After school snack memories
So after staying up way too late last night reading the post on Mom's cooking, it got me thinking about what my Mom would serve for after school snacks. I vividly remember coming home and hoping for the best and many times getting the worst: my older brother was put on the Feingold diet for hyperactivity during my early school years and because of his restrictions (no sugar, no chocolate and no artifical colors or flavors) there was always some 'fake' chocolate/carob type cookie that left a strange aftertaste, or if we were lucky, 'natural' peanut butter that had to be stirred for ages to make it come back together, spread on a piece of bread. What was waiting for you when you got home?
cher99
Jul 09, 2009 11:56AM
View »
As a latchkey kid, I had the run of the pantry, so I tested out my nascent cooking skills by making huge amounts of Rice Krispie Treats and eating the whole batch before my mom got home.
Permalink | Reply
=D
lucky!! i think at one point i would've traded my family for the privilege.
Permalink | Reply
Little Debbie or TaskyKake
Oreos, Vienna Fingers or those Almond Windmill cookies.
Fresh fruit.
Mom’s dessert of the week was strictly for after dinner.
Permalink | Reply
My personal favorite was on Mondays when Mom made bread for the week. Walking into the enclosed porch on a cold, blistery wind afternoon and getting a heady whiff of warm flour and yeast. Warm yeast rolls straight from the oven with butter. That was the best ever.
For my son (latch key kid) it was when I had bought oreos. A very rare treat.
Sheesh - what a disparity!
Permalink | Reply
- apple slices or celery & carrots with PB
- a bowl of cold cereal (my favorite)
- crackers, pretzels or goldfish with some sort of cheese (usually muenster or Swiss)
- Spaghetti-O's
we rarely had "junk food" in the house because my mom was always on some sort of diet and my sister was a bit heavy. but when there were cookies in the cabinet, they were usually Chips Ahoy, Keebler Fudge Stripes, Vienna Fingers or Honey Maid Graham Crackers. i'd have a couple with a glass of skim milk.
Permalink | Reply
home made cookies when my mother stayed at home... sometimes after, but once she started working and wans't home in the afternoons, I'd grab a stack of ritz crackers and make SUPER dark chocolate milk with nestle quick. (that was before I discovered the joy of chocolate and pretzels together). I could eat a whole stack and drink a quart of milk in one afternoon! :)
Permalink | Reply
Sometimes my mom would stop and get groceries after golfing and pick up a pan of iced coffeecake /honeybuns to have with butter and coffee when she got home. She would save out a couple for my sister and me......but by the time we got home, they were generally stale and dry as a cardboard box. If we were lucky, they were warm and fresh.....about 1 time in 5. We never knew whether to hope she had gotten them or not.
Otherwise, it was PB&J
Permalink | Reply
I didn't know at the time how fortunate I was to have my mom at home. She doted on all three of us and sometimes would serve us at different times.
My after school snack varied, and sometimes if my Dad was home, he'd make it.
I've had crab cocktail (was really trout!) that was excellent
French apple pie
cooked chocolate pudding
homemade big huge sugar cookies
peanut butter and jelly toast
mayonnaise sandwiches - white bread and Miracle Whip
Rice Krispies
Cheerios
Hostess chocolate cupcakes - LOVED THOSE! (cold we'd freeze them and as they soften eat them)
Frozen Musketeer Bars
Greeen Apples with salt
Cinnamon Toast
Tuna sandwiches
Grilled Cheese sandwiches
Fried chicken - I loved it ! My mom would always have a fried chicken or a french vegetable soup with french bread on the stove almost every week.
Most of the time I ruined my appetite for dinner. But we all how hungry you get after school!!! Who can wait
Permalink | Reply
To make sure your followers don't get the wrong idea about the Feingold diet, I wanted to point out that it does not eliminate sugar or chocolate and one does not have to stir peanut butter! Afterschool snacks can be just about anything as long as it doesn not include artificial colors, artificial flavors, some preservatives or Aspartame.
Permalink | Reply
We were one of those annoying "no junk food" homes, but I used to love going over to my bestest friend's house after school, where they had a bottomless cupboard of Ring Dings. (The Big kind, before they shrank them....) mmm kreme.... adam
Permalink | Reply
i had the same situation. my best friend's house was directly behind ours, and our backyards were connected, which made it very easy to get a junk food fix. they had an entire double-wide cabinet AND one of those deep pull-out bins dedicated to snacks - every cupcake, cookie & chip you could imagine, plus shelves in the refrigerator & freezer stocked with goodies like pudding, whipped cream & ice cream. it was nuts. whenever my mom had a chocolate craving she would call their house and ask if one of the kids could run something over for her :)
Permalink | Reply
We were also an essentially junk-food free home. (Mom was a 1950s home ec major). Often it was peanut butter between slices of apple or carrot sticks (still don't particularly like raw carrots).
