread with marshmallow fluff on one slice and BUTTER on the other.  We gobbled them up.  Meal times were pretty healthy on the surface - plenty of vegetables, always a salad.  But look deeper to see that the healthy vegetables were swimming in butter, that salad was drowned in olive oil, and there were mounds of mashed potatoes and gravy, or potatoes au gratin, or some other rich starch.  

Since all my grandparents were from Italy, we ate a lot of pasta, usually smothered in the family recipe sauce.  That sauce was started with a fatty piece of pork, browned with an onion and garlic, and cooked for hours in tomatoes.  There was fat floating on the surface.  Click here to see how
I cleaned up the recipe

I was a skinny child and a slim adult until menopause, when it all caught up with me.  There I was, getting fatter and saddled with a lifetime of bad eating habits.  I'm correcting those, one at a time and hoping I don't have to wait until I'm 90 to get thin again.