I went 40 years without eating bars, hot dishes and jello salads. Why, you ask? Well, mostly because they are just not part of the food culture out west. In addition, let’s face it, the stuffs not good for you! Since “coming home” I have once again been exposed to these local foods which I now, must confess, have a love-hate relationship with. I have searched for and found the guilty for getting me re-hooked on these tasty treats. Let’s start with bars, which are really just large pans of hand held decadent desserts. They may have been practical when feeding large mid-day meals to numerous farm hands but probably not so good for us in today’s sedentary screen based life. My favorite has got to be one with a chewy cereal based bottom that probably has tons of karo syrup in it, with melted chocolate on top. Lordy, lordy look who’s going to be 40, pounds overweight that is, if I keep eating those. And my new friend, Julie, you know who you are, recently brought over still warm orange-cranberry oatmeal bars which were to die for. Shamefully, I fought both my husband and my mother for the last one. I guess restraint is the name of the game with these as neither of us is going away anytime soon.
Let’s move on to hot dishes which were, and I guess still are, a time saving cost conscious way to feed large families. I fondly remember the three ingredient hot dishes from my growing up years which always started with browning a pound of hamburger to which we added some kind of canned soup along with rice, noodles or potatoes. I was particularly fond of something called porcupine meatballs which involved mixing raw ground beef, uncooked rice and diced onions together which we then formed into balls over which we added a can of tomato soup. The dish was cooked in a pressure cooker on the stove and came out with cooked rice sticking out of the meatballs resembling quills, thus aptly named “porcupine meatballs.” Oh, the 60’s! For the most part, today’s crock pot approach to cooking has probably taken the place of hot dishes but at any family potluck there always seems to be at least one hot dish. On the 4th of July I had a blast from the past when I spotted a “tater tot hot dish” in the lineup of potluck options. For old time’s sake, I took a small serving of what turned out to be a very tasty dish that led to a second helping. The guilty was a friend of my Aunt Phyllis who’s name I don’t remember, lucky for her.
Finally, we have jello! I don’t care how much fruit or even veggies, you put into your jello salad, it has no, I mean no, nutritional value. It is just an artificially flavored sugar product or “gateway vehicle” for worse things including high fat dairy products and sugar laden box pudding and/or canned fruit. At our last picnic, a family friend, Bernice, you know who you are, brought a lovely looking green jello salad and the stuff was addictive. Upon her leave, it took everything I had not to wrestle her for her bowl with the leftovers. At another event, there was a humongous plastic bowl with some kind of yellow fluff in it that people were fighting over with the bowl licked clean at the end of the evening. It’s all pathetic but inevitable as we are a sugar addicted society. I guess I could buy sugar free jello or add stevia to plain gelatin along with plain yogurt, fresh chopped apples, celery and walnuts but, somehow, I don’t think I would have many takers and nobody would be fighting me for the bowl of leftovers at the end of the evening. Oh the joys of “coming home” on the food front. 2017