Memory Lane.

My lunch today: 1 peanut butter and jelly sandwich, potato chips, and a glass of milk; with a nice Girl Scout cookie finish.

Our cupboards have been slowly accumulating these ingredients over the winter months (the peanut butter, jelly, potato chips, and Girl Scout cookies are not exactly mainstays in the Hagstrom household) to finally present themselves in the form of this throwback meal from the days of babysitters and weekend lunches at my friends' houses. Occasionally, my own mother would concoct a dish as specifically remarkable as this, but more often my siblings and I would have to thwart off offerings of mustard and mayo on turkey or ham... with lettuce.

Yuck.

Our sal-i-vation would only come when we could escape away to other, ordinary families' houses where they appreciated the comestible advances of white bread, JIF and skim milk.

In the past 15 years or so my cravings for the PB&J have subsided, with only a brief cravings-spike during the time that I spent in Australia (where my roommates and I discovered the full range of abilities of our sandwich griller/maker)... that is, until lately.

In recent times when I have wanted a sandwich, not surprisingly, I've made for myself the sandwich that my mother would have liked to make me. Usually turkey, provolone, lettuce or spinach, and a smidgen of mustard and/or mayo on whole grain bread. But not today. Today was different. Today, I had an escape back to my childhood - served up with a side of potato chips - and I fulfilled an ancient craving that has been building up since my adolescence. And at a time in my life where I could go out and get whatever I wanted for lunch, I found it was nice to have what I really wanted from a time when I couldn't do anything about it.