Guilty Pleasures
Some people say hot dogs are filled with mysterious ingredients that are bad for you. But that doesn’t change the fact that hot dogs taste great. They’re served at family picnics, ball games, campfires, and other fun events associated with happy memories.
And yes, it doesn’t hurt that others think they have no redeeming qualities. That’s what makes them a guilty pleasure.
When I look back on my childhood in California hot dogs are linked (pardon the expression) with happiness. I grew up in a home where nobody went hungry and there was always enough to eat, but there certainly weren’t any seconds. After my father retired from the Navy he got a job with an aerospace firm.
One day when I was ten years old they had a company picnic. It was allyou-can-eat. There were hamburgers, hot dogs, cups of ice cream, and other goodies. I ate ten hamburgers and ten hot dogs. I know. I counted. Looking back I find it hard to believe it really happened, especially since now I can’t imagine eating more than two at one sitting, but it’s true. I had an endless appetite in those days, and I was, as they say “a growing boy.”
I evidently suffered no ill effects. That was one golden memory .Another was attending Dodger games with my father where, in addition to double bags of peanuts which we shelled and ate, we got Dodger Dogs, foot-long weaners that came from a brand called “Farmer John.” How well I remember when Dodger broadcaster Vin Scully would describe them as “The easternmost in quality and the westernmost in flavor. Shipped west live and dressed fresh locally.”
I had no idea as a ten-year-old city kid that “dressed fresh” meant killed out here.
Fast forward to the present. Although I mostly eat healthy 97% fat-free hot dogs, my guilty hot dog pleasures come from two sources – Sheetz and Costco.
Sheetz is a chain of gas stations back east which pioneered ordering food by computer, called “Made to Order.” You use a touch screen to order any number of take-out dishes like sub sandwiches and onion rings, but they are most famous for their hot dogs, two for a buck, with all kinds of condiments to choose from: mustard, ketchup, relish, pickles, onions, sauerkraut, jalapenos – the list goes on and on and the only thing I refuse to put on a hot dog is mayonnaise.
I don’t know if they’re at all healthy. My wife turns her nose up at them, but when I go east I’ll swoop into a gas station and pick up a couple.
And then of course there’s Costco. They’re famous for their buck-fifty hot dog with a soda – and it’s a huge dog, more than a foot long, thick, on an equally hearty bun. Before the Pandemic you put on as much mustard, ketchup, relish, and onions as you liked from the dispenser. During lockdown you couldn’t apply your own condiments. They handed you little plastic cups of mustard, etc. Now things are mostly back to normal.
Unfortunately, according to my Weight Watchers App Costco’s hot dogs are not a good choice. Eating just one means wiping out two-thirds of my allowable daily number of food points.
Several weeks ago we drove east for the internment of someone’s ashes at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C. On the drive home we stopped twice – once for hot dogs at Sheetz, and later down the road for another at Costco.
No one was looking. It never happened.
But boy, it tasted good.