If there's one thing this zine has forced me to do it's been to closely examine the food, eating, and drinking habits that I grew up around. Amazingly, I still subscribe to a handful of these ideas to this day... how Else Do you Explain my Infrequent but Insatiable need for Mom's signature Lenten dish of scrambled eggs, mac & cheese, and canned peas?! Here are Some other Oddball faves that've Left ME scratchin' my head for 35 years...

Seasonal Beverages
Nobody in my household drank (legally), so I wasn't privy to the socially accepted belief that gin and tonics were like white shoes — never before Memorial Day and never after Labor Day. However, Ma had her own similarly strange, stringent rules for drinks like iced tea, lemonade, and hot chocolate. Nothing would set the woman's head a spinning like ordering hot chocolate with whipped cream at Howard Johnson's on a blistering July evening. And, only now, is iced tea viewed as an acceptable winter evening dinner drink.

Food-Specific Beverages
If it really was too hot for hot chocolate and you wanted to freak Mom out, nothing did the trick like breaking a Cardinal Beverage Rule. You see, not only were there certain beverages for certain times of the year, but there were even certain beverages for certain meals! You'd think she was some kind of frustrated sommelier the way she'd match the drink with the meal being served. Soda was for any kind of pasta (including Chili Mac), while milk was reserved for carb-heavy menus featuring the likes of meatloaf and mashed potatoes. Juices were never had with dinner, except for tomato juice on Thanksgiving. Which brings us to...

The Thanksgiving Without A Beverage
Even the best of us can produce a holiday bird that ends up a little on the dry side. With the different internal roasting temperatures, stuffing, noisy kids, and drunk houseguests it's almost inevitable. That dark meat might be tender and juicy, but if you're not careful the breast meat's gonna be as dry, suffocating and fraught with peril as the Valley of Fire! For some reason, our Turkey Day meal was always accompanied by a thimbleful of tomato juice that'd be used in the pre-meal/post-blessing toast. And you'd better ration that puppy because there's no room for drinks on a table piled high with grub and surrounded by twelve people! Year after year this torturous endeavor became an unspoken battle of wills that lasted till one of us crumbled like a day old coffee cake and clawed their way to the kitchen for milk, water, soda, anything to drink with the meal! Just don't try and make any iced tea buster... it is November after all!!

Sick Food
In the days before we had tvs, VCRs and hardcore porn in our rooms, the only way to commandeer the family's lone portable tube was on a sick day. You'd get that ancient, black and whiter wheeled into your room along with a little bell to ring if you wanted the channel changed. I kid you not! What a gig! Other sick day traditions included the black metal TV tray that usually brought light, easy-on-the-tummy fare like buttered toast with applesauce and maybe a glass of flat soda. Mmmmmm, makes we want to stay home tomorrow just thinking about it!

Dessert Corn
Of all my Mom's bizzaro food thingies, this is the one that typically raises the most eyebrows. Somehow, at some point, corn on the cob became an end of the meal palate cleanser. An aperitif of starchy goodness, if you will. I don't know if it was due to a lack of plate space, poor timing, absentmindedness, or who the hell knows what, but corn on the cob became something we had after we'd finished the rest of our meal! "That was great steak Mom, glad I left some room for corn on the cob," was not an odd thing to hear drifting from our back porch on a warm summer's eve. Perhaps this explains my overall indifference to the concept of dessert. Where others see mounds of ice cream topped by whipped cream and chocolate jimmies, I see myself flossing hunks of corn and pepper out of my teeth!

The Heart Attack Breakfast (HAB)
The HAB was no laughing matter in my family; in fact, it was deadly serious. No pun intended. While other families had mid-week meal traditions like "Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti Night," our post-church, pre-televised sporting event refueling was nothing less than a religious experience somehow overlooked by the Catholic Church. The HAB consists of three core components: bacon, fried eggs, white toast with butter. On occasion Ma might be feeling a little zany, a bit kooky, a tad crazy and she'd throw in the ham steak, pork roll, or if we'd been good, scrapple. But, for years and years and years it went something like this: cut in half and and fry an entire package of bacon in recycled grease that came from a coffee can kept in the fridge; remove the crisp bacon from the pan, and make a pretense about draining it on a paper plate; fry the eggs sunny side up (I never knew over easy eggs existed until college!) until the edges of the whites get kinda hard and brown; plate the eggs, pass the bacon, and top the whole thing off with white toast with butter and glasses of whole milk. The grease left in the frying pan was then returned to the coffee can and put in the fridge for the following week. Ma would typically sop up the remnants of the bacon grease with the last few pieces of buttered toast. To this day my family marvels at the fact that my father has a pacemaker and a faulty ticker while blood continues to churn through Ma's bloodstream without any known impediment.

Six Degrees of a Bowl of Bacon
This is a fairly recent addition to Mom's Weird World of Food Habits. Personally, I think it grew out of the Heart Attack Breakfast (see above), but nobody's really sure because: a) we haven't been able to carbon date the findings; and, b) the mothballs Mom tosses around the joint tend to make everything appear younger than it really is. So, it could be an old family tradition, but nobody's quite sure. Walk into my parent's house any day of the week and don't be surprised to find The Bacon Bowl. It might be on the counter, it might be in the fridge, but it's probably there. Lurking. Waiting for Mom to offer you a sandwich. Or bacon & eggs. Or, maybe just a strip of bacon to cure what ails ya. My theory is that after we all left the house, Mom was unable to adjust the amount of food she was cooking and was still frying up a package of bacon every Sunday. At some point, Dad's arteries started fighting back and leftovers inevitable ensued!

The Best of the Rest
A quick call to my brother brought back a flood of more weird food issues than I have space for. I'd forgotten about "No Dessert with Applesauce" and had blocked out the eyebrow-raising combination of "Farina and Baby Apricots." And, where would we be without "The Mother Combo" of kielbasa, sauerkraut, roast pork, green beans, applesauce and mashed potatoes? Years from now, my curious ancestors will identify it as the wellspring from which all other combos emerged!

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[This article originally appeared in THG #5]