Your mom's weird cooking ... and other stories? (recipes encouraged)

[alkapal]

inspired by hill food's post about his mom's, um, "unorthodox" meat loaf technique,

http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/552999#3995312

i thought it would be fun to hear some of your mom's (or any other family member or friend's) food concoctions, weird techniques, odd serving habits, strange "traditions" with food.....

with sauerkraut and porcupine meatballs (recipe to follow later), my mom serves boiled potatoes with mayonnaise. it is quite good.

i never buy pork chops today because my mom always turned them into something akin to pig hide.

she likes boiled tongue, but i could *not* get past the taste buds! eeeuuuw.

friday nights growing up was always spaghetti with meat sauce night. she served it with white bread and butter, with a fresh lettuce ,tomato and cucumber salad -- and, iirc, thousand island or french dressing. (when we ate out, dad liked roquefort dressing. mmmm.) i'd get to sit in front of the tv and watch the wild, wild west, with my heartthrob, james west. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058855/ every. friday. night. (and i was happy about it, too)! (the only celeb pic i ever asked for!

)

to be fair, mom used to make a mean lane cake running up to christmas holidays, dousing it periodically with a little bourbon, then wrapping it back in saran wrap, then foil, then stored in the tupperware cake container. other than the occasional pound cake (which is **quite** good, if i do say so myself) http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/4771...
and birthday cakes from a mix, that was the extent of her baking sweets.

mom is 86 years old now, and doesn't really cook at all. she has a bad habit these days of eating ice cream and peanut butter after her nap, and not balanced nutrition and veggies. <sigh>. i get nostalgic.

anyhow, enough about moi.

tell me your funny stories, please!

[jenwee]

Up untill three years ago I thought that ribs were just bones with a hunk of charred meat on it. I never understood why people wanted to eat ribs since there was nothing on them and it would take 5 minutes to gnaw off a burnt piece. My poor Dad used to flambe the #@#@ out of ribs. Imagine my surprise when I moved to Texas :) LOL. He makes a mean cobbler in his dutch oven though :)

[YAYME]

I'm fairly young but my Mom is obsessed, absolutely obsessed with making the perfect tofu cheesecake. I think she got the original recipe from the moosewood cookbook, there have been a thousand variations on it. Most are disgusting.One with pears was divine. The chocolate one was an unmentionable abomination that would have been kept chained in the cheesecake family basement (if such a a thing existed). Lately she brags to me that she's perfected it. I tried it, nothing special. I don't know why she's been into this for over ten years.

[Sam Fujisaka]

Because she is on a quest - and like all quests, it comes from within, albeit it may be scorned, derided, or loathed by others.

Pretty weird quest, however.

[MARISKANY]

My mother once made a lasagna with tofu substituting for cheese and strips of zucchine subbing for noodles. Awful

[chicgail]

But low in fat and good for you. :>)

[terrierboy]

Most soy in this country is genetically altered and not so healthy. Many people are sensitive to soy, but don't realize it. Anyone with thyroid issues or women with estrogen issues should not consume soy products. I bought into the soy alternative movement back in the 90s. Now, I can't eat it without becoming violently ill. Check the sources of all soy products.

[The Professor]

There's pretty good evidence that ANY unfermented soy is not a particularly healthy option.

[fruti]

Me too. Migraines and worse. Ate soy daily - soy milk, tofu, fake meat…

[terrierboy]

I started using more soy when I was told to stop having dairy, then my acupuncturist started tracing my symptoms back to the soy. Even hidden soy sauce brings on a reaction. It seems every food trend eventually has nasty side effects. It makes you wonder how adulterated our entire food supply has become. I'm fortunate to be able to shop and eat locally most of the year.

As to the mother's cooking aspect of the thread, I'm one of the lucky ones whose mother cooked things I loved. There weren't any weird things, as far as I remember.

[coll]

I was always fine with soy sauce, then I bought the new Kikkoman tamari soy sauce; first time I used it, I felt my throat closing up a little bit with each taste. Scary. I generally avoid soy products since I have a problem with too much estrogen, but do like a touch of soy sauce here and there. Hope this isn't a sudden onset thing and I can go back to regular soy sauce.

So far almond milk has been working well as a dairy sub. Soy milk I would never touch, since I tend to avoid soy when I can.

[terrierboy]

I still miss tamari, which I always loved with sesame noodles or a good seaweed salad. I love Asian food, but it's pretty much off limits now, unless I make my own. I have to skip gluten, too, so eating out is a real challenge. The weirdest part is I never had these sensitivities until I became peri-menopausal. It's awfully frustrating, though apparently it happens more than we realize.

[kubasd]

i've done that before..... and it came out amazingly tasty. Huh, maybe she just didn't adjust the spices? did she crumble the tofu to resemble cottage cheese? or did she just use extra firm....

[trixel]

I've used tofu in place of some or all of the cheese in lasagne as well. I crumbled mine, and it always turned out really well.

[Hollyhock]

My daughter- in-laws mom is a vegetarian and makes tofu-turkey for Thanksgiving!

[tmso]

Spaghetti with meat sauce on Fridays, that's too funny! Of all the days to pick to serve Italian-ish meat...

Oddities in my family are tiramisu made with an anisette. Also, no idea how common it is, but serving things like tongue or squid to be carved at the table ... it would certainly freak out guests less if they were cut up in the kitchen.

Oh, and no bbq is complete without a pizza on the grill. No cheese, of course. No matter what you do, kids *will* smear bbq sauce onto that cabbage-stuffed pizza.

[alkapal]

one acronym to explain that meat sauced spaghetti: wasp.

[Agent Orange]

Count me in as WASP progeny with a weekly serving of spaghetti and meat sauce. In our house, the dish itself was called "spaghetti", as if topping a plateful of noodles with a quart of tomato-ground round-dried oregano sauce was the *only* conceivable way of consuming the pasta.

[Firegoat]

Yep, same meal, same name. If we were lucky with a side of Texas Toast toasted with butter and garlic powder

[alkapal]

yes, we called it simply "spaghetti" too.

[Agent Orange]

Yes, how could I forget the Texas toast (although we just called it garlic bread.) Sometimes it was Wonderbread, other times it was a slice of grocery store "French bread." Always with a big schmear of butter and a heavy sprinkling of McCormick garlic powder. Wouldn't be spaghetti night without the garlic bread.

[aimless1]

You know, I've actually TRIED to make 'garlic bread' the way Mom did, and it's never right. I don't know what I"m doing wrong - maybe my garlic powder's too fresh?

[protzman]

My Mom made garlic bread with garlic salt, Mix it in the butter with parsley flakes and spread it between the slices on the loaf. Heaven!

[chicgail]

You're right about the garlic salt thing. I think salt brings out the flavor really well.

But I think there are (at least) two schools of garlic bread:
There's the keep the bread soft in the middle with butter and garlic school.
And then there's the crisp it up by putting it under the broiler school.

Being a fan of anything that includes garlic, butter and good bread, you can get me with either one.

[kubasd]

ya know, i'm actually nostalgic right now for my mom's garlic bread.... buy a loaf of italian bread from the grocery store, cut slices, smear loads of margarine (yes margarine, my mom never ever used butter) between the slices. sprinkle with garlic powder and dried parsley (if you were feeling fancy). wrap whole thing in foil and stick in the oven. Gooey soft and delicious.....

[Teri Davis Newman]

Instead of garlic salt, use garlic powder and Parmesan. Yummy!!

[patmatw]

Maybe she made it like my mom did. I think it's McCormack that makes a "garlic spread" in a little spice jar. My mom mixed that half and half with melted butter and spread it on slices of Arnold bread toast. I used to LOVE it!

[patmatw]

I read it somewhere else in here, it was Lawry's that makes that spread. That garlic toast recipe went so well with the spaghetti and meatballs that it was served with. Yes, the kind that is served all mixed in a bowl already. Green can of Kraft "grated cheese" passed around the table...

[alkapal]

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/412p0%2BzrdeL._SL500_AA280_PIbundle-12,TopRight,0,0_AA280_SH20_.jpg
look familiar?

apparently, this replaced it: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0012ZW5TG/r...

[jimant60]

McCormick had a garlic spread and so did Lawry's. Unfortunately they stopped producing them 2 or 3 years ago. No one has any now to my knowledge. I worked in supermarkets 45 years and never thought I'd see them discontinue that.

[bubblybarrister]

Great news! I know this is incredibly belated since this topic is a bit older, but I did run across the Lawry's garlic spread in my grocery store last night! I live in Western NC, btw. :)

[alkapal]

i hope you bought some, bubbly!

ps what does a barrister do in western n.c.? (we used to have a place in highlands. i really miss that gorgeous neck of the woods).

[Barbara76137]

yes, the Wonderbread/sandwich bread with butter and garlic salt. Now our "spaghetti" had mushrooms in the sauce, but I think that was a Bohemian (Czech) thing.

[ldkelley]

Yep. Or if you used elbow macaroni instead of spaghetti and then baked the concoction until almost dry it was "gouloush."

[oakjoan]

This brings back memories of a receptionist that worked in my office who used to rave about how her husband just lovvvvvved her spaghetti. He begged her to make it at least once a week. She finally brought some to work so that we could all bow down before the alter of her spaghetti. It was just awful, nothing but boiled spaghetti covered with a sauce that must have been made solely of ground beef that was just added raw to some tomato sauce. There was no seasoning except for salt. We, of course, being the polite little liars we were, said it was very good.

My mother used to put chopped green apples in her spaghetti sauce later in life. It was actually quite good. That was probably because her spaghetti sauce (meat sauce) was very good in the first place.

[Erika L]

My mom always put Kraft singles on spaghetti. Go figure!

[southernitalian]

Please explain how she put the singles on the pasta. Chopped? Shredded? Can that stuff BE shredded? And where oh where did the green apple idea come from?

[Erika L]

It was cut into strips and scattered over the top of the dish. I can't imagine that you can shred it, you can barely cut it without having it gum up your blade!

[Cinnamon]

Somebody, here I think, recently described American cheese as melted traffic cones.

[pine time]

Here I am, over 2 years later, with tears running down my face from laughing about "melted traffic cones"!

[bitsubeats]

My mom did the same thing too (god awful). My mother is Korean, is yours? Maybe it's a weird asian thing. Then with the leftover spaghetti sauce we mixed it with rice and put it in flour tortillas. Other than that my mom is an amazing cook (:

[Cinnamon]

I just went for my first Korean grocery store visit yesterday. Lots of fantastic things, lots of odd things, and the selection of middle-American things was pretty funny. Among them were frozen White Castle burgers. :)

[hill food]

WC: not as good as the real at 3 AM, but not too bad - hard to mess up after all.

why at a Korean Grocer is anyone's guess. I'd be browsing the Daikon.

[Virginia Girl]

I'd be worried--do White Castle's still exist? Maybe they are from another era and just frozen in time.

[hill food]

White Castle is alive and well. although some apostate marketing committee expanded the menu to include jalapeno cheese and other options.

[Henny Penny]

My Chinese MIL made my DH "pizza" when he was a kid that consisted of Pilsbury dough, tomato sauce, and American cheese slices on top.

Really.

[Hollyhock]

Do you really think so? How about the very classic Bolognese Sauce? Start with both "good quality ground beef and lean ground pork." It goes on from there, of course. One of the oldest Italian recipes.

[coll]

In Italy they don't use ground chuck like here, "good quality" means sirloin or tenderloin. That you grind yourself, not from the grocery store. Although I'm not sure who you're actually responding to?

[alkapal]

hollyhock, i'm not sure of your point. it's "wasp" if served on friday, a traditionally catholic (italian) non-meat day. that was my little quip.

[Hollyhock]

How about the classic Bolognese Sauce? The main ingredients are "good quality ground beef and ground pork."

[joda]

We were are large family of nine on a tight budget. My Mom would make a spaghetti with meat sauce for dinner. The very next evening she would take our her large cast iron skillet, put one stick of margarine in the pan and the leftover spaghetti and sauce. They were combined at this time. She would then "fry" it all together. It would be served with white bread and more margarine. My four brothers would make fried spaghetti sandwiches. I would just nibble. Can't say it was a favorite.

