HOTDOG Soup

Food for a depression.

That's right he said depression not for the depressed.  That would be a story about making brownies and ice cream, this is a story about foods you wind up making when the country you live in is in a depression.  it's not a rescission as most would say, including the news.  This has been coming for 12 years and it's the cost of fighting two wars for 10 years, and letting China sell all our stuff for us to us.  It's the fact that we build a robot "the internet" and it literally took every other job left.  The only job I can find these days, is going in to document and weather proof your house on behalf of your bank who just took possession of it.  If that's not a depression, I don't know what is.

The funny part is that today's food solutions are the exact same foods my mom made us when we were young and my parents were poor during the end of the Vietnam war in the early 70's.  It's cheap O simple foods that can pretend to be fancy meals.  Now, in the 80's and 90's we realized that this stuff was bad for us and was single handily the cause of most of the heart attacks in the late 90's.  Yes we got super smart about foods and how our foods are made of the stuff we cram in our mouths, never the less, now we are poor and everybody's got to eat.  So the old ideas come back.

I always think of the one thing my mom used to make us that would send dad back to his car to sit and wait it out or somehow think of some other plan or way to get out of it.  Hot dog soup.  It's hard to imagine.  My brothers and sisters don't remember it the way i do.  Dad used to go up to a small hole in the front door, and see if he could smell it first before walking in  the door to announce his arrival home from work.  The concept was simple, it was * Oscar m yer hot dogs cut into slices floating in Campbell vegetarian vegetable soup. (called alphabet soup in the 70's) 
It was a way to make soup, dinner.  it was horrible, but it worked.

Now, to my mom's credit that was really just the worst, yet most memorable example of this poor cooking.  There are some others that we have recently been taking back to:

• Homemade Beefaroni = elbow noodles, ground chuck browned with onions, mixed together and topped with cold catsup.
• Breakfast dinner = pancakes and eggs for dinner?  WHAAA?
• Cream of mushroom helper = everything cream of mushroom.  before the 4 fingered hand of hamburger helper, there was make your own helper.  used as a base, you can make anything with the fat of Cream of Mushroom.
• Everything "Con Carny" = anything over rice
• English muffin pizza = these actually cost more now to make than a pizza kit,but back in the day before English muffins became $4 a piece, you could use them, old spaghetti sauce and a slice of American cheese to make your own personal sized pizzas.

Now I do concede that some readers have never had to be creative with basic foods, or that some don't remember the simple foods our parents had to resort to when we were tiny.  Other may prefer to block out the late 70's and 80's which I totally understand, the clothing the hair cuts were horrible.  The sad fact is that the less money you have, the worse you will eat.  It's depressing, and it's a fact the world over.  Luck for some that being creative with cheap store products is possible in the United States.  Like I always say "The words vegan and food stamps are never found in the same sentence unless it's this quote".