• Squished-up balls of fresh bread. This one involves taking a piece of really soft, really fresh bread, ripping off all the crusts, and then rolling it into a tight, white ball of dense deliciousness. Feel free to hide a wedge of butter in the core there too.
• Whatever you ate for holiday meals. Maybe back at The Kids Table you were loving Grandma’s pumpkin pie, your brother’s lumpy mashed potatoes, or mom’s famous stuffing. Nothing tastes as good when the holidays hit.
• Boxed macaroni with chopped-up hot dogs. Stare into that hot steamy fluorescent orange bowl and get ready to chow down. Optional features include adding massive squirts of ketchup or chopped-up hot dogs. Not optional is eating the whole box.
• Tang. The beautiful thing about Tang is that as you get older, you can just water it down a bit if you can’t handle the sweetness anymore. Or you can do the opposite and have yourself a glass of Super Tang. After that, it’s time to blast off to the moon.
• Melted Cheese. This is one that my sister and I used to love. We would put a piece of bread on a plate, slice up five thin slices of cheese, and then nuke it for thirty seconds. We had it down to an exact science. Once in a while things would get a little crazy and we’d put some tomato sauce on it, but mostly just Melted Cheese. A perfect name for a perfect after-school snack.
• Liquid antibiotics. Okay, it’s not really a food, but how about that sugary amoxicillin you used to get? You can apparently still ask for it as an adult, but you might need to take eight teaspoons fourteen times a day to get your full dosage.
• Those cheese spread cracker kits with the red plastic stick. Who else always ran out of cheese way before they ran out of cracker?
• Your favorite sandwich. Maybe today you’re on a health kick, but remember when your favorite sandwich was bologna and processed cheese on white bread? Or salami and mustard and mayo? Or creamy peanut butter with grape jelly cut into triangles?
• Canned pasta. Whether your fancy is beef ravioli or the tangy sweetness from a soupy bowl of ketchupsoaked O’s, these piles of sodium and meatpaste definitely tickle the memory bone.
• Mom’s Spaghetti Sauce. Was your mom a jar of sauce in a pot kind of gal? Or a slow, all-day simmering type of lady? Did she leave the mushrooms chunky, chop them real fine, or leave them out completely? What was her position on onions, melted cheese on top, or meatballs versus meat sauce? If you grew up with homemade spaghetti sauce, I’m willing to bet it’s still something that tastes amazing today.
• Cold hot dogs straight from the fridge. Oh, don’t worry. The worms all died in the factory.
• Random mishmash desserts. My sister used to put oats and butter in the microwave and top it with a spoon of brown sugar. Maybe you loved Nestlé Quik on a spoon, butter and sugar sandwiches, homemade Coke ice pops, or Nutella smeared on anything.
• Sugar cereals. I ate Corn Pops every day for breakfast for a decade and somehow survived. These days, you can always cut them with an adult cereal if they’re too sweet. Throw some plain Cheerios on those Honey Nut Cheerios or some Corn Flakes on those Frosted Flakes. Just don’t tell anybody, old man.