[coll]

That was my father's favorite thing in the world (of food I mean). Just a little crispy.
We were only a family of eight though.

[sonia darrow]

I am very curious about this cabbage-stuffed grilled pizza.

[kcfields]

We had a regular spaghetti day but it was lunch on Saturdays. You could set your watch by it. And while mom was great at cooking certain things she took many shortcuts as well. Our spaghetti lunch came from the red box of Chef Boyardee. You know the kind with the noodles, sauce, and little container of parmesan. She would brown about a pound of ground beef, then serve as follows: noodles, sauce, ground beef on top - parmesan was optional. I love all food Italian but this was my introduction. I remember being about ten and asking what those little chunks were and mom would say "nothing, just eat it", I now realize it was tiny little bits of mushroom which I would have gagged then but love now. But their oddity was they had to have toasted bread with peanut butter to complete their meal. GAG. Ahh, nostalgia! Then for Saturday supper we had steak and either baked potato or homemade french fries and salad while we watched HeeHaw!

[alkapal]

our typical spaghetti day was friday, but mom made her own. we ate it with a salad and white bread and butter. then i watched my heartthrob on the "wild wild west," robert conrad. http://www.papermag.com/blogs/WildWil...

--- his is the only celebrity photo i requested as a kid -- and he autographed one and sent it to me! ;-).

oh gosh, i'd better go to bed. i just realized that i told the same story in my original post to start this thread.

it obviously made a deep and lasting impression. {;^D.

[biondanonima]

Our spaghetti day was Wednesday - not sure why, but it was like clockwork. When I was in college I found a little cookbook called "Wednesday is Spaghetti Day" (they had other books for other days of the week) and I immediately bought it and sent it to my mom. She was not amused, but my sister sure was. Anyway, it was made with ground beef and Prego sauce doctored with a glug of red wine and occasionally mushrooms, served over slightly overcooked spaghetti and topped with green shaker parm. Iceberg lettuce salad with sliced carrots, black olives and Wishbone Italian dressing. Oh, and garlic toast - white bread toasted in the toaster, spread with margarine and sprinkled with a blend of garlic powder and garlic salt. Ah, childhood.

I only wish I could have found a cookbook called "Sunday is Roast Beef Day" and my mom's collection would have been complete!

[janetofreno]

lol. This reminds me of a something that happened to me recently: a young woman came to me as a client in my business. As I was introducing myself, she said "You don't remember me, do you?" Then she told her story, and it slowly came back. When they were in fourth grade she was my older son's best friend (no, not a girlfriend....besides, as it turns out she was never that into boys anyway:-) We started reminiscing about some of their crazier antics as children, and she told me "My favorite part about knowing you guys was coming over for Wednesday Night Pizza Night." This took me back a bit, as I had no memory of Wenesday Night Pizza Night...especially since I am not a pizza fan and can't imagine voluntarily having it one night a week. But as she started talking it all came back: her mother was a single mom at the time, and had to work late Wednesday nights. So we volunteered to pick her up from the afterschool program with our sons, and feed her dinner. I also worked fairly late on Wednesdays, so the after-school duties fell to my husband. He was apparently the one who initiated the Wednesday Night Pizza Nights. The funny thing is, this lovely young lady said it was one of her favorite childhood memories....that she loved feeling like part of the family. How pathetic is that? lol.....

[Teri Davis Newman]

Oh Janet--it's not pathetic--I was a little misty-eyed when I finished reading it. I think it's sweet that she has fond memories of your family Pizza nights. It shows that your family made her feel very welcome and it meant a lot to her to be a part of the family gathering. Poor lonely little kid....

[hill food]

not in any way could that be interpreted as pathetic. we should all be so lucky to A. have a bright spot in the week at that age/situation (no criticism to the single mom) and B. encounter a relative stranger recall fond memories of our households

[Gmarie]

OMG we might have grown up in the same house

[riversuzyq]

OMG!! I didn't think anyone else's mother used those boxed Spaghetti "kits" except mine! I'm almost sure ours was made by Kraft though. What really mystifies me is how many boxes did my mother have to make to feed a hungry family of 6???

[dexters]

That is really funny, because I was just going to mention ice cream & peanut butter! I've never heard of anyone else who ate this combination before. I got it from my grandpa, who loved chocolate ice cream with peanut butter. My grandpa also used to pour his coffee into a saucer every morning, and then sluuuurp it out of the saucer very loudly. I've never figured out the reason for this. Maybe it cooled down faster?

Other things I used to eat that get strange looks from friends when I tell about them now:
cream cheese & jelly sandwiches
deviled ham sandwiches
peanut butter and maple syrup in a bowl, eaten with a spoon

My mom also used to boil vegetables until they were practically white and completely water logged. Same with pasta. And she cooked steaks until they were black and you had to chew each bite for a solid 3 minutes just to get it down (covered in Lea & Perrin's Steak sauce to make it a more palatable).

Another sandwich that I love to this day is white bread, French's mustard, cheddar cheese and raw sliced onion. This was my dad's invention, and it is still comfort food to me.

[hannaone]

"Another sandwich that I love to this day is white bread, French's mustard, cheddar cheese and raw sliced onion. This was my dad's invention, and it is still comfort food to me."

Add some black pepper to the onion and this was my fathers favorite sandwich also. Sometimes he would add very thin sliced tomato, but not often.

[livetocook]

My mom eats that all the time. (Minus the mustard). Sometimes she adds radishes

[gfr1111]

Hannaone,
My Dad made exactly the same sandwich. I thought that he had invented it.
Thanks for the memory.

[Virginia Girl]

My mom made potato chip sandwiches with a little mayo on them. Go figure. I thought this was normal. Otherwise, she was a pretty good cook.

[hill food]

I LOVE potato chips on sandwiches, gives a satisfying crunch (granted I put more than just chips on, usu. tuna salad or salami) and they definitely have to be next to the mayo side even if there's lettuce as well.

[hannaone]

Did that with any of the "luncheon meat" sandwiches, and still do.

[hippioflov]

And right after payday we'd put fried bologna on it!

[goodhealthgourmet]

cream cheese & jelly was a lunchtime staple in my childhood home - and it had to be on Wonder Bread...unless it was Passover. then, of course, it was cream cheese & jelly on matzo.

my friends all *loved* my mother's "chicken salad," but i couldn't get it down...chunks of boneless, skinless breasts that had been poached in water with two packets of George Washington's Seasoning [pretty much just MSG & salt], combined with so much mayonnaise the chicken was practically suspended in it. gack. makes me gag just thinking about it.

[oakjoan]

Dexters: Was your grandpa Swedish? My Swedish grandpa, who came over from Sweden to Duluth in the early part of the last century, always drank his coffee that way, as did all his neighbors and relatives.

[chilihead]

My father used to do this as well and he picked it up from his father who came over from Denmark.

[foodisgreat]

chilihead, oakjean, dexters - I don't believe that the "slurping the morning coffee from the saucer" practice necessarily had anything to do with a Scandanavian heritage, but believe it was more of a taste preference & generational thing. My dad did the same thing & his ancestors were from Scotland, but so far back that he never knew any of them. I know the reason for his "coffee from the saucer" was to cool the coffee. In fact, he'd often put an ice cube in the cup of coffee to cool that while he "slurped from saucer" his first coffee. Then he'd drink the remaining coffee from the cup. He & I are certainly opposites when it comes to way we liked our coffee. I can hardly get mine hot enough and he could hardly get his cool enough. In fact, he liked all of his foods much cooler than I like mine.

[Sand2kat]

My grandpa used the slurping saucer trick too & he was American Indian, he said because the china cup was to hot to hold until his coffee cooled down, but they boiled coffee back then & it was HOT not like this brewed stuff it gets cold in a minute.

[milkweed]

My Swedish Grandfather sipped my Grandmother's strong coffec through a cube of sugar for each swallow. He'd use about 10 sugar cubes! I'd sit with him when I was three and when Grandma wasn't looking he;d give me a sugar cube and sip of coffee. So naughty and delicious. I don't use sugar today, but I still love having the cubes in a dish!

[joan mar]

I loved cream cheese & jelly sandwiches as a kid, but I thought I was the only one who ever had them. None of my friends had them. I remember my mom buying a little square of Philadelphia cream cheese to make them. I actually tried this sandwich recently, but it wasn't as wonderful as I had remembered, but still good.

[mlgb]

I'd forgotten all about those cream cheese and (grape) jelly sandwiches, on Wonder Bread. I wonder if it was a Jewish thing?

The wierdest thing my mother did was use matzo meal as her fried-chicken coating (we lived in Miami, she was confused). It turns into a rock-hard crust. Much preferred the Colonel's.

My stepmother made Kraft Dinner but added extra shredded Cheddar and then a can of plum tomatoes. The acid in the tomato juice used to coagulate the cheese, but we liked it.

[Shayna Madel]

Not sure, but I had it sometimes when I was a kid. Welch's grape jelly.

Mom would make her meat loaf with hard boiled eggs down the center of the loaf. I always thought it looked like eyeballs watching as we ate.

[Firegoat]

Mmm Welch's grape jelly. That's the only kind of jelly we had growing up other than the home canned sand plum jelly. I am completely spoiled for any other kind of grape jelly. Must have Welch's.....

[chicgail]

My mom made meatloaf like that too!. When I was little I thought she used a raw egg and I wondered how she got that raw egg to fit in just right so that it cooked up so neatly.

My mom also used to make some kind of spaghetti-like dish that seemed to combine spaghetti noodles, canned stewed tomatoes and American cheese.

Another favorite of my dad's (and I think this is a dish of Eastern European Jewish derivation) was something called farmers chop suey that, if I can remember was basically an iceberg lettuce salad with radishes, tomatoes and onions topped with sour cream.

Finally I used to love, but got mocked for mercilessly at school, green olive and cream cheese sandwiches on rye bread. Haven't had one of those for years.

[alkapal]

totally not kosher, but delicious: green olive/pimento cream cheese with rare roast beef, grilled on pumpernickel.. courtesy of dunderbak's deli, altamonte mall, orlando/winter park florida, circa 1975. the best savory sandwich -- ever.

[chicgail]

Ooo.

Adding the roast beef is a great touch. More like an olive burger (for those of you who don't know it's a burger topped those pimento-stuffed green olives, chopped and mixed with mayo on a rarish burger.

I can only guess how good it would be grilled. Gotta try it.

[alkapal]

oh yeah, the cream cheese gets soft and the olives come to life (well, in a good way, metaphorically ;-)

[Cinnamon]

That is/was a good little deli.

[Bigley9]

ooh I loved cream cheese and olive sandwiches! Interestingly, there is now a coffee shop near me that takes thick yougart (almost cheese and spreads it on soft rye bread and tops it with Kalamata olives (pitted!) - my favorite sandwich all grown up!

[Lucyblue]

Now, THAT'S pretty funny! :o)

[iheartcooking]

I just had to reply! Ewwwww meatloaf and hard boiled eggs are the ONLY two foods I refuse to eat because they're so gross. Hearing of their marriage in this abomination you've described completely grossed me out!!!

[alkapal]

gag me with a spoon! like, totally!

[ChristinaMason]

lol, snark.

[alkapal]

;^D.

[patmatw]

My Dad used to BEG my mom to do this.. I think his mother did it at least once..
She never would comply. Eyeballs, ugh.

[Al_Pal]

Not a Jewish thing I don't think. My mom's the one who made them for me, and she grew up in a pretty Christian Polish household.

I have to add that every Christmas, my mother makes this HORRIBLE boiled fruit dish. She's the only one who likes it (and she knows this), but she insists on making enough for everyone and getting insulted when we don't eat it. I have to give her credit for tenacity though. We've been refusing to eat boiled fruit for 25 years, and each year she acts like it's the first time this has come up.

[aimless1]

No, not Jewish... I've got white trash cred from here to the nearest NASCAR track, and my mom made cream cheese, olive and walnut sandwiches all the time. Sometimes she bought this weird canned date-nut bread that was almost like dessert -- I've never thought of this before, but I adore almost anything that's salty-sweet, and I wonder if it started with those sandwiches?

