Friend's House

Listeners share their favorite food memories from a friend's house.

Want to share your story? Email us at treatlandpod@gmail.com.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_02 0:19

Hello and welcome to Treatland. This is the podcast where you, the listener, share your favorite food memories from childhood. We'll be playing your audio clips and reading your stories, and we'll definitely be sharing a few of our own along the way. Each episode has its own food-related theme. If you like what you hear today, please subscribe to our show. Hello everyone. As you probably notice, if you're a subscriber or someone that submitted a story, it's been quite a while since I put one out, and I did not mean for it to go that long, and I was looking. And last time I put an episode out was in October of 2024. And then right away I asked for new stories for this theme today, which is food memories at a friend's house. And I got responses right away because I felt that this topic would really resonate with people. And it seemed to. And I feel like a lot of the stories today are really cute and really kind of heartwarming and like definitely bring me back and make me think of other food at friends' houses that I remember very significantly that I forgot to include at the time. But anyway, I really appreciate you for being patient. And if you submitted a story again, I apologize that it took so long. I want to continue to do these. I know it's been a while, but I always have fun with it, and it makes me happy just hearing people reminisce. I don't know, it's just heartwarming for me, so I really appreciate it, and I hope you enjoyed the episode.

SPEAKER_08 2:02

I grew up in a pretty religious household. I went to public school, but most of my friends were from church. This all changed in 1994 when I met my lifelong best friend John. Now let me say we're both very fortunate to come from loving, caring families, but everything else about the environments we grew up in were very different, including the food. Yes, there were some food items that you could find at my place, like peanut butter and jam. But it ain't going on white wonder bread like at my house. It's going on whole wheat or multi-grain. And you could absolutely pour yourself a bowl of cereal at John's, but you better believe it's going to be cornbread. When I would stay over for dinner at his place, the house would be filled with different wonderful aromas as his dad would cook. I tried tofu, fresh spring rolls, and so many other different types of food at such a young age that I never would have tried had it not been for John and his hippie parents. As I said at the beginning, John and I are lifelong best friends. Heck, I saw him yesterday. And every now and then I get to go back to his parents' house that's still filled with those wonderful aromas from 30 years ago.

SPEAKER_01 3:13

My mom was a really good, she still is a really good baker and a really great cook. So we didn't really have like packaged snack food around in our house. So like things like Pop Tarts were such a nice, like a big treat that we used to get them in our Christmas stockings. And they didn't, they were just not like around our house. But my neighbor down this down the road, my best childhood friend and neighbor, her mom had that stuff in their pantry all the time, every day. So we went after school and just like raided her pantry and then went and played in the woods for the rest of the afternoon until dinner. But she had stuff in there like President's Choice granola bars that were like chocolate chip, they're super good. And Stella Dora breakfast treats that I I've never seen them like I never saw them before or since. And this is like the the 80s, you know, like mid-80s. And they had like regular Pop-Tars and they also had a lot of knockoff Pop-Tarts, which were actually pretty good, and ramen noodles and just all this like packaged stuff, convenience food that was perfect for when we got out of school, you know, and had needed to do something. But I, you know, when you said that the episode was food at other people's houses, I remembered like I don't know if everyone is hyper aware of what what you know things there were to eat at everyone else's houses, boy, but we sure were when we were little, at least I was. Like one house on our street, the woman had fresh-made iced tea, you know, that you can do in the sun. Oh my gosh, it was so good. And another woman had a bowl of candy by her front door, and then also a bowl of dog biscuits. Like if you know, if you somebody visited with a dog. And I remember one time we went there and my sister was like, I don't know, maybe nine years old or so, and she took the dog biscuit and ate that. And we just thought that was so funny.

SPEAKER_04 5:08

What's up, everybody? This is Garrett over at Born to Be Rad. And this topic of going to a friend's house and things like sleepovers and snacks, and it really just kind of makes me reminisce about my childhood of the 80s and 90s, because what was so fun about that was not only just hanging out with your friend, and you know, it was kind of pre-internet and stuff like that, but I always liked that they always had different foods than I would get. My parents were kind of strict with specific things, like we never had like sugary cereals or anything like that. So going to a friend's house where they were allowed to have all that stuff was just mind-blowing to me. And it was always one of those things that every time I went to someone's house, I was like, oh, they always have like the good cereal, like the fruit loops, and there was even like rice crispy treats cereal and stuff like that hanging out in their pantry. And it was always one of those things where, you know, in the morning of a sleepover, you're like, all right, great, I get to have that cereal. And other things, like when you were at their house, you knew they had kind of like these specific snacks that you wanted. You always like go to them and be like, hey, are you hungry? Like trying to get them to to agree to have some food. And then the worst part was when the kid would yell out and say, Mom, Garrett wants a snack, and I'd be like, No, no, no, I don't, no, no, no, I'm fine, I'm fine. But you always try to get them to kind of buy into the idea that you were hungry because you really just wanted to have some of the food that uh they have at their house you didn't. So just a really cool memory kind of going back in time and thinking about you know those times of being a kid and going to someone else's house where it was just kind of a whole new world when it came to food and snacks and drinks and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_00 6:43

