Gabourey Sidibe, Margaret Cho, and More Celebs Take Us Back to School

0:00This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen? Snacks? A stapler? The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pass keys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See paypal.com slash protection terms. It wasn't until I left the house that I had food with what most people call flavor. Nerds Gummy Clusters had me in a choco. I had what you call a unhappy childhood.

0:38Arden Myrin:Hey, I'm Joe Saltz and welcome to Snacks. Today we're going snacks to school and looking back at some of our guests' most fun, most wild, and most nostalgic food memories. We're talking childhood favorites, after school snacks, and foods that send you straight back in time. So make sure you grab your lunchbox and let's go snacks to school.

1:02Arden Myrin:And we'll be right back. This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen. Snacks. A stapler? The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pass keys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See paypal.com slash protection terms.

1:38I make a little snack pack for them. We go outside to play, right? So I'm cutting up cheese. My daughter likes baby bills. That's her jam. She likes cheese and she likes a little, she likes turkey. Like cut up turkey.

1:51Arden Myrin:I don't know why. Wait, sorry. I realized my face was like, turkey? And someone is going to give a comment of like, okay, calm down about turkey. There was absolutely no reason that was an inappropriate response to turkey. But okay, continue. She eats turkey. Yeah, she eats turkey. So cheese and turkey and also cut up strawberries. Okay, so you're making her a charcuterie board. I'm making it for both of them. Right. And I do, so I'll put a little thing of cookies in there too. or like just always cookies with a fruit, with two different fruits and a cheese. And usually it is her eating most of the fruit and my son coming back for cooking, he pronounces it, he go cocky.

2:32It's cause he's still a baby.

2:35Arden Myrin:So we do, that's the thing. I mean, that's a pretty cool mom. So when you came home after school, what was your go-to snack? Probably ramen, probably hot dogs. Those are the things that were kind of snackish, They also discovered Costco, I think, pretty early. And so we'd have like big packages of buns, like hot dog buns. And we have big packages of hot dogs and kind of like, yeah, endless supply boxes and boxes of ramen. So you would have a lot of that. Actually, so then that's a great question that we've asked here on Snacks, which are hot dogs a snack? And it sounds like definitively, yes, you think so?

3:17Yeah, I mean, I think hot dogs are a snack. I don't think hot dogs are a sandwich. That's the main thing that I have a problem with. I don't think hot dogs are a sandwich. I don't think a bratwurst is a sandwich. I don't think any kind of tube to meat long is a sandwich. But then you get into the salami, which is also a tube kind of meat. Yes, bologna. It's all the same stuff. So why the girth of it is where you have the problem, how it's sliced.

3:46Arden Myrin:I see. I see. Like girthy meats are more sandwich based and non girthy meats are not a sandwich. What are the candies and treats that you remember that like send you back to your childhood? Warheads definitely send me back. Nerds. Oh my God. When they used to come in the square package. Split down the middle. Yeah. Two different flavors. Two different flavors. Now we know what's in them and that's heartbreaking. I know. Because listen, Nerds Gummy Clusters had me in a choco. I mean, I just had one of those nerds ropes. Oh, yeah. See, the rope was where it started. And then once they roped us in, they were like, y 'all want some of these clusters.

4:27So the cluster is just the rope ripped up. Yes. I love it. It wasn't until I left the house that I had food with what most people call flavor. Yeah.

4:35Arden Myrin:And so what were you? So after school, you come home and eat? Eat Entenmann's donuts. They were always on the top of everyone's fridge. Which kind, though, specifically? The chocolate covered runs, right? Yes. They're great. I just happened to have one again the other day. Somebody had them. I was on a podcast. Tom Papa. Oh, we love Tom Papa. He brought me. He thought it would be reminiscent of all our childhoods if you lived on the East Coast. Depending on the year, things kind of rolled in and rolled out. But there was a big Twinkie run. You had a cool house. But then those kind of like, yeah, it was just emerging that sugar wasn't great for you.

5:16Got it. So we started off strong. We started with like Lucky Charms and Count Chocula and Captain Crunch. And then as we started to get a little older, then everyone was like, what are you feeding this to your kids for? And then it went, then the most decadent, then we were like Raisin Bran. Then the most decadent we would get would be Honeycomb, which was kind of like in between a healthy and a bad.

5:45Arden Myrin:Yeah, it's one of those like kind of it didn't get the same kind of rep as like the others. Yeah, for some reason. Yeah, like Honey Nut Cheerios. It's coated in sugar. Yeah, but it says honey on it. It says honey. There's a little nice bee on it. Were we the most? No, we were the most not athletic. Were we the ones that fit in? No. Were we the fun ones where you can watch unlimited television, watch rated R movies at the age of 10? Yeah. Were we the ones where we had ColecoVision, where we had basically, where we had jars of cigarettes out. I was walking around as a child, a Stuban ashtray just filled with cigarettes.

