I love words...so much so that my kids have sacked me from picking up duty because I talk too much...but I love the written word and that is why this words & pictures blog appealed to me. I like a challenge, and now that I have fixed the glitch in the computer (HURRAH!), I can work on it without it screaming at me and having it threaten to die (thank you computer man xxx)
The theme given for this weeks assignment is "School lunches" which immediately sends shivers down my spine as I remember the sound of my carrot top and apple core rattling around in my blue lunch box as I ran around the playground trying to hold on to it whilst playing. I think that my family were the only family at our school in the north east of Melbourne to have lunch boxes. It seemed to me, at that delicate age, that everyone else had fantastic disposable bags... Oh how jealous I was of them.
My mum, bless her, made our bread which we named crumpet bread. It was stiff and brown. Delicious straight out of the oven with butter dripping through it, stiff as a board at lunch time. We were allowed to choose our own fillings for our sandwiches, as long as it was salad (lettuce from the garden, tomato). The extra choices were cheese (none of that processed stuff please), and left over meat if there was any. It was always a bonus when we had meatloaf left over because she made a mean meatloaf (and still does). Occasionally we had "meat pie" sandwich which consisted of tomato sauce - yep that's it, just sauce! I know it is weird, but it is kinda nice. We did also sometimes have promite, Vegemite, homemade jam or peanut butter (of course on the homemade bread). I do remember striking out during high school and insisting that I could no longer have tomato in my sandwich as it made my bread soggy and I couldn't bear it any more unless it went between the lettuce and the cheese.
The other standards in our lunch boxes were 1 tomato - whole, 1 carrot - whole and a piece of fruit of your choice. In winter we could take a thermos of soup as well if we wanted.
I think I did spend a great deal of my 13 schooling years hankering after a canteen lunch or a paper bag lunch, or a white bread with jam, or white bread with Vegemite and plastic cheese sandwich like my best friend Jenny had. In fact, we found out later in life that we were very jealous of each other's lunches. I wanted her so called normality and she wanted my nutrition.
I now find that I am inflicting about 50% of this on my kids .... without the crumpet bread! The good news for them is that they get to leave their lunch boxes in the classrooms nowadays.
