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The Grape Pop

CRUSH_GRAPE_20

Now I’m using this pic since I couldn’t find a pic of the old glass pop bottles they used to have when I was a kid and you could get a deposit back at the store when you’d return the bottles. I always liked walking up with some bottles to the store a couple of blocks away since I could usually get a candy bar or two.

One summer, there were around three or four empty pop bottles on the floor by the fridge, no caps on them and I decided I’d take them up to the store. The one, a grape Crush bottle, appeared to have a mouthful of pop in the bottom, keep in mind I was around eight years old, I tipped the bottle up to my mouth to get the last mouthful of pop and all of a sudden I felt things crawling in my mouth…It was ants, I had a mouthful of moving ants! Luckily I was standing right beside the sink and spat them out, oh it was so gross! Needless to say, I’ve never gone for the last mouthful of anything in an uncapped bottle again!

The Chocolate Covered Macadamia Nuts

chocnuts

Another of the funny stories I can think of about food, when I was a little girl, my mom and her parents and I went to Hawaii. As many people know, the delicious macadamia nuts are grown there and are widely available, as are the chocolate covered ones. So we’d gotten a box of these chocolate covered macadamia nuts and brought them back up to the hotel room to share and enjoy.

We didn’t eat the whole box in one sitting of course, so put them in the drawer under the telephone where the phone book and bible was that was between the two beds. The next day I went to have a few of the chocolates and decided not to eat any when I saw ants crawling on them. How ants could get there on a not ground floor room and in a drawer, I will never know, so I just put the lid back on the box and closed the drawer. I mentioned it to my mom and she just left them there. A while later we laughed when we came back in the room and saw my grandfather eating the chocolates, seemingly unaware they had some ants crawling on them. LOL, we teased him for years after that about it.

The Chicken Bones

I thought some funny food stories would be amusing to include as well, don’t all of us have funny stories about food?

bones

Many years ago I was into making soup, I’ve gone through various phases of being into preparing certain kinds of foods for a while, then moved on to other things.

I had gotten a couple of very large stock pots, I don’t know how much they hold exactly, around five gallons I think. My grandmother would complain when I’d use them about the amount of steam they’d put off. Water would be running down the insides of the window panes, the kitchen was like a steam bath as they went on at a full, rolling boil for hour after hour. It was a nice soup I’d make, not from a recipe, just what I thought was a good mix of things. I’d usually have a whole bag of dried beans I’d soak the day before, make chicken stock from scratch out of necks and backs, some celery, potatoes, carrots, onions, add a large can of tomato juice to the stock, a vegetable bean soup, was very good and froze very well.

One time when my grandmother’s sister was out of town, my mom offered to house sit for her and go up a couple of times a day to turn the lights on, bring in the mail and newspapers, etc to make it look like someone was there. We figured with the house empty, why not go up there and make the soup, since then my grandmother wouldn’t complain about all the steam in our kitchen at home? So I pre cut up all the vegetable, pre soaked the beans etc. and my mom dropped me and all the bags off and she was going to come back some hours later and I could freeze most of the soup in my great aunt’s freezer in all the washed out empty cottage cheese containers et. and then take it back to our house all ready finished and frozen in the containers.

So I made the stock, made the soup, put it in the containers and filled up her freezer, cleaned up and then once they were frozen, took all the containers back home. All went well. My mom however forgot garbage day, and the chicken necks and backs I’d used for the stock sat in the garbage container under the sink. The next garbage day she forgot as well. She continued to go up change the lights, collect the mail, but as she couldn’t see any garbage, she forgot about it again.

My grandmother once in a while would go up to do this as well and she came home and said when she was in the kitchen there was some awful, weird smell and she didn’t know where it was coming from, I laughed to myself and thought I bet it was the chicken bones my mom kept forgetting to put out on garbage day, but of course didn’t mention this to my grandmother as she’d have been mad we used her sister’s kitchen this way.

We only have garbage pick up once a week in my city, and yet again, my mom forgot it. The chicken bones from the stock were getting pretty pungent at this point, and then one night my mom came in after work with this ridiculous look on her face and laughing and I asked what was so funny and she said she’d finally disposed of the chicken bones. I asked where, since it wasn’t garbage day in that part of town. She said she took the bag and drove it to the cemetery! LOL. She said yes, they had drums in there for garbage and it was the first thing she thought of. Odd thing to think of if you ask me, and lord knows what wild animals would have gotten into it, but the chicken bones finally got laid to rest. Odd story, I realize!