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Diabetic Recipes

Subject: Hi, Uncle Phaedrus!
From: Kristin
Date: 3/09/2019, 4:52 PM
To: phaedrus@hungrybrowser.com

On 3/09/2019 12:47 AM, Kristin wrote:

I love your site so very much. The banana milk post was interesting, I'd never heard of it. 
I went to school as a kid in SouthEast Asia, and the only weird beverage I remember is a 
soda called "KickaPoo juice". Ive not found anything on the internet about it.
Anyway- Ive two queries, is that ok?

I'd love some recipes for people that hate vegetables. My husband is diabetic, and has a no 
palate for good food- he likes processed foods, microwave meals, fast food- our tastes could 
not be more diametrically opposed. My problem is getting him to enjoy healthful foods. 
Pumpkin bread, zucchni "patties" are things he would eat, these I found online for "vegetable 
haters". The lists I came up with were not that inspiring- basically the same type recipes 
over and over again across multiple websites. Any ideas of your own?

Question two:I am old enough to remember when TV dinners came in tin trays that you had to 
cook in the oven, they took about 45 minutes til done, and boy were they good. Mom was, and 
still is a fantastic cook, but TV dinners were a special treat when mom had some function & 
couldn't be home to cook, so she'd get those (which wasn't very often) we never had instant
 or convenience foods in our house - there was a class distinction and the "rules" were: 
plastic drinking cups, plates, instant foods like the dehydrated mashed potato flakes were 
for the lower classes. Even as small children we used glasses and rarely broke any. How 
times have changed! TV dinner choices were slim, turkey dinner, Mexican enchilada, & old 
famous Salisbury Steak meals. They all came with some type of dessert in the top corner, 
usually apple cobbler, sometimes a chocolate cake-like thing. Do you remember these Uncle 
Phaedrus?? Did you ever eat them? If so, what kind was your favorite? Oh how we kids would 
get so excited, peeling back the tin foil after it was ready, and we had the "TV trays" 
folding metal deals to eat off of too. OK- enough nostalgia - Phaed, Here is my 2nd question: 
When did they start adding all the soy fillers to these jobs? And does the "food class" still 
exist? I remember it being a big deal then- this was the mid to early 70s that decent people 
didn't use plastic or instant.

Thanks (uh oh I think that's three questions!)

Kristin

Hi Kristin,

I enjoyed your e-mail. It brightened my day even though it is snowing here in Maine today.

I see several questions in your email, and I'll take them one at a time.

Kickapoo juice:

I don't if it's the same thing that you mean, but I'm familiar with something called "Kickapoo Joy Juice." Back in the early sixties Pepsi bought out a small company that had created the soda called "Mountain Dew." It was basically a carbonated citrus juice mixture, but Pepsi marketed it nationally  and it became very popular. Of course, that resulted in a lot of competitors suddenly appearing. My family lived on the Mississippi Gulf Coast at the time , and even Mountain Dew was slow in catching on there, but every summer, my parents would send me to North Mississippi to visit my grandfather. Mountain Dew was much more popular in that area, and so were its competitors. Besides "Mountain Dew", there was "White Lightnin'", "Redeye", and "Kickapoo Joy Juice." My favorite was "White Lightnin'." "Kickapoo Joy Juice" was my least favorite - it had an odd taste, which I have read is because it contained a greater amount of grapefruit juice. As time passed, Mountain Dew prospered, but most of the competitors disappeared one by one. However, "Kickapoo Joy Juice" is apparently still around. See: Drink Kickapoo

Recipes for people who hate vegetables:

I'm afraid I won't be much help to you with this one. Years ago, when I first started doing this site, I got a lot of requests for recipes for diabetics and for people with food allergies. I tried to help these folks for a while, but I soon realized that I generally couldn't recommend recipes for dishes that I had never tasted.  Recommending recipes is just not what my site is about. People write me looking for specific recipes by name or for recipes from restaurants or copycat recipes for commercial foods. I avoid requests for "a good recipe for _____".  I do have a page of links to sites for recipes for diabetics that I set up way back when, but they're probably not much different from the sites you've already looked at. It's an old, old page, so some of the links may not work any more: http://www.hungrybrowser.com/phaedrus/mpdiabetic.htm

TV Dinners:

After college, in the early seventies, I was on my own for the first time, and my first post-college job didn't pay much, so I couldn't dine out every night.  I had never learned to cook, so dinner was a lot of sandwiches and TV dinners. This was before microwave ovens, and there wasn't a lot of variety in TV dinners yet. As you say, you had to cook them in a regular oven, and it took thirty to forty-five minutes for them to cook. The most popular brands were Morton's and Swanson's. My favorite by far was  the fried chicken one, with the wee pieces of chicken and the little dabs of mashed potatoes and corn, but I also liked the turkey and dressing ones and the Salisbury steak ones. I think there was a ham one as well, but these were my favorites. I didn't get into the Mexican ones until later. One of the companies came out with a "beans and franks" TV dinner that had a triangle of cornbread. It was very tasty.  Recently, I bought a couple of the old-style TV dinners in the aluminum foil trays to see if they still tasted as good as I recalled.  They don't, at least not to me. The fried chicken one, in particular, was pretty awful.  And yes, back in the day my family had those flimsy  TV trays, too. Gradually, I learned to cook a bit, but during the times in my life when I have lived alone, I still ate TV dinners and microwave dinners sometimes.

When did they start adding all the soy fillers to these jobs?:

This one kind of bumfuzzles me, Kristin. I don't know what you mean by "jobs." Do you mean adding soy fillers to meat? Using soy fillers as meat extenders began to boom in the late sixties and early seventies, but other meat extenders, such as bread crumbs or oatmeal, had already been in use for years before then. I remember in the early seventies, I started seeing tubes of "hamburger meat" in the supermarket that contained soy filler. They were cheaper compared to ground beef or ground chuck or ground round, but not as good.

And does the "food class" still exist?:

I think the use of convenience foods, which is the basis of your "food class," was basically just a matter of whether Mom worked full-time or was a full-time stay-at home-mom. Stay-at-home-moms had time to cook home-cooked dinners, whereas working moms didn't, so they used a lot of convenience foods. I don't know that I would call working moms "lower class". I think there was a lot of overlap there in family income. In families where both Dad and Mom worked, income may have been quite good, but there was still a need for convenience foods. Time was the deciding factor, so I doubt that things have changed very much.

Thanks for a very interesting email, Kristin! Write anytime.

Phaed

Hi Uncle Phaed, thanks for posting that email. Just to clarify, the "food class" wasn't anything 
to do with income at all. My mom worked part time, & there was even a time when my dad 
"disappeared" after going to the store for cigarettes one day, and we were on relief! The words 
my mom used, and in my family, were "oh that's common.. that's for common people" a euphemism 
for lower classes. "Common" people ate convenience foods, ate a lot of fast food, didn't eat at the 
table, and used plastic utensils. That is not to say we never used or ate those things, just in 
general. It's hard to explain, but I did read of this same mentality on a Catholic website "fast 
food is Protestant food!" yet, my mom of Catholic upbringing, we were by far no Catholic family. 
Anyway, I wondered if that "class" still existed ??

My other question was concerning the TV/microwave meals: they all have soy in them now. 
Everything has soy! Even the ingredients list on our cat food has Soy as an ingredient. I hate soy!

cheers- & PS, I wish you'd write more personal food or dining anecdotes. They're darn fun to read!

Kristin