Deep fried spam

I’ve been thinking about food lately – oh, who I am kidding? I think about food a lot. This time, I was thinking about meal planning, food and kids. moms talks about this a lot. After all, we usually do the cooking, and we’re constantly on the lookout for new and fresh ideas to please our families.

At least that’s another thing the magazine covers tell me.

Some of us moms have a problem though. Our familes like to eat the same limited amounts of food over and over again. It’s boring. This has lead to the occasional “AHA!” moment of food-is-just-fuel, but when that happens I usually go find something really yummy and enjoy it just because I can.

Occasionally this has lead to some really interesting culinary endeavors over the years. Especially when you toss frugalness into the mix and have a tableful of growing starving children.

This is where the deep fried spam comes in.

Once upon a time, we loved spam. It was cheap, it kept for ages, and it was fast. Plus you could actually do a lot of things with it. One of which was deep frying.

I know, you are either laughing, cringing at the fat content, or secretly wondering how good it tasted.

We went through a phase where we deep fried everything. If it could be coated in batter and dunked in hot oil, we tried it. And spam was one of them. Actually, I didn’t *deep* fry it, I dredged it in batter and pan-fried it in a half-inch of oil. But deep fried spam is somehow nicer than chicken-fried spam.

Thankfully that phase passed and somehow I still have pretty skinny kids with no heart problems. But it was kinda tasty, and we recently joked that we could have stretched Thankgiving dinner that way, if we really wanted to.

Oh, those were good times.