So, one of my food memories from a friend's house was probably when I was in fifth grade, I had a friend named Najwa, and we lived in the same apartment complex together, and we'd walk to school together every day to and from. And I would always stop at her house, and one of the items that she would always make, and I'd never even thought to make this before she did, she would either toast a piece of bread or she would take a plain bagel, she would slap a piece of American cheese on it, and she would nuke it. Now the bread she would toast first, then put the cheese on, then stick it in the microwave for I don't know, 10-15 seconds or something. And what was weird about the bagel was when you didn't toast it and you just stuck the bagel in the microwave with the American cheese on it, it became very like chewy. And to my I don't know, fifth grade self, that was delicious.

SPEAKER_07 7:39

So for my party or hangout get together memory, what a surprise. The one I'm bringing up was this amazing birthday Halloween mashup that I was invited to. I believe my buddy Mike's birthday was somewhere in late October, close to Halloween, and the parents decided to still have a birthday celebration, but sort of with a mix of balloons and Halloween decorations. There was this costume contest game where you had to you know run around and put the costume on. Of course, the gift that I got him was these awesome Sub-Zero G.I. Joe toys that that were coming. Anyway, so the big thing that stood out to me with the food, of course, was the Rice Krispie treats. They had these really neat spider web cobwebs on them, homemade candied apples and caramel apples with different colored sprinkles. And I remember, of course, orange and black being, you know, sprinkles and different colors that were on the cupcakes and brownies and brownies with eyes, and of course, the dirt pie with the gummy worms. Like I definitely remember that was there. And and then, of course, homemade pizza was, I believe, was one of the foods, and you know, probably pretzels and chips. But I really most especially remember the rice krispie treat standing out to me. And it was just neat the way she had done these black lines to form spider webs on the on the rice krispie treats, and then of course cupcakes that had like little spider designs on them. And that was really neat. So just you know, once again, this was a birthday party, you know, and there was, you know, birthday gifts, of course, and balloons, and we watched Casper. But at the same time, it was heavily a Halloween, you know, was happening. So just such an intense, awesome party to get invited to when you're younger, and definitely some great food memories.

SPEAKER_05 9:58

I was a really young girl, maybe seven or eight years old, and was visiting with my family, my grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins up in the upper peninsula of Michigan. And I couldn't have been more than seven, maybe eight years old. And for the first time, I was invited to go fishing with my grandpa and my dad the next morning. And I remember being woken up when it was dark outside, and I remember it was like four o'clock in the morning, and I woke up to the smell of coffee and bacon. And to this day, I don't know why, maybe because I knew I was going on an adventure that involved bears and fish and my grandpa's old Ford pickup truck. But to this day, bacon and coffee, bacon in particular, always feels like such a treat. Okay, here's another quick little one. So I was much younger, maybe five or six years old, hanging out with a little neighborhood girl who became my best friend. Her name was Tina, and we were sneaking around her parents' house, and we kept going into like dress drawers and clothes drawers, and we started collecting these big, brightly colored, what looked to be like giant sweet tarts, you know, those those pink and purple and light blue sweet tarts, and we were kind of trying to gather them in our pockets. And then we ran back to her room and we pull out these giant sweet tarts, and we were so excited that we'd found like five or six of them. And next thing we know, we both bit down on one of these giant sweet tarts, and they turned out they were those those one of those funny little aromatic things that you put in your drawers to keep your clothes fresh, smelling fresh. So to this to this day, I I can't eat sweet tarts.

