Photo by Renee Comet
Foodstyling by Lisa Cherkasky
My favorite lunch when I was about 8 was a peanut butter and banana sandwich, slogged down, glug, glug, glug, with egg nog. Used to walk home from school for lunch – this was Wisconsin, mind you, and kind of a long time ago. The lunch break was from 11:50 to 1:00. Why I remember that I do not know. The egg nog recipe was/is in the Betty Crocker Blender cookbook, spiral bound and cheery. Made you want to just tear into it and blend up a storm.
The sandwich was a proper sandwich, neither open-faced nor on an English muffin. English muffin indeed! Nevah. At least not for lunch.
The nog recipe is 1 cup milk (must be full fat, yeah!), 1 egg, 1 tablespoon sugar, dash nutmeg. That’s it. An everyday, unfancy nog. That I will never forget. Course now I’m terrified to give it to anyone. Hate to have to haul the body out after salmonella-induced expiration. Guess that’s not funny. Clearly I have never had salmonella or I wouldn’t be making fun. Hand slap.
Good popover recipe in that book too, particularly if you view popovers as primarily a hot-butter-ferrying system.
That lunch sounds really thick to me now. Wonder if I could choke it down. Bet I could. Especially in front of an 11-inch black and white in my mother’s Appleton “breakfast nook”.
Afternote: Dang it all. Got the book wrong, but hate to think of that cause it loosens the mortar of my childhood memories. The popover/blender book is/was The Blender Cookbook, by Ann Seranne and Eileen Gaden. No happy young adults on the cover, no egg nog recipe between the covers. My brain has combined this book, much used and loved, with the Betty Crocker Boys and Girls Cookbook, and a phantom source for the nog recipe.
This may require some deep digging for recovered memory. Guess what though, don’t wanna go down that dark alley, who knows what my be lurking? A memory mugger, eager to knock me down and snatch my precious childhood. Naw, I’ll stay on the sofa and lounge in blissful delusion.
The Lunch Encounter 