When We Were Young

I'm certain that you are probably like me in your tastes, and I am referencing the taste buds, not your aesthetic or lifestyle choices.  Our tactile senses ripen and mature with age just like our mental and emotional ones.  Let me give some examples in my own life...

My wife and I were recently grocery shopping, and we came across a display of huge boxes of Kellogg's Frosted Flakes® for an unbelievably low price.  My memory of the taste of that cereal just kicked in and I grabbed a box and put it in the cart.  Judy looked askance at me and said, "I hope you intend to eat all of those."  I, of course, stated that I would, but I secretly harbored a notion that she would relent and try some, too.  after all, who can resist those crunchy, sugary corn flakes!

Well, when we opened the box for the first time we did share the Frosted Flakes, and we have done so ever since - several times.  It's amazing how far you can stretch one of those family-sized boxes of cereal!  And it is also interesting how different adult taste buds react to something we loved as a kid.  I don't like them as much as I did when I was young, sorry Kellogg   Never again for me.

On our recent trip we were treated to a complimentary breakfast at our hotel every morning.  One morning, there was bacon instead of sausage in the chafing dish, so I decided to try something I haven't had since I was a teenager back home; a sandwich my brothers and I dubbed "the Powgiver".  It was kind of a shortening of the words "power" and "giver", and we had assigned all kinds of mystical attributes to it.  It consisted of two pieces of toast with about four strips of crisp bacon between them - nothing else, not even butter.

Okay, you know the outcome . . . I used up my breakfast appetite on a greasy and mostly tasteless sandwich that didn't recall any of the magic of childhood.  It was, in a word, "blah!"

There is one other breakfast treat from my childhood that I haven't ever been able to find or even come close to duplicating.  My mother used to do a lot of canning, and one of her concoctions was peach butter.  It wasn't anything like what you might sometimes see in a farmers market or grocery store with that label.  This was big chunks of peaches, boiled in simple syrup until it turned thick and orange.  It was great on bread, but we used to put it on waffles with a splash of sweetened condensed milk over it.  It was yummy in the tummy!

I sometimes obsess over waffles and peach butter.  I know my sister has the recipe and has made it in the past, but I've never gotten to share it,  We live several hours apart now.   But I suspect that if I ever did try it, I would be disappointed.  Some things just aren't the same when we get older.  I think I'll just live with my memories of that wonderful meal.