As long as we're headed down memory lane with Binaca, it only seems appropriate to think about what else has been hanging around since lunch came in a lunchbox. Two dishes have yet to leave my diet, despite the passage of two decades.
The first is a dish that launched my career as a published author: ants on a log. My entry in the kindergarten cookbook required no actual cooking -- just the spreading of peanut butter on a celery stalk and the careful placement of raisins to resemble the aforementioned insects.
It's a food that I still eat once a week, usually when I'm feeling too lazy to cook. It's where my brain goes when I need a default meal.
The second is arguably my guiltiest pleasure: the salt-laden circular comfort of Dinty Moore Beef Stew. It was the food that resided at friends' houses -- never my own -- yet I was free to enjoy it in college and as a bachelor.
The soupy mess of beef, carrots and potatoes is one I'll eat cold out of the can -- no styrofoam packaging for me. I choose to remember it in the same manner in which it has always been available; Dinty Moore should take a little work today's microwavable containers are merely shortcuts to sin.
These are the two true holdouts from my childhood. The neon orange of macaroni n' cheese is now a muted yellow; Nestle Toll House keeps raising food-safety red flags in my mind; and hamburgers are high-end. But it's good to know there are some foods that I still don't have to give up even as I find myself more firmly entrenched as an adult in society.
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