[Virginia Girl]

I'll bet it was canned boston brown bread in a can that you heat up in water, cut out the ends of the can and eat.

[joan mar]

i used to love that canned boston brown bread. I used to think of it as such a treat to have it when I was growing up! I've actually looked for it over the years, but have never found it in the stores.

[buttertart]

It's fairly easily made - there are quite a few recipes for steamed Boston brown bread out there.

[nosurndr]

Definitely Boston brown bread in a can. Never heard of heating it up in water, but loved that stuff when I was a kid. One of the biggest special treats we ever got in a poor household. My Mom used to give us thick slices spread liberally with cream cheese, probably the fanciest she ever got with food. I loved the fact that you had to cut off both ends of the can to push the bread out. It didn't have dates, rather raisins, the only thing I will eat raisins in. I was at the Vermont Country Store and found the original bread there. Bought several cans and just enjoyed the hell out of it all over again with nice cold cream cheese. One of the few "kid food" memories that actually lived up to the memory and rekindled my love for the stuff all over again. The Vermont Country Store has a catalogue, but don't know if they sell food things through the mail.

[fruti]

Cream cheese and jelly (usually welch's grape) on toasted (frozen) Lender's bagels - in the 60's fresh bagels were not available where I grew up. Sometimes on matzo or sweet French from the neighborhood bakery. Never ever had wonder bread.

[milkweed]

I thought cream cheese and jelly were exotic since I had been raised in the midwest for ten years and my favorite sandwich was wonder bread and as much mayonaise as I could put inside without losing it down the sides. No meat, lettuce, just pure mayo.

My next lunch special was fluffernut sandwiches. Anyone remember these? Marshmellow and peanut butter?

[Bigley9]

I remember them well - my mother had just "discovered" them when a stray cat appeared on our doorstep - Fluffernutter lived to be 17!

[Al_Pal]

My mom used to make me cream cheese and jelly sandwiches when I was little! I thought I was literally the only one who'd ever had this sandwich, and I don't typically mention it to people because they think it's SOO weird.

I have to say though that my mother is a fantastic cook. She does some weird stuff like putting bread, meat, nuts, and popcorn directly into the freezer when she gets it home. I live with my boyfriend who has been more than vocal in pointing out that it's strange.

My dad's good on the grill, but the man doesn't stand a chance in the kitchen. He tried making boxed brownies once and forgot the eggs. Tasted the same, but they were only about a half centimeter thick and hard as a freaking rock.

[betsydiver]

just remembered... when I was sick and home from school my mom would make me "milk toast.".. cinnamon and sugar and butter on toast covered with hot milk that would float the sugar/cinnamon and melt the butter mmm...made it worth it to be prohibited from going outside to play "after school"

[elismamie97864]

We had jelly and cream cheese sandwiches, too. They were my favorite, especially with strawberry jam!

[fallingup]

My mom and grandmother do the same thing with tea. They pour the hot tea into a saucer, then drink from the saucer. I used to do the same with hot milk.

[Doh]

I think that was the "proper" way to drink tea in polite society in this country 200 years ago.

[milkyway4679]

I keep seeing this pop up on the board, and just wanted to clarify. After some minor research, this is what I have found.
"In Victorian days, tea drinkers poured their tea into saucers to cool before sipping, this was perfectly acceptable. This is what writers of the period mean by “a dish of tea.”"
http://www.afternoontoremember.com/le...

[joan mar]

My grandfather used to do that with coffee when I was a kid. He passed away when I was young, so I had completely forgotten about this.

[fallingup]

AND we eat cream cheese and jam sandwiches all the time!

[krisrishere]

Ugh, cream cheese and jelly sandwiches! It had to be toasted white bread with grape jelly on one side and cream cheese on the other. I haven't had that to eat in years..It was so good back then, who knows what I would think about it now.

[southernitalian]

Better than cream cheese and jelly - cream cheese and green olives with pimentos!!!

[Henny Penny]

How about peanut butter and brown sugar sandwiches?

[ssjsts]

too funny, that sandwich your dad invented- "my" dad also invented. I have passed it on to my son, and he loves it. Although- the bread has to be toasted, so the cheese gets soft.

[mrsmoonie]

peanut butter and chocolate ice cream is AWESOME! Peanut butter and Bacon sandwiches, now there's a real sandwich! yummy

[shecrab]

Peanut butter and bacon is a marriage made in heaven. It's also great if you add jelly or jam to it or sliced pickles.MMMMMM

[melpy]

We ate cream cheese and jelly sandwiches too (had to be strawberry jelly though). Other jellies were for PB (usually grape but Polaner All fruit blackberry jelly was also acceptable).

[nosurndr]

Don't know where or when it started, but a staple sandwich my Mom made us was bread, cheddar cheese, mayo and pickle relish. The bread was whole grain, definitely real cheese, mayo (not Miracle Whip) and Heinz pickle relish. I still eat it on occasion. Don't know why I love/loved it so much. My husband just sneers.

[nosurndr]

I ate enough of that those exact sandwiches to reach to the moon. My Mom was a vegetarian, but didn't push it on us, however everything we ate was definitely on the heathy side. Whole grain bread, real sharp cheddar cheese (sliced exactly right, not too thick, not too thin), mayo (not MW) on both sides of the bread, pickle relish on only one side, cheese on the other. Seriously, thought I was the only one who ever ate this and occasionally still do. My husband sneers as well, thinks it is the weirdest sandwich ever. Still don't know why I love them so much.

[beethoven]

I've been eating the same sandwich for years, but with the pickles as bread-and-butter slices, not relish. It's basically a "ploughmans lunch" stacked up instead of on a plate.

Mmm...that classic combination of salt/fat and crisp/sweet... and it's just not quite right unless you let it sit in a lunchbox for three hours.

[BabsW]

Oh I love pickle sandwiches. Sometimes I'll use pumpernickel bread and horseradish cheddar.

[Teri Davis Newman]

Because they make you remember how much your mother loved you!!
My mother would make the Lipton powdered Chicken noodle soup--the envelope one with about 3 pieces of freeze-dried chicken--and she'd add a cup of Acini de pepe (little round pasta balls) which sucked up the water so it was like a thick chicken pudding. She considered this to be too much of a treat for anything but a very sick child so when we were deathly ill with chickenpox, mumps, etc. she made this and served it with buttered saltines and Coca-cola. To this day (I'm almost 53) it's the ONLY thing I will eat when I am sick.

[pikawicca]

For a real treat, try the same sandwich, subbing Branston Pickle for the pickle relish.

[moonmau]

I still enjoy a similar sandwich but with bread and butter pickles.

[fruti]

A variety. Grilled cheese (no mayo or mustard) with relish. Dill preferred but sweet ok too

[biondanonima]

My mom used to suggest cream cheese and jelly as a bagel topping. Ew. My sister loved it though.

[alkapal]

what's wrong with cream cheese and jelly?

[chicgail]

It doesn't belong on a bagel. Sorry, just one woman's opinion. I hate any kind of sweet bagel variations.

[The Professor]

Cream cheese and jelly is a match made in heaven...and a combination I didn't ever have a taste of until well into adulthood. Am hooked on it now...especially with red pepper jelly.
Yum.

[pine time]

Yes! Peanut butter swirled with syrup, eaten with white bread. Or a variation: soft butter (well, more likely margarine, don't think Mom ever bought butter) swirled with syrup. Ours was probably Karo, since Mom never bought anything as luxurious as maple syrup.

[Val]

My mom made porcupine meatballs too. I think her strangest combination was chili (made in the pressure cooker, very soupy and bland) and mashed potatoes. To her credit, though, I was never afraid of the pressure cooker and love using it today, too.

[trixel]

I would say about 60% of the food my mom made was in the pressure cooker. I remember all of the meat done that way being incredibly moist and tender.

[alkapal]

i just got an electronic pressure cooker last month and am loving it! tender meat roast -- fast. quick chili. good bean soups. i'm having fun experimenting. next up: curry.

my mom always made pole beans with bacon in the pressure cooker. it was done in a *snap.* (get it? LOL!). by the way, harris teeter has frozen pole beans that are quite good. so far, i've only used them in making a lebanese dish with tomatoes, onion and garlic, loubiah bin something or another (green beans).

[coll]

I made that this summer when the green beans were fresh, it was so good. It was just weird to cook them so long, doing it in a pressure cooker sounds like a good idea.

[alkapal]

the great thing about that loubiah dish is that i can eat it without ANY guilt (LOL) and it is savory and so delicious. plus, it works warm or at room temp. try it next time with some good, fresh, warm pita which you can tear off and in which you can wrap little spoonfuls of the beans.

for those who'd like to try it, this will give them an idea: http://almashriq.hiof.no/general/600/...

i don't use that much oil, and use more garlic. it is really flexible, to taste.

[coll]

This is great, I will make it in the pressure cooker next time. I was picking out whole beans from the dish for days and eating them like they were hors d'oeuvres.

[alkapal]

i forgot to mention, my dad would always use this ploy when he wanted something that was not on the table at dinner (some condiment, e.g.):
"amy, wouldn't *you* like some A-1?"
"georgia, wouldn't *you* like some worcestershire sauce?"
and.... when he knew that we knew that he knew, it became "wouldn't *you* like some ice cream for dessert?" while we were watching tv in the family room. ;-D

it became a big joke, and if he's watching me from heaven, he is laughing every time we all still pull that trick! i sure miss that twinkle in his blue eyes when he said it!

ooooooh, and he'd get really ticked off when i had "mined out" all the fudge "veins" in his favorite winn-dixie fudge royale ice cream!!! i couldn't help it <sheepish grin>.

[WendyBinCT]

Two words: jelly omelets.

[TampaAurora]

Ah, the favored omlette of my cartoon-watching mornings when Mom was not home and Dad had "control" of the kitchen. I was convinced that I was eating Green Eggs without Ham - dad would never make that!

[Louise]

There's a breakfast place in Berkeley, Ca that makes marmalade omelets and serves them with a croissant and two grapefruit halves. Yummy yum yum yum.

[Vetter]

I was in college before I realized that everyone else didn't eat (plump, luscious) raisins in their taco meat.

My mom always, always put raisins in the spiced meat, and we at it very simply with lettuce, tomatoes, sour cream. To this day I crave it. Now it sort of cracks me up-- a Moroccan-ish technique from my Pollock meat and potatoes mom!

[alanbarnes]

Actually, many traditional Mexican picadillo (taco meat) recipes include fruit. Raisins and olives are one classic combination.

[Veggo]

Many versions of Veracruz sauce for shrimp and fish include golden raisins and green olives.

[Vetter]

That is too funny- I had no idea! My mom wouldn't touch a green olive, and I'm sure traditional Mexican food has never been on her radar. I'll have to ask her where she learned to do that! (Her taco seasoning is out of a packet!)

Learn somethin' new every day!

[alkapal]

and remember country captain with the raisins in the chicken "curry"!
http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/co...

[mrsmoonie]

LOL! I was in college before I realized that chicken salad didn't have red grapes and almonds in it!!

[The Professor]

ahhh...but real chicken salad does...

[JennyLeah]

Wait, it doesn't??!

[danhole]

Ah, yes, mom food! We lived up north so the only tacos available were the frozen ones, I think it was Patio brand. She mixed grated cheese with minced onions and mayo, and when they came out of the oven we would pry them open and add a dollop of that odd mixture, and let it melt a bit. It was actually pretty good, until we got back to Texas, anyway!

Sometimes we would have white bread smeared with fresh butter (that was delivered to our back door), and then sprinkle sugar on top. If she was being lazy, or I guess just had a craving, she would get a pat of butter and dip it in the sugar bowl, coating it on both sides. Not exactly health food. She had a real sugar fixation, come to think of it. She would cut up fresh fruit, mix in a bowl and add heaping tablespoons of sugar on top. ICK!

The jello with fruit cocktail mixed with miracle whip. It was okay, but looked pretty disgusting.

And my least favorite of all was the noodles, or elbow macaroni dish she made where you boil the noodles, and then dump a can of chopped tomatoes in it. Stir and add salt. No herbs, pepper, or anything that could have made it go down easy. It was truly awful, but I had to eat it.