6:20Arden Myrin:Yeah. Was I walking around with a cigarette and a candy cigarette? Making my grandmother a martini? Yes. And we'll be right back.

6:34everything? Sunscreen? Snacks? A stapler? The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pass keys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See paypal.com slash protection terms.

7:02I loved sitting around with my family talking. That was kind of my first stage was to kind of make my family laugh. Yeah. And I remember literally going from the kitchen table to then going to, I don't know if this is a Midwest thing, but we would sit right outside the garage in like lawn chairs and just watch everybody in the neighborhood while we kind of had coffee or cake or dessert. So we kind of, we migrated to the driveway for dessert.

7:40Arden Myrin:This is like a normal family everyday occurrence or like when you had guests? In the Northwest suburbs, yeah, it was like every, not every night, but like a lot of the nights. Do you have any happy food? Like, did you have a good food house, do you feel like? Well, I had what you call a unhappy childhood. You know, as I think. Everybody. And that's the standard, I think. Absolutely. So I don't have a lot of, like, great food memories. But you know what? My favorite, and we only, I feel like there was a season for these. Malamar cookies. It's an East Coast, I feel like, cookie. And it's a dome-shaped cookie, marshmallow on top, some sort of cookie on the bottom.

8:22A little wafer. Dipped in chocolate. it and just this past year i saw them at the uh one of the delis here in new york city and that launched for me a months-long indulgence in malamars yes where every time i was out of malamars i was buying more malamars and i was consuming 12 to 15 malamars a day i want to say that's a lot for months yeah that's a lot yeah but look at me

8:51Arden Myrin:like gushers, fruit roll-ups. You're not the first gushers person. Really? Literally, like, gushers is like a trigger food, I think, here for my guests. It also ages you in a certain way. Like, it puts you in a, it's like millennial. It kind of just, like, puts you in a category when you say gushers. You know, I, my mom would always send me, like, lean cuisines for lunch. Like, it's something. Is that crazy? No, it's amazing. Are you kidding me? Like, that's like real food. Yeah. That is so funny. It was great. I love that. I never batted an eye. I loved it. There are certain things that like certain foods like Little Debbie's, like the mall.

9:29Yeah. I don't remember. What are we just getting trauma triggers? I remember like sitting around with my family eating. Do you want to lay down? Do you want to talk about it? But like for some reason, and my mom did cook, like we did eat, but I don't have a sense. I don't have a memory about that.

9:47Arden Myrin:Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I remember the cafeteria at the school always had pizza, like on Friday. My parents both worked. They started paying me a quarter a day to cook dinner for the family. Stop. At what age? Eleven. I made my first Thanksgiving dinner at eleven. I was doing baked Alaska. I was doing duck au la range. Wait, where were you getting this information from? From cookbooks. I mean, because of course there was no internet in 1700. I'm good. Hardly. Yeah. What do you mean? You mean in 2018? I would get on the horse. I would go to the grocery store. I would churn some butter. I would bring it home.

10:23Like, my mom never baked anything from scratch. She wasn't that type of baker. I think I started that tradition. She was a mixed person.

10:32Arden Myrin:She liked to mix. Yes. Okay. But, you know, like, she did, she bought things that were kind of, you know, like the Chips Ahoy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was frozen. Oh, got it. Oh, yeah, yeah. Those kinds of, like, break and bake kind of things from out of the freezer. Or, like, the log. Yes, and the yellow cake in a box. Like, that's what my mom did. And it was amazing. It's so good. It's so good. Boxed cakes mix is, like, so good. So that's how I started. But after school, I would love when she would bake chocolate chip cookies. Because it's the smell of the chocolate chip cookies that are, you know, it's that smell that's in your house.

11:06And you just feel warm. Zombie chews? Did you have those? No. We also had zombie chews.

11:12Arden Myrin:Do you live on Earth? I'm like, where is Australia? Zombie juice. That sounds amazing. No, it's basically like that, but they put all this sourness in the middle. Zombie juice. I'm trying to go back. Like a sourness in the middle, like it's like... It's powder. Oh. They put like sherbet. Okay. You guys call it sherbet. We didn't really have sherbet. No, we wouldn't call that sherbet. We would call that like... I don't know what we would call powder. We call ice... It's like sour powder. Yeah, okay. In the middle. Yeah. So you would bite it and it would like give you a buzz. Interesting. And there you have it.

11:49Arden Myrin:Forbidden snacks, after school treats, and enough food memories to fill a lunchbox. Thanks so much for joining Snacks to School. We'll see you next time.

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