SPEAKER_11 12:03

I have two memories about enjoying food over friends' houses. One was in fourth grade. There was a girl named Vicky that I met while I was in fourth grade, and it was one of those situations where you just kind of find somebody in class that you can kind of talk to, and you haven't become like super good friends yet, but you're kind of like just trying to find your way and trying to find your friend group. And there was this girl, Vicki, who was really nice, and she was the shy girl in the class. I didn't really have a lot in common with her, but she was also very friendly. And my mom really wanted me to start having sleepovers and getting more social. But so I went I remember sleeping over her house one day, and she had these things called pickle chips. Now, they weren't Lay's, and I honestly can't remember the brand they were. It was so long ago. They might not even make them anymore, they might be reformulated, but basically they were just potato chips that had a distinct pickle flavoring. And they were better than Lay's, the pickle chips that I r you know they have out now. But these were so good. I just remember being so addicted to them that every time I went over her house, like that's all I wanted to eat was the were those pickle chips. And she also turned me on to the Ritz cheesecrackers as well in lunch. So yeah, that was another thing that became a fast addiction. But this is like the mid-90s. So I remember we would we would sit around her TV and we watched that old MTV show called I think it was 15 or something like that. It was like one of those like early MTV soap opera type shows, really bad acting, but it was one of those things we would just sit around the TV, eat pickle chips, eat the recipe at the cheesecrackers, and it was great. Another memory I have is when I first started college in 2001, my best friend Bethany and I, we lived so close together, I would often just walk to her house. It's about a 10-minute walk, but I wouldn't even go at night, I had no problem walking there. And one of the things we would do, since it was so new and novel at the time, was go on to AOL and just like you know, instant message people, and we would order Domino's pizza because that was, you know, back in the day, that was like super, super cheap. And we would just order like one of those personal pies and split it. So those are two really distinct memories I have surrounding food over friends' houses.

SPEAKER_02 14:18

Growing up, my two best friends were two brothers, and they came from a family where they had a sister, so there were three kids, and their parents were my godparents, and my best memories growing up were spending time with them. During the summer, we'd go to amusement parks. During the winter, we'd have sleepovers, we would spend holidays together sometimes, and they were by far the funniest two boys that I knew, and they were like brothers to me because I spent so much time with them. Our parents were always really loose, but they would let us kind of get away with anything. We would watch SNL, we would watch R-rated movies, we would watch scary movies all the time. There were no restrictions on what we could watch, and so a lot of the time we would get together, and often our parents and their parents would all sit around and we would watch Saturday Night Live together and stay up late and eat pizza and all sorts of snacks. And so we were just used to this fun experience with them anytime we were together. Some of my best times were when it was just me and Jesse and Luke, and we would have a sleepover at their house, and we would go in the basement, and they had a computer down there, and we'd be downloading music on Limoyer and Napster, and it would be taking hours and hours. Sometimes it would take all night. Overnight, the song would still be downloading by morning. We would watch weird shows and always run a bunch of stuff from Blockbuster, and sometimes we'd stay up to like five in the morning. But one of my favorite things was their mom would always heat up a bunch of mini tombstone deep dish pizzas, the kind that had the pepperoni, and she would cut them up into like six different slices. So they were these triangular slices, and they were really thick, and she'd bring down a plate and they'd be like stacked up. The sauce was very unique because I had never had tombstone pizza before, except at their house. And the pepperoni, I remember it was like a little bit spicier, and the dough was soft but also crispy on the edges. It was kind of baked perfectly. I almost feel like it was like black on the edges, even, but it was still soft somehow. Almost like a huge pizza bagel with way better sauce. It was the most incredible snack you could possibly get. And it was usually, that's the thing, it was usually just a snack. Had typically already had dinner, and it was almost like the midnight snack. We probably had some kind of dessert too, like gummies or ice cream. But yeah, those were some of the greatest memories, just hanging out with them, and so much of it revolved around food. Eating whatever we wanted, it felt like such freedom to me back then. Another really great memory I have of food was at my next door neighbor's house growing up, their names were Shanna and Jim, and their mom was from Mobile, Alabama, and she was always baking and cooking, and I remember she tried to be really healthy, and I was not a fan of vegetables or fruit or anything healthy growing up, but sometimes their mom would marinate these green beans in some kind of Italian dressing, and she would have them out as a snack for her kids. And whatever the salad dressing was, it was really zesty and flavorful, and it would make them taste amazing. So I remember that was a healthy snack that I knew I could get only at their house. Another thing that she would make that was semi-healthy was cinnamon bread. It was cinnamon raisin bread, and it didn't have too many swirls of the cinnamon in it. It just had like a nice sweet dough, and you'd get like the raisins once in a while in it, and it would always be warm, and you could tell it was homemade and it was just so comforting. And she would always bring us out some slices on a plate when we were outside or something. But some of those memories were incredible, and it's funny. Their mom was pretty strict as well, so it was a complete 180 from being with Jesse and Luke, where there were no restrictions, we could do whatever we want. And then going over to their house, she would have healthy snacks, and they would watch Veggie Tales, which was like a Christian kid's show with these animated fruits and vegetables that would talk and say grace, and I'm pretty sure they were putting religious stories into these episodes. Yeah, it was just such a 180. Anyway, yeah, those are my memories of food at friends' houses that I still think about a lot today.