Oh and I have mentioned this numerous times, but it still blows me away - her ham salad was made with bologna. I have recently found out that a lot of her generation did that. I guess it was growing up in the Depression sort of thing.

[adventuresinbaking]

My grandfather makes his ham salad with bologna too. I don't like bologna on its own, but always loved his ham salad before I became a vegetarian. I still salivate over it when they make it for Christmas eve in my family.

[joda]

My Mom also made the Bologna Ham Salad. I can see her now putting a big chunk of bologna in the hand crank grinder. She then added sweet pickle relish and Miracle Whip to that. Served on white bread.

Like Dani's Mom mine also did the bologna on white with Miracle Whip. We just got one slice though. I would ask if I could use mustard instead and she would just say no. We also brought this or the "ham Salad"to school every day for lunch. Not sure why we never got fod poisoning with that sitting in the locker all day.

[Cheflambo]

Dani - our moms must have been swapping recipes over the back fence. The elbow mac w. canned tomatoes was on our dinner table too, although my mom added browned ground beef to hers and called it "slumgullion" (do NOT ask me where this name came from - even today, she can't tell us why she called it that). I liked the meat and the macaroni, but the tomatoes were just gaggy to me. We also had jello with fruit in it, but it was usually red jello with bananas (still comfort food for me today).

Mom's signature sandwich was bologna (always Oscar Mayer) on white bread (always Wonder Bread) with Miracle Whip (which we called mayonnaise until we knew better). No lettuce, no tomato, just bread, "mayo" and bologna. And you only got 1 1/2 slices of bologna -- a regular visitor to our refrigerator could usually open the package of OMB and find 1/2 a slice sitting there. And I swear mom COUNTED the slices. Once she caught me putting TWO slices of OMB on my sandwich and made me put half a slice back.

[Raedia]

OMG, my mom made "Slubgullion" too, or sometimes it was called "American Chop Suey." Except my little sister hated tomato sauce at the time, so she just got a pile of cooked ground beef next to a pile of buttered elbow mac.

[sablemerle]

My Mom was never what you would call a good cook. She came from the Irish American culinary tradition (Boil it. For a long time. It might not be dead yet).

American Chop Suey was a box of elbow macaroni, a large can of crushed tomatoes, a pound of ground beef, two coursely chopped onions, and two (count them) two whole sticks of butter. I think she might have used garlic powder as well (I never saw a head of actual garlic until well into my teens). She would season her plate with a whole lot of black pepper, and maybe an extra chunk of butter. I really hated this as a kid; oddly enough, I now find myself really craving it once or twice a year.

She also used to fry up bacon and eggs (hers: over hard), and then would make a "gravy" out of bacon grease, water, and ketchup to put over the eggs. I couldn't be in the same room with this (and have an aversion to ketchup to this day).

When I was little, we went home from school for lunch during good weather and I remember her "cooking" Franco-American canned macaroni and cheese. It was about as revolting as it sounds.

Friday lunches (catholic family) were either egg salad, cream cheese and jelly (yuck), or cream cheese and green olive on pumpernickel, which I still love.

[lannanh]

I think my step mom made a version of "Slubgullion" too that we LOVED as kids. She'd take the bologna and dice it up into flat squares then fry it up in ketchup and maybe some other stuff but I doubt it. It'd go on top of a pile of mashed potatoes and it was delcious.

Also a lot of talk of cream cheese and jelly sandwiches but what about peanut butter and butter (probably margin actually). I hated PB&J but loved PB&B just like my dad.

[moonmau]

My Mom made a version of this she called "Slumgullion."

[betsydiver]

must be something... my mom would serve canned stewed tomatoes whenever she made mac and cheese which she poured milk into that would coagulate in veins around the elbows...I've tried to replicate w/o success

[LJS]

Cheflambo and Dani: MY mom also made this dish with ground round and elbow noodles, but with a tin of tomato soup-we called it "muckygutchi" and I have no idea why. I still love it and my husband and daughter both consider it the ultimate comfort food with huge debates over whether putting onions in it is a great addition or the ultimate desecration!

This recipe is so old that, growing up in Newfoundland, it was not possible to buy elbow macaroni pasta on its own. The only shape of pasta available was spaghetti.

However, my ingenious Mom would buy Kraft Dinner, use the pasta and then save the cheese 'sauce' packet to cook with niblet corn, from a can! (Oh, I feel old when I admit this stuff...but my Mom did her best and we all grew up thinnish and in good health!).

[danhole]

You guys are lucky you got some meat in that dish! That may have made it better. It was those chunks of tomatoes that turned me off! To this day I still don't care for elbow macaroni. It may have been better with soup.

As far as her "ham" salad, it was delicious. I tried doing it with bologna, but it wasn't the same. Back then we got the bologna from a deli, in a big chunk with the red wrapping on it, and then she hand cranked it with her meat grinder. I can't replicate it and maybe that's a good thing . . . not really sure!

[joan mar]

We rarely had fresh vegetables when I was growing up. It was either canned or frozen (but more than likely canned).

[jarona]

Cheflambo, Dani and LJS, are you from Long Island? I just posted about my mom's "slumgullion" recipe and thought she made it up. I cannot believe that was an actual recipe! I'm having a blast reading these replies "after" I posted. Wow!

[danhole]

Jarona,

I can only speak for myself and I am not from Long Island. My mom was raised in Ohio, during the depression, so that probably explains a lot of the wacky recipes. Or at least I like to blame it on that. ;-)

Dani

[LJS]

Jarona...well I'm from an island, but not LONG Island...I am from Newfoundland...sorry I didn't catch up with this thread sooner...there's some great stuff on here and many memories!

[soyummmy]

that's my mom's "goulash" I still request it every time I go home. I love to make sandwiches out of it with white or potato bread and butter!

[alanbarnes]

The word "slum," as used in the US with regard to mining, means sludge, while "gullion" is a Scots and/or Anglo-Irish word meaning quagmire or cesspool. So "slumgullion" would be the sludge in the bottom of a cesspool. Appetizing, no?

[danhole]

alan, that sounds about right to me, as in the swill my mom served!

[Cheflambo]

Oh alan ....your definition is waaaaay to close to being true! I need to print this out and send it to my "I just dont understand the interweb" mom -- she would be amused to see how close that word came to being accurate.

[Passadumkeg]

I think Slumgullion was a minor character in Walt Disney's children's book Bongo the Bear as well.

[Virginia Girl]

Ewwwwww. When my mom went out for the day and didn't have time to cook, she'd open a can of chow mein, heat it and dump it over those greasy crunchy noodles. OMG, how we hated it.

[chicaraleigh]

wow, if i didn't know better I'd say we're related....

slumgullion was a staple but no butter in ours like poor sablemerle had to suffer through, every party we went to we were dragging the jello mold bowl along, usually red with banana and I promise, if you looked in my fridge right now, you'd find 1/2 slice of bologna on top of the package.

I have upgraded to german bologna w/ real mayo but it still has to be on white bread.

Miracle whip was also a staple and could be found not only on the bologna but also on the gawd awful jello salad....

I never knew the origin of the name slumgullion either but we hailed from Western PA, is there a connection there?

[rememberme]

Oh, boy, I remember my grandmother putting out lime jello with fruit cocktail in it, and Miracle Whip on top, as the "salad" with dinner. Yes, in Western Pennsylvania. Even as a child, I wouldn't eat it.
The other food oddity was that my mother would make "chinese food", i.e. celery and onions, in a pressure cooker until they were absolute mush, add soy sauce, and put it over rice. It, too, was one of the only foods I would refuse to eat. I never ate in a chinese restaurant until a boyfriend took me when I was 18 years old, but again, as a child, I knew what my mother made was not worth putting in my mouth.
Other than that, she actually was a terrific cook!

[ghammers]

Slumgullion is a mountain pass in Colorado, but also the muddy deposit in a mining sluice- so think tomato component=red mud, corn=pebbles...

[laliz]

my mom grated spam and mixed with Miracle Whip and sweet relish and called it ham salad

[Sam Fujisaka]

What??!! That's NOT the way to make ham salad???

[jenn]

I don't know, I'm still back there thinking about how spam can be grated..........

honestly, you people make me feel like my mom just didn't try hard enough. . .not the cooking part but the lack of decent story material!

[Sam Fujisaka]

Spot on. My mom and aunties were such good cooks, I can only get vicarious thrills from this great thread.

Maybe if you slightly freeze the Spam first?

[danhole]

I'm thinking the spam is "grated" with a fork!

When I was a kid mom would get the Underwoods Deviled ham, spam and various other potted meats, but I am not sure what she did with them. Obviously I must have eaten them, but she must have mixed them with lots of other stuff because I sure don't remember what they tasted like. I went to the store to get storm supplies and looked at all of that stuff, but just could not bring myself to get any of it!

[pikawicca]

Deviled ham sandwich from my childhood: 2 pieces of Wonderbread, 1 spread with deviled ham, 1 with Hellman's. Sometimes some iceberg lettuce.

[sleepyscience]

My mom would make the exact same sandwich and to this day I still enjoy them. Your "Hellman's" threw me off for a second, but then I realized it is the exact same thing as the Best Foods we used. Toasted bread was required.

[patmatw]

I loved this sandwich, still do! In a guilty yukky sort of way... I upgrade it with some red pepper relish sometimes. (PS It's never really as good as I remember it being, because I always have one and then waste the rest of the can.....)

[alkapal]

potted meat and vienna sausages with white bread and crackers were what my parents took on road trips for lunch in the pre-interstate days (and pre-interstate food stops). and a thermos of coffee. more than once the little cup got left on the roof of the car when we drove off from the little roadside rest-stop with the concrete picnic tables, benches and canopies (florida, 1960's...)

when we annually traveled to our summer home in highlands, nc, i sipped coca-cola from the little greenish bottle (the *only* bottle from which coca-cola should be drunk, according to my atlanta-based aunt martha "it tastes different"!). the coke and saltines helped with my queasy tummy from going around all those mountain curves. it helped!

[Teri Davis Newman]

OMG we had a summer home in Highlands NC too!!! We drove up from Florida in the 60s--do I know you?
What part of FL??? I live in Highland IL now--how's that for a coincidence??

[alkapal]

funny, teri! but....you don't look familiar. our place was near the country club. i am from fort myers, fla.

[Teri Davis Newman]

We were on the east coast--and I was 5 or 6. I'm 52 now! I look a bit different!!!

[alkapal]

wow, i just saw this! LOL!

[sarahjay]

We always grated our spam on a box grater. My mom would open english muffins, spread them with tomato sauce and top them with grated spam and mozzarella. Spam Pizzas were our standard school holiday lunch.

[Barbara76137]

a friend of mine who was Japanese-American from Hawaii used to make Spam sushi...she also caught her kitchen on fire cooking Tamago. Never tasted the "sushi" and the Tamago was cinders.

[alanbarnes]

SPAM musubi (it isn't sushi because the rice isn't sweetened) is one of the great culinary developments of the last century. If you've never had it, you're missing out.

[Barbara76137]

Please don't be offended, but I'll trust you on this. My parents always said the two greatest contributions to Hawaii during WW2 were quonset huts and spam.

[alanbarnes]

No doubt. My introduction to SPAM was at age 40 in a plate lunch shack on Maui. Still tastes like paradise to me.

Most folks don't like the **idea** of SPAM. And some have negative taste associations that can't be overcome (hey, Mark!). But lots of folks who never thought they'd enjoy the stuff have found a crisp-fried slice quite tasty. An open mind is a wonderful thing.

[foiegras]

I haven't had it in many years, but loved it as a kid. I remember my mother once frying it for breakfast (clearly had run out of or forgotten to buy breakfast meat!), but she usually put it in sandwiches. Maybe I'll have to get some ... oh, it was also the meat in 'chef's salad.'

[ZenSojourner]

My dad loved Spam. But then he came from a generation that struggled to keep food on the table. When he volunteered for service in WWII, at 6' 1" tall he weighed in at 120 lbs.

I'm nearly a foot shorter, and I wish I weighed 120 lbs now!

