childhood food memories meme

how fun, i've been tagged by cookiecrumb at i'm mad and i eat to participate in a meme dealing with childhood food memories...specifically the top five childhood food memories i miss. or rather missed. which would be all childhood memories since it seems to me that i pretty much missed out on the all those carefree childhood memories. i was expelled from the womb at about the age of seventy and have been doing a pretty good imitation of bette davis in "baby jane" ever since.

blessedly, i do not have any actual autobiographical photographic evidence of said times, but here is a dramatized, made for tv representation of the aforementioned epoch. race, gender and location all changed to protect the identity of the innocent.


so, back to the meme at hand, which is: name the top five childhood food memories i miss:

1. "soft rice". martha stewart re-dubbed this as "japanese risotto". even martha couldn't take the tarnish off of this hardcore asian peasant dish which is really just what the chinese call congee. a very soupy, thick short grain rice porridge (yes, porridge)with miso and cabbage and an egg cracked in and stirred up to thicken the mess at the end. the proportions were probaby about 1/4 c. short grain rice to 2 cup water and 3 T. miso and 1/8 cabbage and 1 egg. i got this every time i was sick, so you might imagine i have a sort of love-hate relationship with the stuff.

2. "hungarian goulash". my fathers specialty. i have no idea where the name came from since i've since learned that the actual hungarian goulash bears absolutely no resemblance to the hamburger, italian sausage, elbow macaroni in a tomato sauce slop that i happily slurped up and still fondly dream of. what can i say except "upstate new york"?

3. "rabbit stew". yikes, i know, i know. poor little bugs bunny. but i can't tell you how darn tender that stewed rabbit leg was. the meat just fell off of the bone, and the veggies that it came with (potatoes, onion, celery, carrot, a bit of tomato - yummy). too bad it turned out to be my pet rabbit oscar to whom i read bedtime stories in his hutch at twilight (and you ask why i became a vegetarian?).

4. dinty moore "beef" stew. honest to god my brother and i used to fight over the stuff. even though we both agreed that it smelled exactly
like the canned horsemeat (kalcan, i recall) dogfood our giant one-eyed german shepard used to eat. this comes in at a dead heat to the canned hormel "tamales", but much ahead of the underwood "deviled meats" line.

5. "meatloaf". i put that in quotations since it was a japanese version of the american classic. for sure there was some groundbeef but as for the rest, well, at least she tried.

and now for the hard part. the rules. did any of you read "the rules" when it came out - that little handbook about how to manipulate a man into that thing that they say us females desire the most - no, not a maid or a big, furry, friendly rotweiler - but rather a mate.... but anyhoo, here are four people i shall forward this meme to:
1. brownbreadicecream
2. simply recipes
3. obachans kitchen balcony and garden
4. asian vegan

and here is the next step, which smells very strongly of a chain letter: it is to remove the blog at #1 from the following list (which is the uppermost link from hence this meme came) and bump every one up one place, adding your blog's name in the #5 spot; link to each of the other blogs for the desired effect,whatever that might be. fingers crossed i get a dollar in the mail sometime soon....or an autographed picture of shaun cassidy...
1. pumpkin pie bungalow
2. once upon a feast
3. belly-timber
4. i'm mad and i eat
5. bunnyfoot