Hot Dog Buns

My cheap mother really saved money consistently on food, especially when it came to feeding us (remember, she is also selfish). She would only make one trip to the grocery store every week, and some weeks she would buy hot dogs and buns. The ratio of hot dogs to buns would be pretty close to one. Unfortunately for us, she preferred the texture of hot dog buns to regular white bread for eating with hot chocolate. Sugar free hot chocolate and bread (or preferably some kind of bun) is her favorite meal. So, even though she knew we had exactly enough buns to go with hot dogs, she would eat the buns. She would never go buy more buns, she would never plan ahead and buy extra buns (probably too much money), and she wouldn't save the buns to go with the hot dogs. So, how did we eat the hot dogs? We ate the hot dogs on horrible, cheap, disgusting, plain white bread. You may wonder if white bread really absorbs ketchup and gets all soggy and gross. It does.

School Lunch

Almost every day for school lunch in K-5th grade, I took my lunch to school. It consisted of generic white bread with peanut butter and the cheapest grape jelly sold in stores, a baggie of some kind of plain potato chips or potato sticks, and one "Mega" brand vanilla cookie (I'm sure you have seen those horrible cheap vanilla, chocolate, and lemon cookies). I liked the chocolate cookies much better, but my cheap mother liked the vanilla better, so we never got chocolate. The only variation in this lunch was that rarely I would get tuna fish (a real treat), and sometimes we would run out of potato snacks and cookies, and then I might get something like two apples plus a sandwich. I don't remember what I had to drink, but I'm sure it was awful and cheap. This carried on every day for 6 years. What changed? I started going to public school and we qualified for free or $.25 lunches, so then I got school lunches, which were great in comparison. Sometime in high school my parents made too much money for reduced price school lunch, and so faced with more peanut butter sandwiches, I decided to buy my own lunch. This cost me $1.40 per day. That's right, my mom refused to pay $1.40 for school lunch because she could put together a lunch for less than that.

For years, I was unable to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Perhaps it was the psychological aspect of being forced to eat the same damn thing for so many years, or perhaps it was because those sandwiches were so cheap and gross. One day I decided to try peanut butter and jelly again, and know what I discovered? Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches taste completely different if decent bread and jam are used. I actually like them. I still hate store brand vanilla cookies.