So given the high caloric content I imagine it was a pretty satisfying food to people who (1) didn't necessarily have access to fresh meat all that often (2) didn't have refrigeration when they could get meat and (3) spent significant portions of the winter subsisting on parsnips, turnips, and potatoes once the home canned stuff gave out.

[alanbarnes]

Or maybe it just tastes good.

[Passadumkeg]

To repeat my mantra: forced to eat SPAM 3 meals a day, for nearly 3 weeks, in the heat of the jungle, under great duress, is enough to kill it for anyone.
Druther eat Ham Muther's.

[chicgail]

I like spam. I also like fried bologna and especially fried salami. I almost never eat any of them, but they taste good.

[The Professor]

Fried salami is especially good in soft scrambled eggs.

[dekethedog]

There was so much baloney salad around when I was growing up that I thought real ham salad was quite a luxury.

[Aislyn]

My mom also made ham salad with bologna - ground up and mixed with sweet pickle relish and Miracle Whip on white bread. Haven't tried it since I was a kid but might give it a try one day just for the heck of it.:)

[poached]

My family is from Indiana and while I have grown up on the East Coast much of my food experiences were and are informed by the Midwest.
Couple of good ones from my mom:
-Pork Chops in Pickle juice- In the spirit of nothing goes to waste, my mother would reserve the juice from the pickle jar and soak the porck chops in it then pan fry. People loved it but I became a vegetarian when I was 11 this was one the reasons why.
-Besides shell fish which she does very well! I believed fish only came frozen and breaded until College- when I became a pescatarian and now I have converted my parents to the joys of fresh fish at home
- Lastly perhaps the most midwestern of them All- Jello makes anything a party.
Vinegar goes in place of the water for a savory jello mold and sour cream or mayonaise gives it the spookey cloudy complextion. And as much as I still find savory jello molds odd I love them to death. My Mother's Miller Salad: Lime Jello, Sour cream, Carrots, Celery, Pears- It's great

[Sdenred]

So now you're a Pescajellaterian?

[GeeBeeEmm]

These are from my mom and grandma:

Peanut butter and butter sandwiches.
Tuna salad on a hamburger bun, with the crown of the bun sliced to add a thin layer of ketchup and homemade icebox sweet and sour pickles. Then heated in the microwave.
"Chop Suey" hamburger with the Chun-king bi-pack
Chuckwagon sandwiches - onion bun, baloney, salami, swiss cheese or monty-jack cheese, american cheese, mustard on top, Miracle Whip on bottom. (Mom still makes this for me)
Fried egg sandwich with Miracle Whip and soft white bread

[LisaMarie86]

Peanut butter and butter sandwiches are the best. Everyone always looks at me like Im weird but that is the way my grandma and dad made them for me so now I make them for myself this way. I also love potato chip sandwiches. White bread with mayo on both sides then lots of chips smushed in between.

[patmatw]

I love peanut butter and butter too. Peanut butter and potato chip is an old favorite, so is peanut butter and bacon (on toast). My mom used to eat peanut butter and thinly sliced onion, but to this day I haven't tried that yet.

[nosey]

Loved the PB & B! Was my father's specialty. Don't know that I could eat it now...

[The Professor]

Why couldn't you eat it now?

[nosey]

Guilt factor. Would love to have one....

[Firegoat]

Dried Beef Gravy (I never understood this, and at that time hated gravy, so I had a couple of slices of the dried beef in a sandwich when that was the nightly meal).
Minute steak -- well done.
Orange Jell-o with grated carrots inside.

[Firegoat]

Mom also made sloppy joes that were browned hamburger, brown sugar vinegar, yellow mustard and ketchup simmer together. That's it for ingredients. Every 3-4 months or so I get a craving for it and make it myself with a dollop of cold ketchup on top. The part that falls out of the bun is best scooped up with fritos.

[dekethedog]

I loved creamed dried beef on toast. We used to crush potato chips on top of it.

[chocoaddict]

My mum has always constantly experimented, she rarely does the same recipe twice the same way. Have something great at our house and 2 months later when you ask for the recipe, it's been altered quite a bit. My dad just ate what was put in front of him with the exception of one morning my mum put spinach in the omelette. It wasn't the spinach anyone objected to, but the fact she had put the omelette through the blender before cooking it. It was a bright medium spinach green! My dad refused to touch it, unfortunately I'd already taken a bite, I wasn't about to tell everyone it was edible, if not especially good. I was just waiting for the ham.

[dratlover]

green eggs and ham...a perfect Seuse breakfast.

[Cakegirl]

My mom is an incredible gourmet cook and I'm a pastry chef and the whole family loves good food, fancy restaurants, etc....but she did make a few things that might raise some eyebrows (but were delicious) like:

Apple Jacks cereal mixed with melted chocolate chips, then dropped on wax paper like cookies and refrigerated (never saw these made anywhere else)

Chocolate soup--she would make My-T-Fine pudding and simply serve it hot for --amazing on a cold morning

Canned string beans mixed with sour cream--I think this was from one of my European-born great-grandmothers

A dinner of veal parmesan served with Kraft Deluxe Mac & Cheese dinner--probably what made me the salt addict I am today

Yum yum yum!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[petitgateau]

I still remember spaghetti with ketchup accompanied by fried flounder (not bad, but I prefer gourmet Italian sauce now), date nut bread with cream cheese (my favorite school lunch), and my mom still eats saltines dipped in coffee (go figure, nothing I would ever eat). I used to eat cream cheese and jelly sandwiches as well. My mom evolved as a cook and became quite accomplished, but I'll always remember these meal offerings.

[alkapal]

date nut bread mini-loaves. i baked so many in high school, and loved them with cream cheese. yummy! i haven't made them in a coon's age, so i think i might just find that old recipe and make some for little treats for christmas or turkey-day!

[howboy]

Spaghetti and ketchup accompanied by a glass of chocolate milk (Fox's U-bet) is still my #1 comfort food.

[sccrash]

Spaghetti (or any pasta) with ketchup and butter. I stayed overnight at my babysitter's house once in a while, and her mother would make it for me, called it Polish spaghetti. My best comfort food, it has since morphed into pasta with ketchup, cream, a small dab of butter, and lots of pepper. I'f i'm feeling grandiose, i grate a little parmesan in too.

[joan mar]

I remember a bread that came in a can. I think it was date nut bread and it was delicious (believe it or not!)

[mlgb]

I remember that! It was date nut bread and it was good, especially with a little cream cheese.

[jenn]

i remember it too and it was served with cream cheese and it was tasty. I seem to recall my mother goofed once and bought something called Boston brown bread which was in a can just like the date nut bread but not nearly as tasty despite the liberal schmear of cream cheese.........

[nosey]

That was our "special sandwich" it tasted like dessert.

[Sparkina]

The "Chocolate Soup" (sounds more like a thick cocoa, actually) and the Apple Jacks snack clusters sound delectable! I think my mouth watered all over my keyboard :-)

[RavenWilde]

My Mom was Scotch Irish and from Western NC where I live now, (but I spent the first 5 years or so near Poughkeepsie, NY). My Dad was Italian and from NYC.
Mom had some strange habits such as putting Mayo on everything! Canned green beans, corn on the cob, fried liver, etc. I thought it was really gross until I was about 15 and we had corn on the cob but were out of butter. I tried the mayo on it and I was amazed, I LOVED it! It has to be REAL mayo though, I prefer Kraft but she liked Hellman's.
To this day I eat mayo on my corn on the cob and even canned green beans...but I don't eat Liver...Fried or otherwise! Like me, my two daughter thought it was disgusting until they tried it, now they eat their corn on the cob with mayo too!

My Dad used to make Spaghetti once a week in a huge bowl; Two boxes of Elbow macaroni and two jars of Ragu with meat sauce with Parmesan cheese mixed in.. And of course the green can of Kraft Parmesan cheese to top it with as well! Salad was a lettuce wedge topped with a mayo and ketchup mixture that I suppose was Mom's version of 1000 Island dressing.
Chocolate milk was made with Hershey's cocoa powder mixed with sugar then mixed into the milk .

My mom also loved Onion sandwiches, white bread with mayo and sliced onion. One of my weird favs is lettuce and mustard sandwiches! Another favorite from childhood compliments of neighbors who moved to NC from Lowell MA is a Boston Creme Sandwich, Peanut Butter and Marshmallow Creme, they also introduced me to PB Toast!

[hill food]

I love toasted onion sandwiches

will have to try the mayo and corn next season

[bubblybarrister]

Mayo and onion sandwiches!!!! YUM! My grandparents made them for every holiday. They'd get a loaf of white bread and use a biscuit cutter to cut out little circles from each slice. Every round got a liberal smear of mayo, a slice of onion, and another bread circle on top, and then they rolled the round in parsley on the outside edge. Every once in a while I have a serious craving for them that I need to indulge.

[Barbara76137]

'Apple Jacks cereal mixed with melted chocolate chips, then dropped on wax paper like cookies and refrigerated (never saw these made anywhere else)'

Sounds like the chinese noodles with the chocolate chips. Did she get it from that?

[Passadumkeg]

Now home-made Apple Jack whiskey is another matter.

[torty]

My mom was a good cook and pretty adventuresome, but there were a few things we had that nobody else did. Granted they came over on the boat in 1955 so there were lots of items the other "normal" kids never had, but I mean overall. The dictated format for dinner was green salad, a vegetable, a protein and a starch. I think the only variation was on Fat Tuesday when she made the homemade donuts with some lucky coins slipped inside. For some reason she fell into this pattern where at least 70% of the time the starch was Uncle Ben's converted rice sauteed in a little margarine and then cooked per directions, and the vegetable would be the frozen blend of peas, corn and carrot cubes tossed with margarine and green can parmesan before serving. The green salad was always red leaf lettuce only with bottled Wishbone Italian. Dessert was frequently this red rennet pudding that kind of looked like jello but was starchy and not as clear. It didn't taste bad, but it was just an odd assortment for someone from the Austro-Hungarian Empire kind of cuisine.

[LJS]

Hey, I recognize that dessert-thats 'Junket Rennet Custard-"the growing up dessert"...came in 6 flavours, one of which was a lurid raspberry colour-do you think thats it?

[pondrat]

God I still love that stuff.......Huge fan of the chocolate..

Their website is a childhood flashback:

http://www.junketdesserts.com/

[LJS]

Pondrat: thank you so much for that trip down memory lane AND the neat source of rennet tablets and recipes. I have recently been inspired by Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" and we are thinking of doing our own cheeses next year!

Which if you think of it, isn't really off topic...how far we have traveled from our Mom's cooking while still honouring her offerings...I wonder what our grandchildren's attitudes to OUR food will be?

[rememberme]

Junket! I just had it a few weeks ago! I found boxes at an outlet store -- they only had vanilla flavor, so I put some almond extract in -- it was great, and still had that lovely flubbery texture. Wonderful as dessert in the summer!

[torty]

Oh yes- it was definitely the raspberry. Then again this WAS the era of all kinds of jello related and whip type desserts. The one that you blended and it had 3 magic layers and all those cool whip + jello concoctions. I looked for the rennet one in several large chain grocers recently and could not find it.

[smalt]

1-2-3 Jello!

And for us, there was the lime or orange sherbet mixed with jello and molded, too.....

[capeanne]

Well starting with my Maternal grandmother who was a phenominal cook and hosted HUGE Holidays for all of her 6 children, their spouses and nearly 30 grandchildren, my favorite gourmet dish with her was butter ( delivered by Kennedy Butter and Eggs in Boston) on saltines. I recall having this delicacy at her kitchen table and her telling me to hold my tongue with my tiny fingers and say " molasses on the table" Try it...my 5 or 6 year old foray into a " swear " word...then my Mom who worked with my Dad in their business before it was fashionable or even acceptable for women to work outside the home. She made quick dinners and not a one of them bad..loose hamburger sauteed and doctored up with some sauteed onions A-1 and God knows what else, served over mashed potatoes and frozen tiny peas, lasagna with the quick sidestep of cottage cheese although she made her own quick red sauce using canned tomatoes, more onions and sugar !!, corn chowder with the sauteed onions , canned cream corn and frozen Birdseye corn kernals and chunked potatoes ...the treat was when she came home early and did a beef stew from scratch with big chunky potatoes, chunks of carrot and some canned stewed tomatoes...I thought as a kid I ate like a queen...the appetizer royale was celery stuffed with cream cheese... she was appalled when McD's took off and we NEVER ate there...it was quick , basic , not terribly health conscious and with lots of short cuts but it was good

[mar52]

I'll never forget the day I looked at the dinner table, did an about face and walked out of the house.

