< Shudder > < left eye starts to involuntarily twitch >
You were forced to eat those “Swanson” hell on earth monstrosities too? First, thank Og you survived. Second, while I admit my mother was not the best cook, when she and Dad went out to a cocktail party and left one of those, I always felt like I must have done something wrong.
I mean, this is punishment, right?
So… from left to right… the potatoes. What the hell? That’s no potato… no potato was mashed or even smashed to make that. That was squirted out of a hose and I could almost still taste the rubber.
“Just put butter on it.”
“Why? Is it hungry?”
It always had to be probed with a fork to make sure nothing was lurking beneath the surface because a lot of the time… some things were. Strange things.
“That’s a pea.”
“Yes honey.”
“Why is there a pea in my mashed potatoes?”
“It must have shifted over there when they were shipping the box from the warehouse.”
“But Mom, the vegetable is string beans. Where did a pea even come from? That box was sealed. I saw you open it”
“Maybe there was a dinner being made next to it and it fell into this dinner.”
“So…a pea, trying to escape it’s own horrible TV dinner, jumped over to this one? Did it shout ’ I’m free! I’m free! ’ right before drowning under the mashed potato hose? ( I could almost hear the pea screaming as the hose went <splork!> )
I mean, that’s a pretty cruel way to die. Did it piss off a Peapod Mafia Boss?”
Moving right along was the desert which you were not allowed to eat until you had eaten everything else. It looked good, it smelled good, but don’t touch it. Why? Because it was boobytrapped! That’s right… under that sweet muffin top was a fruit filling that was (seemingly) at a constant boil of 212 degrees. This temperature was seemingly maintained until every other item that was considered edible (a likely story) was consumed. It was so hot, it could raise a blister on a finger, so you’d better not get any of it anywhere near your mouth.
Next came the string beans. For years I honestly thought that ‘string beans’ were called string beans because if you held one up, it would bend and flop over onto it’s side… like trying to hold up string. They were limp, green, tasteless, and most definitely Dead.
One of the very few ways to get any flavor on them at all was to add ‘a condiment’… but in our house there were very few of them. There was Soy Sauce, which would make you stroke right out. There was salt, which for years was what I thought happened when you left Soy Sauce out too long in the sun. There was pepper. There were ‘cooking spices’ which we were forbidden to touch (“…because they’re for cooking, that’s why. Now eat your beans”). And there was ketchup. Yes, out of hunger and desperation I sometimes added ketchup to my string beans. It was better if you added a lot of pepper to the ketchup.
(Decades Later- “Why do you eat so much salsa?” “Oh… no reason.” )
And then… you finally got to… the chicken. Honestly… WTF did they do to that animal? Did they kill it with some sort of experimental death ray? Its bones were rubbery and they… bent! You could literally bend the bones 90 degrees and they would not break. ( Yes, I wasn’t supposed to play with my food, but really… was this… food? ) That chicken also always had some kind of gravy/grease to it that thinking back was more like yellow sludge or slime. What was that all about? Did it lose a fight with “The Blob”? Nah, couldn’t be… The Blob would have eaten it. Then again, this was a Swanson’s TV Dinner chicken. Any respectable Blob would take one taste and just Know that it could do better.
I had a mental picture of The Blob thinking to itself, “That’s Disgusting! I’ve got to get this taste out of my mouth. Anything… eat Anything else. Must get this taste out of me.
Wait, is that Soy Sauce?”
{ And that, my friends, was how scientists finally killed “The Blob”. }
So, after you’ve scraped the leftover yellow bits of blob off of the chicken, you’d come to it’s rubbery hide. Now, this was no ordinary rubbery hide. You’d have to literally saw for a minute… maybe two… to get through this hide. You had to do it very gently too, because if you used too much pressure, the plastic knife would snap and then that was it: no chicken for you!
On some of them I wondered if this was actual skin or if some joker had put a diver’s wetsuit on the chicken. I even checked the back to see if there were marks left by an air tank. Could that chicken have SCUBA dived? For what purpose? And if so, where was it’s tiny mask? Lost in the potatoes no doubt. < Splork!>
“Mom, how come you didn’t just leave me with McDonalds food?”
“I wanted you to have Real food. You still want to grow up to be president, don’t you?
Well, you’ll never grow up to be president eating McDonalds food. Only Idiots eat that…”