This Treat-Sneaking Kid Deserves A Gold Medal In Stealth Tactics

I promise I'll stop talking nonstop about chocolate Nesquik powder before the week is up. But The Takeout's brilliant readership keeps giving us reason to consider the sugary drink mix more than we ever thought we would. Who knew you, our readers, would all have such an impressive list of uses for the stuff, beyond mere chocolate milk? Recommendations poured in: Nesquik on toast, Nesquik on ice cream, Nesquik-and-Fluff sandwiches. But even better might be the little long-dormant kitchen memories that seeped into the comment section beyond Nesquik—it felt like we were catching a glimpse of your childhoods, one by one.

Best of all might have been this little memory from anonymous/mononymous reader "D." Weighing in on the ol' did-you-eat-dry-Nesquik-powder-with-a-spoon debate, D mentions how great a prop Nesquik can be if you want to act like a dragon (it can be puffed out of your mouth like smoke!), but then adds this unrelated memory to the end of the comment, as if suddenly recalling further kitchen hijinks once the floodgates had opened:

We also ate frozen Cool Whip straight out of the tub. My mom would keep it in the freezer and we learned you could flip it out and eat a few spoonfuls from the bottom and the top would still look uneaten.

Reader, when I tell you how I laughed.

If anything encapsulates the level of seriousness with which children take their sweets, it is this tableau. You can picture the scene, can't you? The lightbulb that must have gone off above this child's head when they figured out how cleanly Cool Whip pulls from its tub and how easily it can be resettled in its packaging after being sabotaged by spoons. Multiple siblings elbowing each other out of the way, trying to dig a furtive spoon into the bottom of the Cool Whip before a parent reappears. And, perhaps best of all, the look on the mom's face when she eventually pulls the Cool Whip from the freezer for a recipe (Green Stuff, perhaps?) and finds that it's been all but hollowed out from below, a little series of scoops pocking the smooth surface of the whipped topping. Thanks for the perfect bite-sized one-act play, D.

If I had ever thought of such a stealthy way to eat frozen Cool Whip undetected, I absolutely would have done so. Would you?