My mother had made lamb tongues and there was one on everyone's plate.

[alkapal]

baa-baa baaaaad!

[danhole]

Poor thing! scarred for life, huh? I am so glad my mom never made a tongue for me!

[Firegoat]

My mom never made tongue. But my grandmother cleaned a brain once to cook, and I saw the process and left the house and didn't come back for hours.......

[oakjoan]

I first saw tongue at a fancy restaurant in L.A. called Cafe de Paris, now long gone.

They brought an hors d'oeuvre tray with a bunch of the usual French stuff, but one dish was unidentifiable for the first few minutes. It looked like a small dish turned upside down and covered with mustard sauce.

To my horror, as I watched, the sauce started sinking into what turned out to be the crenelations of a brain. I've never gotten within 10 yards of one since that day. Yuuch.

On the other hand, I've always loved tongue, but only if somebody else cooked it. I can't stand to skin it.

[susancinsf]

I've always loved tongue also...and one of the reasons I've always liked it is that it is one of the few dishes that my mother really did a good job with (she wasn't much of a cook in general). Oddly enough, however, I've never even tried to cook it. These days, most of my tongue is from taco trucks...

[Bigley9]

third vote for tongue! Mom skinned it with hemostats (my father was a physician)

[rememberme]

My friend tells the story of growing up poor in Germany with an English-speaking mother. She ordered what she thought was tongue at the butcher, and when she got home she discovered it was an udder! The mother cooked it, but my friend doesn't want to talk about it.

[alkapal]

well, i learned the hard way that "oxenmausalat" is ox tongue with salad-y stuff like radishes -- in german -- by ordering what i though was a regular salad, and finding the tongue all sliced up on top!! i'm glad the beer came in those huge glasses! ;-).

[mnosyne]

My mom's version of tongue had tomato sauce and green olives with pimento. She called it "Spanish" tongue. I hated tongue and it took me years to get over it!

[Shayna Madel]

My brother calls tongue the food that tastes you back.

[alkapal]

shayna, that is a really good one!

[Shayna Madel]

He's in marketing--always has that snappy idea.

[foiegras]

My mother made tongue (beef tongue) in the pressure cooker. I loved it, but have to admit the taste buds were ... odd. (Even though she skinned them, the taste buds were still evident directly underneath.) Haven't had tongue in many years now ...

She was a fiend for using organ meats, such as beef heart. When someone would ask what it was, I *delighted* in telling them. A teenage boy once ran outside and spit a mouthful of what I had just told him was 'cow heart' in the snow. Good times, good times ...

[buttertart]

My mom was big on boiled beef heart, with stuffing between the ventricles. OK if it was cooked long enough, otherwise a bit too chewy. The best use for it was in a soup she made from a recipe of - of all people - Pierre Berton's (a Canadian jourmalistic eminence who wrote a cookbook in the '60's).

[foiegras]

My mother's never got past the chewy stage ;) The night of the snow incident, it was the 'beef' in beef-vegetable soup. Other than chicken livers, I'm not an organ meat girl ... but I would go for some tongue (if I didn't have to prepare it!). There was a tongue or two in every butcher's case in town when I was growing up ... now it's been many years since I've seen one.

[Bigley9]

Just about the only place I get tongue now is in a good Jewish Deli - the first time I saw it on a menu I was thrilled!

[Deedine]

I saw some in Wal-Marts Super center last night in Branson MO.

[Bigley9]

My Mom made beef tongue as well and I loved it although I didn't want to be around when she skinned it! Still get it out when I see it!

[joan mar]

I remember on Thanksgiving & Christmas my mother would make celery stuffed with cream cheese. We thought that was wonderful. Such a fancy appetizer!

[nosey]

Lasagne made with cottage cheese!

[16crab]

My mom too on that one. Didn't know what ricotta was until I went to college!

[Sugar]

My mom had two standbys, one of which I loved (and to this day remains one of my favorite calories-be-damned meals...)

1) Chicken parm. Chicken coated with breadcrumbs, sauteed, then put into a small casserole dish, covered with sauce and cheese and finished in the toaster. It was the only thing she ever used the toaster for besides toast.

2) Chicken and broccoli. She'd break out the wok -- but it only served as her way of making this dish "authentically" Asian. She'd cook the hell out of the chicken AND the broccoli and I don't recall much in the way of sauce. If she was feeling adventurous, she'd top off with some sesame seeds. The funny thing was, this was the one dish I always ordered from Chinese restaurants as a kid...so maybe she thought she was making something I liked?

She's gotten slightly more adventurous since I've moved out of the house actually.

[foodwich]

liver. mum used to boil liver, chop into small pcs and add to a yoghurt cilantro sauce, then refrigerate it. pretty yummy but the catch was she somehow felt i needed the iron so would make me drink the water the liver was boiled in. looked and tasted like pure blood. it was awful. i dreaded/anticipated this dish.

[alkapal]

my mom was always insisting i needed "iron"! (i was perfectly healthy, of course, other than the typical adolescent lethargy, melancholia, antsy-ness, malaise.....) ;-) (hmmm..... sounds quite familiar even today! ;-) or... ;-(

[foodwich]

i was anemic once and unfortunately it never left me ! seriously she felt i needed feeding, fattening etc etc. you get the drift. the 'soup' or whatever we call it was awful, the end result which was the liver slices in a yoghurt sauce was quite delicious except by the time i got through drinking the blood i was in no condition to want anything to do with it. i have never made it but after writing about it, i think i have a faint craving.

[hill food]

Alkapal, you flatter me.

I think I've posted this somewhere before, but it's apropos.

when a toddler I was anemic as I refused almost anything but bananas, as a result liver became a regular meal in the house much to the resentment of my sisters. still not sure if I developed a taste or pretended to out of spite. but mom came up with rarely successful ways to mask and deliver the liver years after the issue was over.

anyway, she has always made a great pizza dough, but once in 1974 (age 8 now) after kneading the dough, she took a short cut with the cheese and used pre-sliced sharp Kraft sandwich swiss, not the wrapped oil based singles, but sort of real swiss (she was using a rectangular pan and all - very time/effort efficient) and decided this would be the ideal utilization of the weeks liver.

she denies liver and swiss cheese pizza to this day, but I have witnesses.

[danhole]

UGH! That liver cocktail sounds awful. When my daughters were young and I got concerned about iron I got a cast iron skillet, rather than try to get them to eat liver.

[Vetter]

That is the most dreadful thing I've ever heard.

[alkapal]

that blood liver cocktail is horrible. my mom only made me eat liver and onions, or "iron pills". i never cook liver, though mr. alka likes it. (exception, i cook chicken livers to make pate sometimes, but am really liking schaller and weber liverwurst varieties for that flavor profile.)

i used to work in a hotel that made liver with a mustard sauce. it was a great combination actually. for liver.

[coll]

My mother ordered sauerbraten calves liver in a German restaurant once and made me try some. It was the only time I was crazy about it (chicken liver and hearts is another story, love 'em). Although I've never tried to duplicate it.

[tmso]

Wow, I'm guessing there's a generational difference at play here -- but my mother only cooked us liver for special occasions. You know, because of the cholesterol. But oh oh oh, sauteed calfs liver! That was maybe my favorite meat as a child. Not to mention pâté, leberwurst, Jewish chopped liver ... yum!

(Bad Tommaso, you're low-fat this month ... fantasize about lentils, not liver)

[rememberme]

When my daughter was young she loved what we called "liver cookies", i.e. a quite delicious chicken liver pate, made with cream cheese, cloves, brandy, etc., eaten on Carr's whole wheat crackers. Now that she's 17, she blanches when I bring it up.

[alkapal]

she'll like it again! good pate is good pate!

[hill food]

I'd eat that.

[recipelover]

When my grandchildren were very young, their favorite meal was sauted "puppy parts", aka chicken livers. This was my daughter's way of getting them to eat chicken livers. However, it backfired once when they were in the grocery store and began clammoring for sauted "puppy parts" for lunch. She was the recipient of many horrified stares.

[hill food]

oooh, the "bad uncle" in me has to remember that one.

[howboy]

Geez, sounds like something out of Sybil.

[garfish]

When I was a kid, one of my fondest memories was my summers down South with my Grandparents. When we went fishing on the White River in Arkansas my Grandfather would always bring a cast iron skillet a pound of bacon and a bag of lemons. Some of the best freshwater fish I ever ate was Rainbow Trout fried in a cast iron skillet in bacon fat finished off with a little lemon over a campfire.

Gramps was sure to send a whole cooler of frozen trout back home with me at the end of the summer. Unfortunately this was the time that the microwave became popular and Mom promptly turned all my precious trout into rubber.

[susabella]

I grew up thinking my mother's beef stew was the very best I ever had. She would brown the beef, add potatoes, carrots and "french cut" frozen string beans, and a can of stewed tomatoes. She always served this with warm Jiffy corn bread squares with butter.
She also would make meatloaf with Ragu tomato sauce and put crushed cheezits on top. The next day she would chop up the leftover meatloaf and make American Chop Suey with macaroni and another can of stewed tomatoes, but it was good!
Some times she would make cold meatloaf sandwiches with sweet relish, to this day it's one of my favorites sandwiches. A few other staples we had were fried baloney sandwiches on white bread with mustard, Junket rennet custard, strawberry or chocolate, and pineapple upside down cake.

[smartie]

my mum had a couple of dishes that myself and my siblings just hated and dreaded.

One was her stuffed cabbage, meat and rice in slimy cabbage with a sweet and sour tomato sauce. Still can't look at it. And the worst was some kind of gedempt baked huge meatballs in a brown gravy she called Klops. They were ghastly and we made the kind of jokes about both the meatballs and their name which reduced us to giggles, and the meatballs were surreptitously fed to the family dog.

She did make great bubbelas though - fried doughy things drenched in white sugar.

[ErikaZ]

Ha ha. My mother made something called Konigsberg Klops. Must be the same thing. Inedible!

As long as I'm here ...

She made creamed chipped beef, which I later (much later!) found out was called S*#%-on-a-Shingle. Also inedible! She put ground beef on rye bread and broiled it. That was pretty good. She did some stir frys that were ok. She made something called American Chop Suey, which was salad with sour cream. I didn't get it, and still don't.

She did a fabulous brisket and a fabulous roast beef with browned potatoes, but those were special, company meals.

[Bigley9]

There is a recipe for Konigsberger Klops in The Joy of Cooking - or Mrs. R as my mom always called it.

[beekeroc]

ErikaZ we had what my Mom called Canadian ChopSeuy. It was ground beef fried with onion and garlic, add two cans mushroom soup, celery and bean sprouts. Served over rice, we actually believed this was Chinese food! I still make it once in a while, reminds me of home.

[Aislyn]

I remember this but we called it Chinese Laundry - all the same ingredients except we added canned mushrooms. It was very popular "back in the day" in Eastern Canada.

[bubblybarrister]

I think the stuffed cabbage is actually Ukrainian in origin - my grandparents, who were both 100% Ukie, used to make it and called it hallupchi (I'm sure I'm spelling that incorrectly). They would serve the cabbage rolls with catsup though, and when I was little I LOVED them.

[Emme]

Mom's Stuff

-Strawberry Shortcake - those little yellow cakes, soaked in skim milk, topped with sliced strawberries (which I choked down), then topped with Reddi-Whip - i loved getting rid of the strawberries, then mashing up the milk-laden cake and whipped cream into a soup of sorts

Tuna Salad- made with mayo, red onion, red apple, sometimes celery, and curry powder - one of my friends had a conniption when we were 10 and i put apple in the tuna salad

-Chicken Divan - made with chicken breast on the bottom of the casserole dish, then broccoli florets, then topped with mayo (low or no fat) mixed with condensed cream of chicken soup (low or no fat), then baked.