SPEAKER_09 19:07

Okay, so I don't really have a large number of memories of food at friends' houses. Like typically I don't really feel like food was a major part of it. I mean, I would occasionally go over to friends' houses for dinner and things like that, but I don't really have much memory of of what we would have or whatever, because it was just kind of standard fare, like, oh, we're over here for either they have pizza or or the mom's making meatloaf or whatever, something like that. Nothing really stands out. More often than not, I was probably the friend where people remembered going over to the house because we always had candy. My dad always bought a lot of candy, and as the years went on, he would buy more and more candy. So we always had something around. We always had something in the cupboard. And not everyone did, so I guess that's good. But there is one memory that I do have, and it's a pretty strong one. So when I was much, much younger, probably preteen, like uh 9 to 12-ish, I would occasionally go over to my friend Joel's house for sleepovers. And as is typically the case with sleepovers, the sleeping was secondary to standing up super, super, super late watching scary movies and reading pantries for goodies. Now the pantry themselves, the pantry itself is not as memorable as the baking that would be done at night. That's right. At like four o'clock in the morning, we would get up and go into the kitchen. I don't know how nobody woke up and sort of gave us read us the riot act, but but for whatever reason, we would get up at four o'clock in the morning, and there were two things we would always do. We would bake brownies, and these were like some sedimentary brownies I'm talking like would basically fall apart. They would they would disintegrate upon touch. But they still, I remember them tasting very good. I we used to call them dirt clods because they would fall apart so readily in our hands. But I remember them tasting very, very good. So that's a very strong memory right there. But the one that I was even more excited about, remember even more vividly, is the chocolate chip pancakes. So his mom had a griddle, like a portable griddle, not a porta, you know, a plug-in griddle, not like a stovetop, but like a pull a plug-in griddle. Which I never had and still don't to this day. And it would make very, very good pancakes. But we used to love to put the chocolate chips in them. And when those were done, when those would come out, and I belie I believe this is my first experience with chocolate chip pancakes, or at least the most the first that I can remember. When those would come out done, they were perfectly golden brown. I would love to get a griddle like that at some point, although if I did, I would probably never stop eating chocolate chip pancakes because I to this day, even when Make the Kodiak brony or sorry, the Kodiak cake pancakes. I put chocolate chips in them. And they are delicious, but nothing matches up to that time back when I was a young preteen at four or five o'clock in the morning making those chocolate chip pancakes on that griddle in the middle of the night. Those were indeed the days.

SPEAKER_10 22:23

I've always had almost a fetish for food at other people's houses. Something about other people having different kinds of food that I would ever keep in my house or ever buy and not knowing what that might be and being able to explore the kitchen in their space. I still to this day love showing up at people's house parties where they will have like a spread of food. And I just can't wait to see what kind of food they have. I still look forward to reading the kitchen. And this goes back to when I was younger. I think the first thing I can remember is when I was young, my younger brother had to have a surgery, and so my mom had to go with him to the hospital for this. And instead of me going with them, she had to stay with a few different of her friends for a few minutes at a time. And each one of them would make meals for me and I'd be included in that, and I would get other foods into the house. And I just thought it was the best thing ever because each house I went to had different kinds of snacks and goodies and food, and oh my gosh, I was in heaven. So I still to this day look forward to going to people's houses with the forefront of my brain thinking, ooh, what kind of food will they have?

