Do they still make those? I grew up mesmerized by the little devils, I really enjoyed their presence in our cupboard, but the visual of the contents didn't live up to the promise of the little guy with the fork... :(

Yes, they do. Still spreads on crackers with the consistency, look, and smell of catfood, only saltier. Yummy in a way that only stuff like that on a cracker can be. I think they've expanded their product offerings to include a devilled chicken variety. One thing that I actually appreciate about it ... the unlabelled can is still wrapped in paper that you have to pull off first. I'm glad they haven't changed that.

I was very hearily disappointed when SPAM stopped using the key.

It's not food, but I keep non-food items in my freezer. I did some 'binding' back a few years ago and that is still in there (and, working, too) and I've a list of worries that I wrote out and keep in there--whenever I want to worry about thos things I stop myself by saying, "oh. that's in the freezer. It's being taken care of!" and then go on my way.

Foodwise--I've a bag consisting of three dried craisin's...why am I keeping a bag of just three?

Polenta can be tasty, cut in rounds half an inch thick and fried as is... a starch, for dinner. You can also bust an entire chub up into a bowl of mush, and thereby achieve... corn meal mush! Serve lightly salted, w/brown sugar to make this bland starch fun to eat as a breakfast cereal.

Or whop some of it entirely into its little granules and incorporate into pancakes; somehow pancakes are improved by a bit of corn content.

Clam chowder, dude. Manhattan or Boston. Lay hold of clams, build it from the ground up and decide if you do it better than Campbell's does. Some do -- around here, Neptune's Net, right at the county line on US 1, is justly famous, and there's another outfit whose name I can't remember over Malibu way whose chowder can fight the Net's to a draw any day.

Oh, oh, what a great idea ... I wish ...

UG. Are you from the south? Do you really know about corn meal, Polenta?
As in that was the one of the 2 or 3 grains you had to eat. :bolt:

Get a rope.

I used to cajole my folks into eating it so I could unwrap the paper. latent ocd? maybe. ditto on the keys, and pop tops that actually came off and before I got used to them, I pined for the church keys...

As it's just me and the cats I have some bad choices in my cupboard, but no mysteries.

We used to have them when I lived with my parents though. Most were prizes from raffles or leftovers from hampers.

I don't know whether churches (in these days of credit) still run hamper schemes, but we had one every Christmas when I was growing up. Mum & Dad paid a little every week -they were both paid weekly in cash in those days. A few days before Christmas, Father H delivered the hamper. Every year there would be 1 or 2 things that we had no intention of eating. So they went to the Tins & Bottles raffle stall at the soonest school or church fete.

It was an ongoing childhood entertainment - watching the Dads try to win bottles of wine or whisky and walking away with tinned ham or fruit salad (not ours I hasten to add - we ate both of those in our house) I'm sure some of the more random items circulated for months before finding a home. I remember artichoke hearts causing much consternation on year - is it vegetable? meat? what do you do with it? Well I never claimed I had a sophisticated childhood...

I remember my Mum being mournful when I finally realised I liked tinned hotdog sausages at the age of 13.... "Oh SG, all those years of giving them away!"

tinned hotdog sausages

Around here they are called VIannEEs ,

I won a hamper as a raffle prize about a year ago. I took it as a personal challenge to try to incorporate all of the contents into our household diet. It was an interesting exercise, but I think there were a couple of things I didn't manage to - can't remember what they were at the moment.

Hey. I like deviled ham. I'll even eat armour potted meat, though deviled ham is better.

Are we talking food here or dirty clothes. :eek:

Hamper must be a Brit-ism. A hamper here almost invariably refers to a receptacle for dirty clothes.

Nah; I'm not only living in California, I was born here too, though considerably upstate, during my dad's last year in the Army. And Mom and Dad were both pretty much Bostonians -- hence the baked bean recipe over on the "most recent recipe thread" which needs something to bump it.

I've tried doing up my own cornmeal mush, and it tastes just like -- cornmeal mush. Pretty good if you're tired of oatmeal. Seems you need to put the cornmeal in a mixing bowl and put some water in to soak it good before you add it to boiling salted water.

I've never learned how to make grits so they won't taste like the box they came in.