So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

[tonyb]

Can't say I'd want it every day, but I've never objected to liver.

Chicken liver is great in omelettes. I had it frequently at the old 13 Coins on Boren Avenue North, over by the Seattle Times building,

 

[2jakes]

Oysters!
I just don’t understand how the first dude that opened up a shell
and think...”man that looks yummy!

 

[tonyb]

I don't remember specifically what the food item was, but Mom tried that on me once. My response was something to the effect of, "Well, pack it up and ship it off to 'em then, 'cause I'm not eating it." Never got that guilt trip again.

An admittedly less-than-tasteful variation overheard at one of my regular late-night haunts during my carousing years was "Drink up! Starving children in Ethiopia have no bourbon."

 

[tonyb]

As long as the steer wasn't a heavy drinker liver well prepared is greatly underrated as cuisine. Grill those onions and bring it with a side of breaded tomatoes.

The Old Man, who insisted we eat whatever was prepared for dinner, wouldn't touch liver himself. I learned this years later, when Mom let it slip that she made liver only during those blessedly peaceful stretches when the folks were living apart.

 

[HanauMan]

I don't mind liver but I always pass on the onions.

Something I haven't eaten in decades is cow's brains. I liked the stuff when I lived in Germany but it isn't something I've tried since I was a kid. I recall the brain was very soft (d'uh) and melt - in - the - mouth, very nice with melted butter. I guess that since BSE it may not even be a legal food anymore. My friends wouldn't touch the stuff but my mom always shopped on the economy when we were living abroad and loved tasting the local cuisine.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^^^
Never been a picky eater myself. I'm willing to try most anything considered food wherever I might find myself. I'd eat insects if that's what the locals were having. But fear of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is enough to steer (har har) me clear of bovine neural tissue of any sort.

Ain't big on pork chitlins, either. I've heard they're okay if prepared right. I've yet to have them prepared right, I suppose.

 

[TimeWarpWife]

The first apartment I ever had, a dinky two-room thing I shared with a roommate, we only had two plates, two bowls, and one knife, fork and spoon each. Dishes tended not to be a problem. I've often thought of giving away all my crockery and going back to that system, but then I'd end up breaking the one plate, and I hate to hold macaroni and cheese in my hands while eating it. And if I broke the bowl too, with soup it'd be even worse.

Paper plates - easy clean up.

 

[HudsonHawk]

This ⇩ was the version of that ⇧, that I grew up with - they were everywhere in NJ (just checked, look like they were a Baltimore-based company then, so, as you said, a regional brand a few hundred miles down the coast).

View attachment 113209

We got Charles Chips shipped all the way down to Florida.

And being gone for a few days, I'm getting caught up reading about Hendrix, potato chips and hot law professors. This thread just zooms by.

 

[HudsonHawk]

Doritos. I love doritos. Especially while out fishing. Doritos, beef jerky and beer.

THIS is a fishing lunch:

 

[TimeWarpWife]

It was back about 1970 when MAD Magazine ran an Al Jaffee cartoon about "The Incredible Shrinking Candy Bar". It displayed how small the package would be without the interior cardboard tray. I've also recently noticed that sugar is no longer sold in 5 lb. bags. They are all now 4 lb. bags. (10 lb. bags remain the same.).

I remember back the 70s during the sugar shortage the candy companies promising that once the shortage was over the candy bars would go right back to their original size and price. Yeah, right - they went back to their original sizes, but were called "giant" size and sold at a much higher price.

 

[LizzieMaine]

There was a time when the == ha ha ha == Fun Size bar was approximately the size of a full-size bar cut in half. Now it's more "bite" size, which is nobody's idea of Fun. A Fun Size box of Milk Duds contains three Duds, which might be mild bemusement on a good day, but is not in any way Fun.

 

[GHT]

^^^^^^^
Never been a picky eater myself. I'm willing to try most anything considered food wherever I might find myself.

Not a picky eater is how I would describe myself too, but. And the but doesn't come much bigger than this. When you live in a country that consumes as much as sixty and a quarter billion, that's: 60,250,000,000 cups of tea a year, and you don't like tea, worse, tea drinkers think that a spoonful of instant powder is real coffee, and I hate instant coffee, such distaste marks me out as a very picky individual.

 

[tonyb]

Not a picky eater is how I would describe myself too, but. And the but doesn't come much bigger than this. When you live in a country that consumes as much as sixty and a quarter billion, that's: 60,250,000,000 cups of tea a year, and you don't like tea, worse, tea drinkers think that a spoonful of instant powder is real coffee, and I hate instant coffee, such distaste marks me out as a very picky individual.

I fear I have become what I once loathed: a coffee snob.

