A Paean to a Personal Panacea

KB was weaned on KD.

For my American friends, KD is Kraft Dinner, what you call, with typical American literalist panache, "Kraft Macaroni and Cheese". (The most popular food in America for many years was the tuna fish, as opposed to tuna chicken and tuna cow.)

Kraft Dinner has been the most popular meal in Canada for at least a generation. Pundit Rex Murphy has said that "Kraft Dinner revolves in that all-but-unobtainable orbit of the Tim Horton's donut and the A&W Teen Burger. It is one of that great trinity of quick digestibles that have been enrolled as genuine Canadian cultural icons." Maybe it's because the founder of Kraft was born in Ontario. Maybe it's because, as Douglas Coupland notes, it "so precisely laser-targets the favoured Canadian food groups: fat, sugar, starch and salt." Or maybe Canadians are just favourably attracted to florescent orange. That might explain the NDP's surge in popularity, too.

My love of Kraft Dinner has been truly lifelong. KD was my mom's pregnancy craving, and I can only assume that's because I was demanding the cheesy pasta shapes in utero. Everyone has that one meal they could live indefinitely off of: KD is mine. '

As such, each bowl provides a heaping helping of memories and proto-memories. I was too young to recall my father hurting himself quite badly preparing this dead-simple dish, but the tale has been told often enough that I can vividly imagine it. Dad was doing just fine boiling the macaroni: when it came time to drain it, he inexplicably held the colander in one hand as he poured the boiling water from the pot with the other.

(This tale is proof positive, if any is ever needed, that I am my father's son. I have never done this myself, but it's something I might do in the same sort of daze that has me come downstairs of a morning with my shirt on backwards. Or inside out. Or both. One time I arrived at breakfast in a dress shirt I had put on inside out and buttoned up. Try that some time, I dare you.)

Then there was the time, many years later, when I almost burned Macdonald House at Wilfrid Laurier University down preparing...you guessed it...Kraft Dinner.

I can count on the fingers of one thumb the number of meals I prepared in that residence kitchen, despite being there for eight months. Part of it was profligacy: I arrived university flush with cash but with no idea of its value. Years of discipline evaporated in a heartbeat: eating damn near every meal out was the biggest reason I finished first year flat broke.

I have no defence, except to note my peers were just as free with their money. OSAP, the Ontario Student Assistance Program, was at the time better known as the Ontario Stereo Acquisition Program and many of my dorm mates seemed to be majoring in beer-soaked frat parties.

The residence common kitchen was a pigsty. On second thought, scratch that: pigs wouldn't choose to live in it. Dishes mouldered for days on end. The microwave broadcast the cloying odour of synthetic butter far and wide, as popcorn was about the only thing ever prepared in it. At the end of the year, several households worth of pots, pans, and assorted kitchen paraphernalia went unclaimed. Short-sighted, every one of us.

One night I got that telltale rumbling of the tummy that only a box of KD would cure. Kraft Dinner being one of those things not generally available on restaurant menus, I ventured across the street to Forwell's Super Variety and procured a box and some margarine. Fifteen minutes later, I set a pot of water to boil, and retreated to my residence room to find the perfect book for the cooking occasion.

(That last probably sounds weird if you're not me. If I'm going to be alone and forced to stare at nothing for a period of time, there simply must be a book to fill the mental space. What sort of book? I'll know it when I find it. Unless I don't, in which case I'm apt to soil myself looking for bathroom reading. Luckily, there are Bathroom Readers to fill the voiding void.)

I was still looking for that elusive Perfect Book To Accompany The Cooking Of Macaroni Noodles when my reverie was abruptly interrupted by my residence don, Craig, shouting 'BREADNER!' in exactly the same tone of voice that Fred Flintstone shouts 'WILMA!' That was accompanied by an odd kind of scurry-stomp as he hustled down the hall.

Craig was built like a fire hydrant. I had already by that point seen him pick up a guy who had six inches on him and throw him across a room. Hearing my name shouted out like that did not exactly fill me with warm creamy noodles.

I gingerly poked my head out my doorway only to be snatched and dragged back the way Craig had come. Finding my feet, I ran ahead of him, did a one-eighty into the floor lounge...

...and found the stove element merrily belching flames.

I am not generally the person who keeps their head in a crisis. My head is usually off and rolling all over the room at the first sign of trouble. This time, I'm happy to report, I managed to reach round the little campfire I had going, turn the element off, and then grab a fire extinguisher and discharge it...the first time I ever used one of those, and the last, knock on something that isn't flammable.

Disaster averted...but I never did get my Kraft Dinner that night. It turned out somebody had spilled some oil down into the element well and hadn't bothered to clean it up until I came along to burn it off. This is, of course, the sort of thing that only happens to people named Ken Breadner,

The prospect of a bowl of Kraft Dinner fills me with a warm glow. It's comfort food, a link to my childhood, and something I can make myself without too much trouble (unless I'm setting a kitchen on fire...) Many people add all sorts of things to their macaroni and cheese: wieners and ketchup being the most popular. My mom likes to put pepper on hers; I've also consumed it with hamburger and peas. But I'll always prefer mine plain, prepared exactly as the directions on the box indicate, save perhaps for the addition of a wee bit more margarine than is called for.

Kraft Dinner: another way I'm quintessentially Canadian.