-Chicken Soup - chicken eaten on the side dipped in mayo

-Mix-in style frozen yogurt - vanilla w/ double espresso and double cinnamon mix-in's

Grandma 1
Ice cream float - diet grapefruit soda over vanilla ice cream
Chicken Soup made from scratch "I started making this at 6 am for you today, so don't tell me you don't want it now"

Grandma 2
Canned corn - i gobbled that stuff up as a kid
Cottage Cheese noodles - egg noodles mixed with cottage cheese, sour cream, salt and pepper for my grandfather

[poptart]

Oh jeez....Chicken Divan. My mom made that all the time and I hated it.
she also made grey leathery pork chops, grey leathery roast beef. Served with a side of partially-still-frozen microwaved frozen green beans.

[goodhealthgourmet]

emme - those cottage cheese noodles are a total comfort food from my childhood, and the combo wound up coming in handy for me. i was a counselor at a sleepaway camp for a couple of summers in my late teens, and i was a vegetarian at the time, so i didn't have many options at mealtime. we had a salad bar, though, so in addition to the veggies, i pretty much *lived* on cottage cheese mixed with plain cold pasta from the salad bar for the entire summer.

[mdepsmom]

I grew up on noodles w/ cottage cheese (no sour cream or pepper, but lots of salt). to this day, that is my #1 comfort food. I'll make it w/ noodles, elbow macaroni or, my favorite, shell macaroni.

My favorite sandwich growing up which my mom concocted was peanut butter and miracle whip on caraway rye bread. I haven't had it in years and years but I can vividly remember how yummy the combination was.

My mom would also make a delicious casserole of cooked spaghetti that was mixed w/ canned tomato soup, melted Kraft singles, and sauteed onion & green pepper. On top of that she'd place 6 or 8 hot dogs, which were slashed on the diagonal and sprinkled w/ Kraft parmesan cheese, and then the whole thing was baked. The best parts were the corners of the casserole, where big chunks of spaghetti would get stuck together, and I loved how the hot dogs got all brown and crunchy. I'd even eat the leftovers cold the next day.

[The Professor]

I had the ol' noodle and cottage cheese favorite last night! I like it the classic European way, with wide egg noodles. Comfort food indeed...simple and sublime. I do go a little easier on the salt these days though.
My family (extended, with my Grandmother living with us for as long as I can remember) was Hungarian on both sides and hence, everyone cooked and everyone cooked _really_ well. At least one side of the family came from peasant stock, arriving here in 1905. As such, they made use of everything so I grew up thinking that no food was weird (the weirdness factor is strictly cultural anyway). That's carried over into my adulthood. In retrospect the only thing weird my mom cooked was vegetables. They were REALLY cooked, to the point of cruelty to the vegetable. The first time I had somewhat authentic Chinese food it was a revelation. (Broccoli is crunchy??? Oh, wow).
Except for the veggies which I do my own way, I do enjoy some of the old family faves now and again. So far, my arteries are fine.

[Firegoat]

I admit to liking cottage cheese with bottled french dressing on it.
I have no room to point fingers at my mother. :(

[rememberme]

Go, hungarians! Yes, they're great cooks.

[Virginia Girl]

I have a hungarian/german background. My grandmother would boil macaroni, drain the water (leaving a little), and add condensed unsweetened canned milk, some butter, salt and pepper. MMMM, macaroni soup. I actually crave it and it is an ultimate comfort soup. No nutrition, though.

[The Professor]

My Hungarian grandmother would boil macaroni, drain it, and then fry it in a cast iron pan with butter until it got a bit brown and crispy.
That dish is still one of my guilty pleasures to this day.

[EWSflash]

Now THAT sounds good!

[Doh]

My mom (whose mom is from Hungary) did the same. That's what I used to get to eat as a treat if I was sick, or maybe my birthday. I tried to get my kid interested but he doesn't seem to like it (maybe I'm not using enough butter).

[The Professor]

You do need to use a fairly good amount of butter...don't worry too much about that though, since much of it stays in the pan after you dish the macaroni out.

I treated myself to this old favorite last week for the first time in a while. It's one of my ultimate comfort foods. After frying, just a sprinkle of sea salt, and I was transported for a while.

[rudeboy]

No one cooks worse than a step-mom. Imagine these two gems:

Cut up Eckridge-type sausage into two inch long pieces. Place them on their ends and brown...to a crisp. Then turn over and do the other side. Serve with white rice. At the end of a meal, you'd have all of these black discs on your plate from cutting off the ends.

Spaghetti - make the noodles. Put a pound of ground beef in a pan and brown. Don't remove the grease. Add onion powder, garlic powder, black pepper, and salt. Stir in a can of rotels and throw all of that in the noodle pot. I always assumed spaghetti was orange.

[oakjoan]

Well, rudeboy, I figure you wrote the "No one cooks worse than a step-mom" bit to rile people up and you've succeeded. I am a well-loved step-mom and a really good cook. My step-son has also become a really good cook due to my influence...so no generalizing, okay?

[jenn]

I'm with oakjoan here and I think my step daughter would disagree as well. My stepdaughter learned of the whole world of food beyond white sauce and swedish meatballs from me.

What you have is just a person who can't cook really cook.......

[iowagirl]

And I know both of my step-daughters would vehemently disagree. One of our favorite things to do together is cook - last weekend we made my great-grandmother's recipe for lime pickles and even the non-pickle eater loved them! The youngest one even decided not to take a cooking class in school because she said she had lots of good cooks to learn from - including me and her grandma!

[rudeboy]

Oh, I'm sorry y'all. I guess I should have said "no one cooks worse than MY step mom."

I've met plenty of lively, pleasant, and cookwise step-moms of OTHER people!

[Barbara76137]

Sorry she isn't a good cook, but I hope overall she's a good step mom. She can always learn how to cook, but I think being a good step-parent is a lot tougher to learn.

[iheartcooking]

Lol I had to be just ONE more stepmom to weigh in and say I have a lot of fans!
Then again, one night I made a terrible beef stew and left it in the crock pot for the family. When I got home (late) my hubby told me the boys didn't like it but they ate it anyway cause they love me.

[hill food]

hey take it over to the "Well That Was Kind of Nice" thread on Not About Food sister.

but that IS kind of nice, ok a lot more than just kind of.

[Agent Orange]

I have a fondness for many of the dishes mom cooked when I was growing up, with the exception of her spaghetti and meat sauce (mentioned above.) I now find it way too salty and heavy on the oregano. Although I did introduce her to imported parmigiano, so you will no longer find any "green cans" in the back of the fridge at home.

My mom was and is a good cook. She knows how to follow a recipe. The downside to her cooking, though, was that she did not take risks. When she found a recipe she (and we) liked, she stuck to it. We mostly had the following meals over and over again:

Lemon pepper chicken breast with white rice (bone in, skin on, of course. Lots of pepper!)
Meatloaf with a mustard-brown sugar sauce
Black beans with yellow rice (topped with cheddar cheese and diced onion)
Pork chops and applesauce
Bean-tomato-ground beef chili (heresy, maybe, but tastes just like home)
Garlic studded pork tenderloin with a sour cream gravy, with rice
The aforementioned spaghetti and meat sauce

At least once a week, we would have grilled steak. When I was younger, it was sirlion, but in the last several years it has always been ribeye. We ate a LOT of beef when I was growing up. I still get most of my beef consumption when I go home to visit.

I think mom was slightly more adventurous when I was around the age of ten or so, possibly before that. I remember many occasions being served lamb chops with a mint sauce. I *hated* the gamey taste of the lamb. I think it may have been less expensive then (early-mid 90s), because now having lamb is a very rare and delicious occurrence for me. Another thing about mom in the kitchen is that she is very rigid about following recipes exactly to the letter. Even recipes she has been making for years she sees no reason to make the slightest change. I, on the other hand, have probably never followed a recipe without making some change or substitution (baking's another story.) I guess that might be my repressed rebel spirit!

Infrequently, my mom or stepdad would cook fish. Usually a fried white fish filet. I hated fish even more than lamb at the time (foolish boy.) I complained so adamantly that seafood rarely made an appearance on the dinner table. How much I missed out on!

Although she often stuck to the same old recipes (usually straight out of Southern Living and Joy of Cooking), she was much more committed to using fresh ingredients. Her mother, on the other hand, served canned vegetables almost exclusively. She still does too! A couple of years ago, I was visiting my grandparents, and fixed a chicken picatta with pan-roasted asparagus. The fresh asparagus was a relevation to her! I think that really may have been one of the first times that she'd had it. She wrote down my method word for word and now makes it for guests.

Mom, especially, was always very encouraging in my cooking endeavors, although I didn't really take off until midway through college. The family is happy to serve as guinea pigs, which they inevitably are anytime I go home for a visit. They are quite willing to eat the (relatively) distinctive and exotic food I like to cook, but my parents have not become much more adventurous in their own cooking. Although, a few weeks ago, my mom randomly cooked up some dry-rubbed slow oven-baked baby-back ribs. They were delicious until my stepdad and I burnt them beyond recognition during our brilliant "charcoal and wood chip" finishing phase. Maybe I'm the impediment!

[betsydiver]

we used to have lamb chops on a pretty regular basis but i seem to remember that in those days the terms lamb and mutton seemed to be used interchangable...ooohh the mutton would smell like dried blood, really yuk!

[swsidejim]

my mom would:

- boil baby back ribs, and then finish on the grill - yuck

- make "South Side Irish Spaghetti" as I call it.... = canned Franco-American spaghetti, with browned ground beef, and canned mushrooms.

- served slamon loaf at least every other week

- served creamed tuna on toast every other week

- only use salt, garlic powder, and black pepper as seasoning

with the above said she could make some of the best gravy, beef roasts, and corned beef and cabbage.

[Firegoat]

LOL, I totally forgot that sometimes mom would put browned ground beef in a big can of franco-american spaghetti when I was a kid. (no mushrooms)

God help me.... I snarfed that right up. Yummy!

[rememberme]

Spaghettios! Loved them as a kid, would eat them straight out of the can if I could. Tried them as an adult -- they're inedible. Even my kids won't eat them!

[ginnyhw]

We had creamed everything on toast - chicken, hard boiled eggs, tuna. And we had creamed veg to get us to eat them - it didn't work. Leftover meat from Sunday dinner was chopped up and combined with relish and mayo for sandwiches. Hard boiled eggs and chopped cheddar cheese were used to stretch the tuna salad.

[Veggo]

You kindled a horrible memory of those jars of dried beef. My mother creamed it with hard boiled eggs and served it on toast. My father called it "skinned indian". I was 5 years old, and didn't want to be a cannibal...

[Firegoat]

our dried beef came in a foil packet, not a jar..... no eggs in it... but definitely the gravy or cream or whatever it was.

[recipelover]

I still make creamed chipped beef over toast. One of my favorites for breakfast or lunch. The only change I've made since childhood is now I make the white sauce with cornstarch instead of flour.

[swsidejim]

thankfully cream of tuna is all we were subject to.

The leftover meat from the Sunday roasts(pork, chicken, beef) were served later in the week warmed up in the leftover gravy and served with the leftover mashed potatoes made into potato pancakes. Since I love gravy, meat, and potatoes these were the better meals of the week.

[Firegoat]

I remember the left over beef roast from sunday being torn up and microwaved with BBQ sauce and served on buns. I liked those.

[swsidejim]

the best part is while we were "stuck" with these leftover meals & meals made by her and put in the fridge for later in the week.. My mom, who was a flight attendant, was off in Cairo, Madrid, Istanbul, London, Paris, Athens, etc. exploring their cusine.

[Cheflambo]

Firegoat, we had this too! But pre-microwave, we just had the meat chopped into small bits and simmered with Kraft BBQ sauce and served on buns. It was great, and sometimes a lot tastier than the dried out roast had been a night or two before.

