School Lunch

I was planning the week ahead, food-wise, and remembered this is spring break.

That means I don’t have to make the boys’ lunches.

And yes, before we read any further, they are perfectly capable of making their lunches themselves, but half the time they ‘forget’ or they ‘ran out of time’.

They take their lunch three times a week and buy it at school the other two.

If they ate at school everyday, we’d be in the poor-house. Everything in the school cafeteria is ala carte. It has a grill to special order burgers. There are chips, fries, mozzarella sticks, smoothie machines, and a baked potato bar.

It’s insane what they can buy for lunch.

When I went to Jurassic High, you had one lunch. And everyone ate the same thing. When I was a Sr. we got a salad bar. With three, mind you, three types of dressing-French, Ranch, and Thousand Island.

Big doings, indeed.

It cost extra though, so only the rich kids got to eat the salad bar.

The rest of us had rectangle pizza and corn.

I know, I know. Everyone talks about the rectangle pizza.

Why?

Because we loved the rectangle pizza! Everyone ate school lunch on pizza day.

Prissy always threw a fit that the school served corn with pizza.

Why that’s nothing but pure starch! Corn isn’t a vegetable, it’s a starch. I’m not paying for you kids to each starch for lunch!

Mom, Bubby and I qualify for free lunch, remember?

It’s still garbage!

Chili day was also pretty sweet. I remember sitting in Algebra class and about 9:00 in morning you’d smell the onions cooking down the hall.

I can still conjure up that scent whenever I walk into that building-onions and the smell of the gym. What is it about the smell of the gym? I could be blind-folded, flown thousands of miles, turned around in circles with a sack over my head and give me one whiff of a high school gym and I can tell you exactly where I am.

But I digress. That’s another post.

So chili day was a treat. But it wasn’t the chili that was so amazing. It was what they served with the chili that brought everyone to the cafeteria in droves. The frenzy would start about 10 o’clock.

Kids who never ate school lunch started borrowing money. Fights would break out because there would be ‘cuts’ in line. Excuses to go to early lunch period would be imagined in case the cafeteria ran out.

This food item still remains one of my favorite in memory.

I’ll give you a hint, it’s just as incongruous with chili as pizza is with corn, but they served this item with chili every single time. (You think Prissy griped about pizza day? You should have heard her with this one.)

Go ahead. Take a stab at it. (Get it? Lunch-fork-stab? Ha!)

I’ll give you some time to digest. Ha-Ha! Ha! Ha. ha. um. uh.

…yeah.