Creamy-Bland Blood Broth

Creamy-Bland Blood Broth
By Jon Slone




Back in elementary, do you remember lunch menus? Each home room teacher would get one at the first of the month and you could like not only see the food planned out for the week ahead, but for the entire month! Here are a few actual offerings as they appeared on a 1974 lunch menu:


Monday
Lasagna
Harvest Salad
Your choice of fruit cup or Cowboy Bread
Milk
Ranger Cookie

Tuesday
Seafood patty
Whipped Potatoes
Chuck wagon beans
Hot roll
Thanksgiving cake


Where do I even begin?

Everything had to have some fancy name remember? Harvest salad? Perfection salad? Ranger cookie? Are you kidding me with the Chuck Wagon Beans?

Thank God the roll was hot right?

If they hadn’t mentioned that I don’t know what I would’ve done!

And for the life of me, what in the Sam Hill was Cowboy Bread?


Hold that thought.

Hamburger day might very well have been the best. This is what it looked like:


Thursday
Hamburger
Oven French fries
Lettuce, Pickle,
Onion slice
Milk
Bun
Tonto cookie


Really?

Lettuce and Pickle seriously?

Onion Slice got its own line?

Was this some covert and elaborate way to try and teach us the love of words. Could this have been our second English class hidden behind a Ranger cookie?

Back to the menu.

The first thing I did was search out all the Pizza days and hastened to make mental notes! (This of course was very important you see) Remember how there was always one meal that you dreaded like portly kids and backward roll day in gym class! For me, that one repugnant repast was…..Grilled cheese/tomato soup day.

First off, why tomato soup? I mean, yes, the grilled cheese sandwich was no walk in the park, but I absolutely detested (And still do) tomato soup…and they would always put those damn things together….”Here guys have some fat back on Marble Rye and some balmy sweat in a bowl! Eat up you fargin stinky bastages!”


You never saw anything like this:


Tuesday
Grilled cheese
Your choice of Crab Bisque or Jambalaya soup.

Wednesday
Grilled cheese
Your choice of Spicy Sausage & Lintel or Potato and cabbage soup.


Heck frickin’ naw

This is the way it read to me:


Crudday
Partially grilled (Stiff, stinky and mostly moldy) cheese and a hard plastic bowl of creamy-bland blood broth.


On those days I would always opt for an alternative meal:


Jon: Yes, how fresh are your onion slices?
Cafeteria lady: (Growl)
Jon: Uh, give me four Ranger cookies please.



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