How cool is THAT? Thank you!! 
If we’re going to get into sandwiches, I have to add my favorite - cream cheese and peanuts. It was tricky to make if the cream cheese was too hard, because it would tear the white bread, but you spread a thick layer on both slices of bread, then packed on as many salted peanuts as you could fit and squooshed the slices of bread together till you see the peanut lumps. Eat carefully, because the peanuts can fall out.
My classmates would look at me like something was wrong when I brought this for lunch, but boy oh boy was it good! I may have to buy some cream cheese and peanuts…
When I told my husband about this thread, he mentioned that he would frequently get peanut butter sandwiches with a bowl of chili to dip it in.
In grade school, the lunch ladies would always serve peanut butter sandwiches with chili.
We used to do the popcorn and milk thing that Little Nemo mentioned for Sunday night suppers. My maternal grandparents also did cornbread and buttermilk in an iced tea glass, eaten with an iced tea spoon. Granny called it a hillbilly milkshake.
At our house growing up, one of my mom’s specialties was stretchburgers. Basically, it was hamburger mixed up with onion, egg, saltines (or bread, rice or oatmeal) like you would meatloaf, but pan fry it like a hamburger. It was a good way to make a pound or two of ground beef stretch to feed a whole mess of people.
Maybe it had something to do with my parents coming from opposite ends of the socio-economic spectrum, but Saturday evenings at my house was always Beenie Belugie Night: a can of Van De Camps Pork & Beans mixed with a 9-oz tin of Beluga Caviar, spread liberally atop a slice of Melba Toast. Wash that down with a tall, cool glass of Bosco, and we’re talking gastronomic delight! Mom would purée a portion in the blender and bottle it for baby Sis to suck down, too.
OK, I lied…we used the cheaper Sevruga caviar, not Beluga…:o
But, a regular dish we really used to make was scrapple & egg sandwiches: 2 slices of fried scrapple topped with a fried egg and catchup, between 2 slices of toasted Arnold bread. Not too coronary artery-friendly, but delicious!
My husband still prefers his hamburgers this way. I’ll usually cut up some bell pepper and celery, too, just like I do for meatloaf. Me? I prefer just plain ground beef, with either salt or soy sauce on it.
And I will grill sliced veggies in olive oil and top a steak or chop with them. Any combo of onions, mushrooms, bell peppers (any color), celery, or carrots. We both need to eat more veggies, and this is a painless way to get another half serving in.
My mother used to eat that too, sans onions. I’ve never tried it myself.
She would also do a homemade version of Rice a Roni - rice, broken up vermicelli, browned onions/hamburger and a can of tomatoes. We scarfed that up regularly when I was a kid.
I like to cook up a basic white sauce and add sauteed onions, mushrooms, and some chopped hard boiled eggs, then serve over toast. Sometimes I’ll get fancy and throw in some curry powder. A very handy recipe around Easter time.
My Mom used to make what came to be known in our family as “Cheese Things in the Oven.”
Take a slice of bread and butter it. On top, lay a slice of processed cheese (American cheese or similar). On top of that, lay a slice of tomato. On top of that, some cut-up green onions. A hint of salt and pepper. Put under the broiler for a few minutes, until the cheese has melted–and voila: Cheese Things in the Oven. Eat with a knife and fork.
As for sandwiches, Mom had some great ones. “Yogi Bear” sandwiches were buttered bread on which was put lettuce and peanut butter (because in the cartoons, Yogi was always eating sandwiches that seemed to have lettuce in them and Mom felt that adding peanut butter would be a good protein for us kids). And there were brown-sugar sandwiches: two slices of bread, butter, and brown sugar.
Hm. Thinking about it, I got me a hankering for a Yogi Bear right now. Do I have any fresh lettuce in the fridge…?
I’ve seen this dish around in my family and others. It always struck me as the food of extreme poverty.
In the second documentary of “The Lost boys of Sudan” (I forgot the name of it) the men crumbled crackers into a cup, added milk and ate it with a spoon.
I recall eating a lot of fried bologna with BBQ sauce and also pickle and mustard sandwiches as a kid.
LOVE fried bologna!
One oddity I just realized is that we NEVER had leftovers. People talk about dressing up leftovers in various ways, or having a whole meal of different bits of leftover… never happened in my house. After considering various explanations, because there’s no way my parents would have wasted food – I think my parents, who had a home-based business for most of my childhood, must have always had the dinner leftovers for their lunch.
It’s funny but I never thought about it until now.
Anyway my parents were also whole-foods-eating-hippies and my father is a vegetarian. So no fried bologna sandwiches or processed-cheese-anything for me!
But my grandma used to make me a toasted bagel, with a scrambled egg, a slice of American cheese, and a thick coating of Smoked Salmon flavor Philly whipped cream cheese. It sounds kind of gross (philly smoked salmon flavor is basically Salty Nitrates flavor) but to me, it was nommy. Of course, being the exact sort of thing my parents would forbid in their own home, it was deliciously contraband as well.
I am so making this. TONIGHT, if not sooner.
The Cherry Household: Pioneering Dog Diarrhea Treatment since 1968.
My dad did the whole leftovers-in-a-pan thing, but no one else would eat it. This is because it was leftovers fried to a crisp, with the addition of enough sliced onion to make a room of chefs teary, enough garlic to make a batch of sausage and so much pepper the whole neighbourhood would sneeze.
I’d melt cheese on the top for “frosting”.
If you use food colouring in mashed potatoes as icing it’s actually an excellent April Fools joke.
Disconcerting and not what you expect but delicious anyway.
If we were feeling really ambitious, we’d whip up a ketchup/brown sugar/mustard glaze to use as frosting.
So… y’all had lots of walk-in closets with plant lights in them?
*Sorry… couldn’t resist. I’m bad. I’ll go quietly now. *
No, it’s worse.
Market Research
flees screaming as the villagers take out their torches and pitchforks…