Permalink | Reply
I don't really remember having too many after school snacks, I think because I came home from school / school activities so late, it was usually almost dinnertime, anyway. Or maybe it was because if I professed hunger, mom would make me eat a full meal of healthy stuff that I didn't want, anyway.
I do remember almost always having tea or other marinated eggs around in the fridge that we could help ourselves to whenever we wanted. And usually a jar of homemade granola. And oatmeal cookies with almost no sugar or oil, which in retrospect I realize tasted a lot more like scones than cookies. And lots and lots of fruit of all different kinds. And seasoned nori seaweed snacks....
Permalink | Reply
Most of the time, there wouldn't be an after school snack because by the time I got home (almost 4-ish), Dad would be back from work soon and Mom would always tell us not to spoil our appetites. If I really wanted something though, then it was usually fruit.
On our really lucky days, Mom would've been trying out a new recipe while we were at school and we would be allowed to have that before dinner. I remember a Chinese steamed egg cake, variations of lo bak go, and this gelatinous/sticky thing with red beans in them.
Permalink | Reply
Sneaking one of these in was always a fun treat. We would eat at 7pm most nights, so an after school snack was usually permitted. Years ago, these were great.
Suzy Q --> http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1379/1...
Permalink | Reply
moslty i never ate after school- casue i was too preocupied with playing but if i did snack it would always be- a piece of fruit or a 100percent dried fruit strap, almonds yoghurt and as a aspecial treat dried figs and if i was very hungry grain crispbreads with vegemite, cheese, tomato and lettuce.
Permalink | Reply
English muffin pizza's (I prefered straight tomato paste for the sauce)
Flakey Puffs
Chopped, raw onions in any creamy dressing (Remember Kraft Creamy Cucumber?)
Spaghetti-o's with LOTS of black pepper
Permalink | Reply
i forgot about those toaster-oven English muffin pizzas! and why Kraft discontinued my beloved Creamy Cucumber dressing is beyond me. i know they have something called Cucumber Ranch now, but there's no substitute for a classic like that.
Permalink | Reply
I remember the creamy cucumber! What I loved was the tomato and bacon dressing that I ate with carrot sticks. That stuff was fabulous!
Permalink | Reply
My sisters and I would want to make french fries but my mother frying in the house. If she wasn't home we might make some - otherwise we were happy with potato chips and ketchup. It was mostly junk food. We always had bags of Fritos,popcorn or chips and a bowl of those would do. Frozen snack foods too like pizza rolls ! But there were alos raw onion sandwiches.
Permalink | Reply
A piece of Oscar Mayer bologna OR, if mom was working, a plain milk chocolate Hershey bar. I love you mom!
Permalink | Reply
Popcorn - the most often consumed and most loved
Peanut Butter and Fluff or Banana on White Bread
Bagel Bites or Pizza Rolls - whichever my Mom found on sale
Ramen Noodles - only the 49 cent instant packs would do
Taco Bell Bean Burritos or Taco Bell Pizza
My after school snacks consisted of things I could eat while walking my dog, watching TV and/or studying. In high school, if I had time to eat a snack and dinner was far enough away to be allowed a snack, it had to be portable and able to fit in between play practice, football games, study groups and between 2-6 hours of homework a night.
No wonder I had high cholesterol and stomach problems as a kid! Thankfully I have learned the error of my ways and have changed my lifestyle and eating habits.
Permalink | Reply
My parents rarely bought junk, so I got graham crackers and milk most of the time and for a treat my dad's homemade yogurt with a little of my mom's homemade plum jam. It was good, but she never bothered to take out the pits, so you could break a tooth.
In junior high I became a latchkey kid. I sometimes bought frozen chocolate chip cookie dough and ate it raw. I also liked to make popcorn on the stove, though I often burnt it. (No microwave yet.)
Then in high school I started taking care of two little girls after school. They had a freezer in their basement full of ice cream and frozen treats like yogurt push-ups. I was amazed and thrilled. Kept the job until I moved on to boys and coffee.
Permalink | Reply
My father always had tea for the kids when we'd get home from school and some sort of sugary snack purchased in bulk at the wholesaler: fried pies, cinnamon buns, donuts, etc. This might be why I weighed nearly the same now as I did when I was in the 3rd grade.
