Pater Familias … because I'm your FATHER!

When Kraft Got It On With Bob Evans

June 16, 2010

What life-shortening gluck did you used to eat and still crave?

Yesteryear's Gut Bombs And Intimations Of Mortality

Minerva, my sweet, my one and only, were we ever those crazy kids? So young, so feckless and free and heedless of anything but desires of the moment? 

We must have been, considering that thing we used to do -- can’t believe I’m telling strangers -- with, with…

• A box of Kraft Mac and Cheese
• A pound of Bob Evans sausage

Talking one of those plastic-skin sausage bombs not links. Minerva, whose recipe this was, glopped it into a pan and chopped and fried, fried, fried the stuff into tiny brown crumbles. While that happened she did the Kraft and then mixed in Bob.  

You should have seen. Deep brown squibbles like sawdust from railroad ties in amongst curved tubules of pasta that would cause violent anti-American riots in Italy, coated with uck of loud, proud, screamingly unnatural yellow-orange. If this is supposed to be cheese, the milk comes from off-planet cows that glow in the dark. But if the very sight doesn’t bring back precious taste-bud memories, I worry about you, bro.  At the very least, you are not from where we're from.   

True story. Once I took a 65-day canoe trip and ate boxed mac cheese just about every day, usually for both breakfast and dinner, and I never got the least bit tired of it. If anything, I liked it more than ever.

And that’s just the mac-cheese. I sing hosannas to pan frizzled oldtime sausage. Cornfield Caviar that speaks to the soul of pig and smoke house and folk who ate such stuff and worked it off before lunchtime. 

Put the one with the other, you got unalloyed ecstacy. Went good with beer and a rented movie, if I remember.

Just now I called Minerva at work and said I wanted some.   

“Wha?” she went and said I could have it for Father’s Day but she had to get back to a call on hold.

Haven’t had it since before Girl Child was born, or even seriously thought-of, but I know why I remembered today. This morning I went to the doc for a check-up. Guy said I’m in great shape, but there are things that bear close watching so we should do some lab work. Not one of the death metrics – like, say, cholesterol, triglycerides, what-the-hell in blood and pee -- did I give a thought to, back when Minerva fed me salt-fat-carcinogenic manna.

We were immortal. 

No, I am not going to try it with any damn turkey sausage. 

So, what were your heart-attack faves from the past? Do you still, what the hey, indulge? 

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