Puffalumps of DOOM!!!!!!

As I sit here on the couch, eating my breakfast of cheese ravioli from a can and waiting for Robin to get out of the bathroom, I'm pondering my addiction to Chef Boyardee.

Those of you who have lived with me or spent any amount of time around me will likely be surprised to hear, I didn't grow up eating Chef Boyardee. When I was 10 or 11, they ran a promotion wherein a person could send X number of labels and receive a Puffalump in the mail.

The funny thing was, I forgot why I was collecting the labels. When my cousin Michael asked me about it at my grandparents' house I honestly couldn't remember. I told him it was a "skateboard or something."

I honestly couldn't remember for what I was saving labels.

For those of you who don't remember, Puffalumps were one of those toys from the 1980s. They were basically stuffed animals made from nylon, and they didn't age well. Basically they were a girls toy, and not at all something a boy should want.

When I do find one at a yard sale or a flea market, they tend to be yellowed and have rust spots on them or someone washed them and the stuffing all went to one end. So far, I think I've only found on in salvageable condition, and it was a dinosaur that grunted when you squeezed it. I think I gave it to my daughter.

Anyway, the point was, I was talking about canned pasta and my canned pasta addiction.

My parents had always bought me Franco-American Spaghettios with Meatballs, so they were a little annoyed but not resistant to the idea of buying Chef Boyardee pasta for me.

As I moved out on my own and started buying my own groceries, I kept buying canned pasta. When Christian was starting out on solid food (he liked green beans A LOT) we bought a can of ravioli for him and it stained everything, his skin, the white plastic of his high chair... Everything.

So we banned canned pasta from the house for a while, especially Chef Boyardee ravioli. And I stopped eating it myself. I figured if it stained plastic that horribly it couldn't possibly be doing my insides any good.

I went years without eating it. Then I started again.

I was like a junkie, hiding my pasta habit from my wife. The label said each can of pasta had at least 100% of the recommended daily sodium allowance. Seriously, the food is not healthy at all. Each can has hundreds of milligrams of sodium inside. The next time you buy a can look at the label. You will be shocked.

And if you get in a hurry and eat it straight out of the can without cooking it, you will have diarrhea. My wife and I use to call this "The Cold Pasta S****."

As in, "Why are you still on the toilet?"

Then I would shout, "It's the Cold Pasta S****."

And she would answer back, "Well, I keep telling you to cook it."

But I never would. I just couldn't spare the one and a half minutes it would take to microwave it. Or there wasn't a clean bowl. Or I was just being lazy.

Canned pasta became my comfort food, replacing Spaghettios. (After a steam bubble popped on the stove top while I was cooking them in a sauce pan, and I dropped to my knees and said, "My childhood comfort food has betrayed me," I never went back.)

After the doctor diagnosed me with hypertension and my wife and I started having problems, I maybe should have backed of the ravioli. But no, I didn't and I swear that it was one of the (many) contributing factors to my stroke.