I don't much care where my coffee was grown or any of that, but I usually drink it cold, and a coffee's attributes, favorable and otherwise, are most apparent when consumed and that temperature. I much prefer a dark roasted arabica, brewed at least double strength if using a drip maker. We have a good espresso machine here, which gets used almost exclusively for the missus's morning coffee with steamed milk, although I occasionally make a couple shots for myself with it, which get immediately poured over ice.

I can enjoy a cup of regular old Folger's or Maxwell House or whatever brand of relatively lightly roasted robusta, provided it's fresh and hot.

 

[scottyrocks]

Costumes like this that try to "capture" the 1920s-40s gangster look. No one dressed like this! It looks ridiculous, and I'm tired of seeing crap like this when looking for actual vintage examples. And then this leads people to believe that this was the definitive bad-ass style of the time. What the mob were wearing may look outlandish today, and was probably ostracized at the time, it's nowhere near like these modern renditions.

Perfect match:

 

[scottyrocks]

Here's what I remember from the time about the '76 version: I was 12 and Jessica Lange.

I was 16. While watching that, I would have believed it was possible to have a coronary at 16.

 

[scottyrocks]

Whilst out at the dinner/dance this evening a good friend told me about an American show called Jay Walking, Jay Leno goes about sticking a microphone at the unsuspecting. He asks simple questions like: "How many stars on the US flag? From that I found a link to: Americans, ignorant & proud. It was toe curlingly embarrassing, but Americans, I have good news. You do not have the monopoly on stupidity.

I have learned, after a couple of experiences, to walk the other way when people with a TV camera and microphone approach me. Regardless of what you say, they can make anything that comes out of your mouth fit to their wants and needs for the point they are trying to make.

 

[Zombie_61]

Oysters! I just don’t understand how the first dude that opened up a shell and think...”man that looks yummy!

I ate an oyster once; it tasted like the parking lot at Ports of Call.

THIS is a fishing lunch:

I'd probably be okay with the RC and Moon Pies, but mixing that with Vienna Sausages jus' don't seem right.

Going back to liver for a moment, when my wife was growing up her mom would occasionally make liver for the family dinner but prepare it similarly to the way she made veal cutlets. She'd tell the kids it was veal, but my wife would notice the difference in flavor. When she questioned it, mom would shrug it off and say, "Oh, I must have forgotten an ingredient." One day my wife walked into the kitchen and "caught" mom making liver, and that was the end of that.

For me liver would be a "last resort" meal, only to be ingested if it was the only thing available to eat and my life depended on it; even then I'd probably flip a coin.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Liver is the organ that filters all the poisons and toxins out of the blood, and people want to eat it? I gape with horror at the deluded gastronomes who think "tomalley," the green substance inside a lobster's body should be eaten: a lobster is the bottom-dragger of the ocean, and every contamination in the water ends up in that green stuff, which is nothing more or less than the lobster's liver. No thanx, bub.

On the other hand, my very favorite food as a little child was heart. I enjoyed telling fellow first-graders, who asked what I was having for lunch, that I was eating a calf's heart. "Wanna bite?"

As for onions, I'm violently allergic to them, and react rather explosively at the slightest tiny flake of onion in anything I eat. The only onion product I can eat without pretty much killing myself is "Funyuns," which tells you how much actual onion they contain.

 

[scottyrocks]

The thing is, people can blame the Education System all they want -- but the best way to get kids interested in The Pleasures Of The Mind is to expose them to those pleasures when they *are* kids. If you want kids to be interested in serious reading, have serious books around the house. If you want kids to appreciate music, expose them to it. If you want kids to think, show them that you, yourself, think.

And don't be snobby about media -- there's a lot of good media out there. I didn't learn to enjoy opera, modern dance, and jazz because I took courses on them in college. I learned that they were enjoyable when I was five from watching "Mister Rogers."

I know pre-school teachers who have classical music playing in the background in their classrooms much of the day. The children hear it, and may not be conscious of it. But it becomes familiar to them. It is also calming, which is always a good thing, at least where I teach.

And that can lead to a desire, later on, to pursue what it was they heard when they were younger. People like the familiar and tend to want to return to surroundings that make them comfortable.

 

[scottyrocks]

That's why I pay little mind to most current popular entertainment. I just don't have enough time left to spend it on diversions that don't compel. And besides, I'll learn of the good stuff eventually. I don't need to be the first to know.

I'm the same way. I watch virtually no modern TV production, especially the reality-type shows - not even Deadliest Catch anymore.

What usually happens is that a family member will recommend an recently out-of-production show airing On-Demand (watching episodes of Person of Interest these days), and we'll binge watch them that way. And usually I'm the only one who hasn't already seen them.