SPEAKER_06 23:39

So I was thinking about all the different times I've been over to friends' houses over the years, and like as a child growing up during the probably the greatest era of snack foods, like you know, gushers and fruit by the foot. I don't know, just like all of the great snacks was during my childhood. But then I started to think about let's see, it was in September of this year, so I'm currently a senior doing my undergrad at UC Santa Cruz, and when the school year started, I got to see my friends that I haven't seen for a while because they were all gone for the summertime. And so I got to see one of my friends, and she had gotten an apartment on campus, which was really nice because she had been living in the dorm rooms the year before, so she had like her own space and like a kitchen to actually cook, like, she didn't have to go to the dining hall anymore, which I love the dining hall, but I love it from a different perspective because like I have a choice, I don't live in the dorm, so I don't have to be forced to go. But yeah, so she got a kitchen and she was like, come over and like we'll hang out and talk and catch up because we hadn't seen each other. And when I went over there, it was pretty sad because I was I was really going through it with my partner, and we were breaking up basically, and it had been happening over the summer and stuff, but I was I was alone because I didn't have like anyone here, everyone was gone. I live I live in Santa Cruz, but most people just go to school here, and so I was pretty much by myself all summer, and so seeing her was just really refreshing to me. It was nice to have like one-on-one time with one of my girlfriends, and so she was like, Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna cook you something, and I was like, I'm really not hungry. I had felt so sad and just really out of it, and she was like, No, like I'll I'll make something, and so she's so she took out some sourdough bread, which is like the best thing to come one of the best things to come out of you know, my area and everything. So she took out some sourdough bread, she took out some smoked sliced turkey, she took out some I don't know if it was provolone, if it was Swiss, it was some kind of like maybe it was white cheddar, it was like a light cheese sliced and pesto, and like I was just talking to her and ranting to her and telling her about what was going on, and she was just like in the kitchen cooking up the sandwich on the stove, and I was like, You really don't have to make me one, and I saw her like putting pesto on it, and I was I was thinking like is that good? Because I've only ever had pesto like in pasta, you know. So she plated it, she brought it over to me, and when I tell you that it was the best thing that I'd eaten in so long, like I'm not even joking. I never thought, like, oh, I should put pesto on my sandwich. I usually just have it I guess the European way where there's not like any mayonnaise or aioli or whatever. I like it dry, but the pesto tasted so good and it went perfectly with the sourdough and the white cheese and the turkey, just like all went together perfectly. And I forgot like I forgot what else she served with it, like I don't even know if she did, but it was sort of like an act of love, like it was like an act of kindness. You know, here I was talking about all of the stress that I had been going through in the summer and you know, my loneliness and just feeling pretty isolated from everything. And she was just sitting with me and listening to me, and and she wasn't judging me, and she made me this sandwich, and so I thought that I would share that story today because while you know, being a kid and growing up, like I said, there was so many great snacks when you go to your friend's house, and you know, if you went to your like rich friend's house, they'd have like a popcorn maker or whatever. But this story like really stood out to me, and now I try now I try to make them myself, but I don't know if it's like the pesto that I bought or what, but it just never comes out the same, and I think the reason why is because I don't make it with like the type of love, like I'm just like, oh let me just make a sandwich. She actually like put her heart into it, you know, and was doing it from a loving perspective, so uh I don't know, but I just know that I I won't ever forget that like my whole life sometimes when you're going through something, like food really does help. And yeah, I you know, shout out to her. I'm still friends with her, obviously. She's always been there for me, so I really enjoyed that sandwich. And I'm just gonna keep I'm just gonna keep buying the pesto and making it and trying to trying to live up to to her version of it.

SPEAKER_03 29:30

I remember in college, one of my friends who lived in Cincinnati at the time, I went to Xavier, so I was in the dorms, since I'm not from there, but one of my friends that lived in Cincinnati, we'd once a week a couple of us go over to his parents' house, and his mom would make us something called skidone. Now, I'm Italian, they're Italian, but I had never heard of that. All it is is pasta with riuniti poured over it, rioniti red, whatever their Chianti or whatever they had, it's rianniti, so I never counted it as wine anyway, because I like lambrusco, but still, so that's all the dish was. I know nowadays people put wine in their red sauce for to make spaghetti bolognese, or they call it drunken pasta and they add stuff to it. But this dish was just spaghetti with rioniti, usually lambrusco, poured over it. Now, I love wine, love spaghetti. Don't think I'd like the two with each other poured over like it was, especially when it's something like rioniti. But being nice people, we would eat it. And I'd always ask his mom, I'm like, was this a northern or southern Italian thing? Because my dad's from southern Italy, mom's from northern, so I couldn't figure out I've never heard of this dish. But she said it was a central, which I thought was funny. In central Italy, I do not recall the name of the town, darn it. But it was just something I had never had before, I had never heard of. I've never had it again, except for those four years down at Xavier. But it was just interesting. If you want to try, you may like it. Again, I because I don't like Rioniti or Lambrusco as a rule. Sorry, people who may like that, I just don't. But it's a weird taste. The wine is cold, the spaghetti's hot. So you have that going on. The texture is weird, a soggy spaghetti, not my favorite, and the flavor, it just I don't understand it. But again, it's if you wanted something bizarre for this, that is your dish. It's called skidone. I don't even know how to spell it. I tried to re look it up just for fun. I can't find any reference to it. So I will just say the strangest dish I ever had at a friend's house and have never had it prior or after was spaghetti with wine poured all over it as a main dish.

SPEAKER_02 32:08

Thanks again to everyone that submitted their stories. If you would like to share your story with us, please email us at treatlandpod at gmail.