Permalink | Reply
Until my senior year in high school, after school snacks followed a predictable pattern -- fresh fruit was always available, most often bananas or apples, milk was the drink of choice and a cookie - either molasses or oatmeal raisin from Van de Kamps bakery in Los Angeles. If we were really lucky, there might be pretzles but the junk food my lucky friends ate did not exist in our home.
I lived with a French family for my last year in high school and hit PAYDIRT! We got chocolate croissants and beer for "gouter" after school and I knew that I'd died and gone to heaven. While my American friends were slurping cokes, I was drinking beer. This was a very big deal to me and still a fond memory.
Permalink | Reply
You consumed chocolate croissants and beer at the *same* time?
Permalink | Reply
Absolutely!
Permalink | Reply
As a hungry teenager in the UK, I have happy memories of a rather eclectic range of 4pm snacks, many made by me in my earliest attempts at cooking, few tried since:
Waffles with Bon Maman rhubarb compote, poached pears in blackcurrant juice with cinnamon; bacon sandwiches with HP sauce on plastic white bread; whole tubs of Onken peach yogurt with wholegrains (hmm, should try that again, an interesting texture); dark chocolate Bahlsen Leibniz biscuits, eaten chocolate topping first; garibaldi biscuits. Sometimes plum-jam filled donuts from a Polish bakery and Lebkuchen in December.
Permalink | Reply
My mom used to bake a lot so there'd usually be some sort of homemade treat to eat after school. Brownies, either with icing on top or melted marshmallows were my favourite, followed by other homemade cookies. If there was nothing homemade I'd eat Dare Chocolate Fudge sandwich cookies, or "Midnight Mint" (which I think were very similar to what American girl scouts sell as thin mints); chocolate covered digestive biscuits or Fudgee-O's, or PC Decadent Chocolate Chip cookies.
My brother usually followed his cookies with a slice of cheese. I just wanted another cookie.
Permalink | Reply
I believe I was lucky. My mother baked a lot and so the list is large and tasty.
Chocolate chip cookies
peanutbutter cookies with a chocolate kiss on top
ranger cookies
butterscotch chip cookies
Brownies
lemon bars
sour cream rasin pie
ginger snap cookies
chocolate cake with mint frosting
carrot cake
fruit cake cookies
rasin bread
poppy seed kolachies and prune
oatmeal rasin cookies
apple pin wheels
jelly roll
All made with love and by hand!!!!!!!!!!!
Permalink | Reply
Graham crackers with butter. I loved them.
Permalink | Reply
We had a junk food drawer that I used to dig into for snacks. I remember when I was really little I used to love nutty bars, and also cheez-its with a glass of oj (i can't believe i liked that combo!).
Permalink | Reply
Growing up in Kenya, things were very different. Chocolates and other Western goodies were a rare treat, snuck into the country whenever anyone went overseas. Ready made snack foods were almost unheard of and for us were a treat if we ever got our hands on them.
I remember savouring a small packet of hula hoops someone brought back from England, making the whole packet last for a week.
After school snacks consisted of home made goodies. An ice cold glass of milk mixed in with a Tbs of cadbury's drinking chocolate or rose water. Home made Indian snacks like chevdo, bhusu and other chick pea flour snacks
Hot khitchi with chilli powder (Rice and lentil flour snack), bhajia with tamarind and tomato chutney's, vegetable samosa's, kachori etc.
And our absolute favourite use to be when dad would get home early from the bakery with fresh, still warm, crusty bread. Eaten with very salty, very creamy butter, and a dollop of jam that still had whole strawberries in it
Permalink | Reply
Inexplicably, in my Italian-American childhood home in Brooklyn, we had "tea" with buttered party rye or other bread cut into small pieces. However, the really big treat was when my mother was making a pot of sauce, and we had some of the sauce on white bread with a heavy sprinkling of Romano cheese.
Permalink | Reply
My parents worked at night so they would usually be sleeping when I got home so my grandmother would usually make me anything I wanted - which was usually instant ramen with an egg in it along with some kimchee. Other times, my best friend would come over to eat steamed rice wrapped in seasoned nori with kimchee. She tells me she still dreams of it to this day.
Permalink | Reply
Also being a latchkey kid and having a mother that made everything I always had left overs but once in a while i would convince my mom to by me bad stuff the best still to this day
Devil dogs
Ring dings
Yodels
Goldfish
Chicken in a bisket crackers
Wise onion garlic potato chips( shared a bag on a bus ride to the Florida keys when I was 12 with my dream girl even though she did not notice me)
Permalink | Reply