Hot Lunch!

Sometimes I wonder if it's just me or is everyone about my age fixated on events and flavors of years gone by. I for example just cannot shake my desires for egg foo young made in Boise Idaho before 1966 our hamburgers from 1957 served in the back of my big sister's car from a little place called To Boys In and Out. I just cannot find a taste like food from those eras of my life.

It's weird that today kids rarely gets served hot lunches made at their school cafeterias. I get it, it's a money thing but still, how sad the best that they can look forward to as far as hot lunch goes is a premade meal manufactured at some gigantic production plant then trucked over for lunch. It's not like I enjoyed hot lunch for my grade school as much as some folks but I could smell the food cooking specially the bread roasting every day before lunch. I of course, most days, took in my cold lunch . I appreciated the sandwiches – – peanut butter and honey, tunafish, lunchmeat – – usually some kind of a sweet or potato chips real potato chips. We bought our bread usually from the day-old bread store by the bakery. Occasionally we would get bags of broken potato chips, product which could not be sold at the regular market. I never thought about who else might use them until one day I was waiting in the car for mom to do the shopping and the bread store when a pig farmer backed his truck into the loading area and I saw them load barrels of chips into his truck to be fed to his pigs. Every once in a while I would “lose” my lunch and had to buy a lunch ticket ($.25). And I would get the best food ever: some kind of meat product encrusted in breadcrumbs, mashed potatoes served with an ice cream scoop covered with yellow gravy and green vegetables of some kind and usually a role. This was divine they even let me go back for seconds.

There were four junior highs actually maybe five when I went to junior high school. The legacy junior high schools were named after the points of the compass. I went to East because I lived in the Southeast end of the valley. This was the big time. We were served lunch in the cafeteria à la carte we got to choose what we're going to eat that day. Again, I'm making it sound like I ate hot lunch or use this amenity of education but again I drug my lunch to school. But, since it was à la carte they had many things to choose from and if I had a quarter here are $.50 there are maybe a whole dollar then I could buy a lunch “enhancer”. The cooks didn't admiral job on regular food at the East cafeteria but one thing they did wonderfully was make cinnamon rolls once a week. These cinnamon rolls were divine, huge pastries, cinnamon and raisins covered with some sort of caramel syrup which the cooks somehow cooked a crust. When you got your cinnamon roll on a cold day you could pull it apart and steam would rise and the aroma would sometimes knock you off by your feet (I was still walking around then just before my accident). I think the roles cost $.50 or something like that. I could always smell them as they cooked in my third period Class.

Just another sensory sensation from my past that I devoutly wish I could bring forward in time and now. Those flavors are no longer exist except in my memories. The people who made those flavors no longer exist to shame today's kids will never know the delight of real school lunches.A