And I am noticing a recurring theme here -- why did so many of our moms overcook food? I can understand the fear of trichinosis that once came from undercooked pork, but why did so many people cook the color, flavor and texture out of vegetables? For those of us who got our veg in cans instead of fresh from the garden, I understand. But my grandmother, who had a huge vegetable garden, brought in fresh carrots and green beans on a daily basis, then cooked them to rubbery mush. These days my uncle lives in gramma's house, and maintains that equally elaborate veg garden (now proudly calling it "organic" although it truth, it always has been). HIS vegetables come to the table blanched or at least just lightly cooked, and they're fantastic! (He never liked gramma's overcooked veggies either, and the poor guy had to eat a lot more of them than I ever did!)

[vorpal]

Hear, hear! I didn't realize that I liked vegetables until I reached my 20s and started cooking for myself. Prior to that, they were all served as an overboiled, indistinguishable, and viciously disgusting mash. I still have trouble overcoming those strong associations in some cases: for example, despite the fact that I now enjoy the flavour, I find it psychologically difficult to eat broccoli.

[pikawicca]

I love, love, love creamed sliced hard-boiled eggs on toast. The eggs have to be perfectly cooked, and the cream sauce a good home-made bechamel, though.

[alanbarnes]

When I was a kid, Sunday supper was often "Eggs a la Goldenrod": hard cooked egg whites in bechamel over toast, yolks crumbled over the top. It was extra special because this was the only meal of the week we were allowed to eat while watching TV. I'm not sure the dish would taste as good without The Wonderful World of Disney.

[CookieWeasel]

Oh, this brought back a terrible food memory from childhood-- creamed asparagus on toast! It was simply awful, totally inedible. I unhooked the screen on the window by the table (when no one was looking) and dumped the whole thing on the woodpile. Yeech!

[coll]

Me too, it would have been OK with fresh asparagus, but Mom used canned. You can't even bite into those limp things. What a waste.

[nvcook]

OMG - creamed tuna on toast. Now that takes me back

[Firegoat]

How do you "cream" tuna?
I'm curious yet slightly horrified.

[swsidejim]

a couple cans of drained canned tuna, a couple cans of cream of mushroom soup.. heat, and serve.

[coll]

My Mom would have added a nice dash of sherry. That was the standard recipe, cream of something soup with the protein, thinned out with sherry. Probably mellowed us out for the night anyway!

[The Professor]

...that actually doesn't sound bad. Iwould definitely try that.

[coll]

Served over noodles, corn bread or rice. Depending on the protein.

[Cinnamon]

This is the kind of thing I'll remember next time it's 2am and I'm starving and am surrounded by 'ingredients' but nothing to eat.

[MrsCris]

In my house, it was creamed salmon on toast. My brother and I weren't good at eating milk, so in order to get more calcium into us she'd make a standard white sauce and throw in a can of salmon. A sprinkle of dried dill weed and lots of pepper topped it off.
I was nostalgic for it and made it once. Once.

[Veggo]

My mother would "extend" the deviled ham in our ( 5 kids ) sandwiches, with a couple mashed hard boiled eggs. We knew we were being had. And despite being wasps, we ate fish on Friday's "in sympathy" with the catholics. But it was because fish was cheaper than meat in the 60's.
To her credit, she concocted a wonderful summer beverage from the wild currants we picked. She would boil and strain them, add sugar, and serve it 50-50 with club soda. Delicious.

[Passadumkeg]

currant "saft" , very Skandinavian! We planted red current bushes for the same purpose. Makes good wine too.

[ipsedixit]

Mom's homemade spaghetti sauce: add soy sauce, ground meat and other Chinese seasonings to jar of Ragu.

Bless her heart.

[MplsM ary]

Not a weird concoction at all but I’d probably be subject to Child Protective Services if this were to happen today…

On Mondays I’d walk home from school (pre-busing) and arrive at 3:45 or so. The house smelled fantastic. Ground beef, onions and garlic perfumed the air. Mom would be busy stirring things around in what I remember as a huge wide pot, opening cans of whole tomatoes and tomato paste.

While I was getting changed she’d add the tomatoes and whatever magic seasoning needed to be added (probably Spice Island Italian Seasoning, salt and pepper).

She’d lower the gas stove to low, plop a lid on the pan and out the back door we’d go, walking a mile to my tap and ballet class at 4:30.

We’d get home around 6:00 and the smell of that wonderful spaghetti sauce would almost make me feel weak with ravenous hunger. I’d assemble the salad so I could nibble and not whine while the spaghetti cooked.

Finally, dinner was served.

As a kid, I loved Mondays.

A couple other things at my house:
Company = Cheddar Goldfish and cashews both in cute little bowls I now have and use for that same purpose.

Thanksgiving and Christmas meals were not complete without a relish tray. Black olives, green olives, watermelon pickle and cream cheese stuffed celery. I continue that tradition as well, even if it’s just for me.

One other thing that I guess is weird but I don’t know. Sometimes I just craved Hollandaise so we’d just have an artichoke (the perfect Hollandaise delivery device) for dinner.

[jenn]

Growing up, my mother hated cooking, well maybe hate is too strong a word but she is not and never shall be, a person who cooks. She likes restaurants--french food, japanese food, middle eastern food---but she can't cook any of it. For not less than 5 years and honestly I think it was more like ten, she did not have a working stove in her house. She used a toaster oven and her beloved microwave. One by one the burners on the stove died and since she hated cooking, she never got them fixed. Growing up, food was prepared because you had to feed children and thats it. I was the first kid on the block who knew what a frozen swanson dinner was.

One thing she did very well was cooking frozen veggies until they were just right [this was the 60s and thats what you got in the big city]---I never touched a canned veggie except at houses of friends. Along with the veggies there were lots and lots and lots of hamburger pattys. She also made meatloaf and did baked chicken. In my early years, she would do chili on Christmas eve---straight from the favorite pre-package mix with added ground beef and tomatoes. She could do a good roast aka hunk o meat in the oven but she could NEVER EVER EVER not burn the rolls nor could she handle getting a complicated [ie more than 3 dishes] meal on the table. I am familiar with the fried egg sandwich with mayo but in our house it was always wheat bread because it was "healthier." I was the only kid in school who never ever ever had white bread. I was also the only kid who brought liverwurst sandwiches to school. Now mind you, it is true that I liked liverwurst with pickle relish but as those of you who were there know, elementary school in the 60s was NOT a time for creative lunches. A proper lunch was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or maybe baloney but never ever liverwurst. In other words, eatting lunch at school was hellish. [Tomorrow is the first day of school and my kids, at their request, are bringing bi bim bap....itsn't it lovely how things have changed?].

We did---when it could be afforded---eat out so I also knew alot about sushi and eventually greek food.

The real cook was her mom, my grandmother who canned like fiend and made awesome beef veggie soup and chicken and all sorts of stuff. I remember her bringing us tons of home canned tomatoes one year and my mother, by then completely brainwashed to the idea that consumption of home canning meant instant death, never opened a single jar. I still miss my grandma's veggie beef soup--never got the recipe.

[oakjoan]

jenn: I had exactly the same experience with my school lunch. It was always black bread or rye bread with meatloaf or liverwurst and NEVER peanut butter and jelly on Wonder Bread. Oh, how I craved that. Sounds as if wonderful changes have taken place in the school lunch area! Nobody would ever trade with me.

[Firegoat]

I went home to my parent's house recently. (see the story of great pizza on the chow crush thread)
I hadn't been home in years due to a variety of estrangements, problems, etc.
Mr. Firegoat and I arrived for lunch. A pork loin that was stuck in a crock pot. Mashed potatoes (real!) canned corn, some fresh sliced tomatoes, and a salad of iceburg lettuce.
The next day for lunch we had hamburgers, charred so badly on the grill they were like hockey pucks, along with some cantelope my dad grew himself, some of mom's tomatoes and a can of Bush's baked beans.
Best meal I've had in at least 3 years.
Sometimes it isn't the food, it is the company you keep and the love they have for you.

[Petrichor]

Firegoat, that was beautiful and you're so right. Food made and served with love is good, no matter what (usually).

My mom made some interesting lunches:
Creamed Egg on Toast: hard boiled eggs diced w/ a can of Cream of Mushroom soup mixed in and thinned to the consistency of thick gravy and poured over toast.

Tuna Broccoli casserole: Boil some broccoli and put in an 8x8 casserole. Dump a can of drained tuna on top. Thin out to the consistency of gravy a can of cream of mushroom soup and pour over the tuna and broccoli. Crunch up some soda crackers (saltines) and sprinkle over the top. Bake til heated through.

She usually made chili w/ slightly crunchy beans, but for some reason my friends really liked it.

And I still make her macaroni and cheese when I need comfort food: Macaroni mixed w/ a can of condensed tomato soup and a bunch of cheddar cheese.

[lovessushi]

Wow - I love this thread - haven't ready all the posts yet but they're great! My mom passed away 5 years ago but memories...wow....

Turkey was the driest meat known to man (I didn't know she always overcooked it)
Meatsauce (similar to spaghetti recipies above) consisted of a pound of pasta, a pound of chopmeat, and some tomato sauce and was very big in our house.
Also something called Arizona Skillet Dinner which had elbow macaroni, some canned beans, and various vegetables - never really liked it but kind of ate it anyway as it was sort of benign.
Salsbury Steak! With canned cream of mushroom soup! Hah!
Pasta with peppers (pasta with italian peppers and a can of tomato paste and some spices)
The episode where she made 15 cups of rice for 6 people :-)
She made this really good dish I called breadcrumb chicken. I have no real idea how to make it and she hated making it for some reason but I loved it - was baked in the oven, maybe with cornflake crumbs?
My mother made THE most awesome sandwiches and great Cuban food. I miss that...
What is nice is that she left me 2 books - one of her recipies and one of my grandmother's - so not the little things they made every day but the big holiday meals and such are all in there and I am SO grateful for that.
Ironically I don't know if my mother was a good cook but we had no money and there was always a delicious (at least back then) meal on the table and we were never hungry...so to me, she was a good cook. But what's ironic is that I am not such a great cook - I can bake like a fiend but cooking is a whole 'nother story :-)

[alkapal]

my aunt billie used to make my favorite: softly scrambled eggs, on white bread with mayo spread on the bread. she'd cut off the crusts, then cut it into 9 squares. i felt like quite the special one!

she also introduced me to creamed chipped beef on toast. i like it as comfort food, and really hate to hear when people on these boards call it that bad name. you know.

and, relish trays were de rigueur for turkey day and christmas dinner. easter, too. little pickles, black olives, celery sticks, radishes....

[Veggo]

Sorry. I knew it was iffy, but my source of trauma was the name, not the product. (I was too young to recognize the poor humor). I just reported myself.

[alkapal]

oh veggo, i didn't mean for you to turn yourself in! ;-(

[Veggo]

I had to. I was tired of runnin'. I had no place to hide. I was gettin' hungry and thirsty, and I ran out of money. I could feel the long arm of the monitors gettin' closer and closer...:)

[foodwich]

after the gross out liver story, in defence of my mum who passed away when i was a teenager, my first cooking experience and love of food came from her. she woke me up early on a sunday and wanted to show me something in the kitchen. i went there and she was showing me how to make scrambled eggs. she was a very good cook and there were some things she made which i havent been able to recreate and i miss them dearly.

[bflocat]

What a great post! I grew up in the '80s and my mom made many of the things listed here already, like spaghetti with meat sauce (prego poured over undrained ground beef), cream cheese and jelly sandwiches (still eat 'em!), s**t on a shingle, and American Chop Suey. We also got:
-Tuna Melts: creamed tuna on english muffins topped with american cheese
-Tex-Mex Dip: a packet of taco seasoning stirred into refried beans, topped with sour cream, shredded cheddar, and occasionally some jarred salsa
-Chicken Casserole: boiled chicken placed in baking pan, covered with canned cream of chicken soup, broccoli, and american cheese and baked until the broccoli is mushy and drab green.

It's the running joke in our family that both my brother and I turned out to be great (and enthusiastic) cooks!!

[pine time]

Oh, the dreaded chicken casserole! Mom baked the heck out of chicken breasts, then poured cream of whatever soup over them. I still can't eat a hunk o' chicken breast.

[hannaone]

There was another thread about a year ago similar to this (something about food in the sixties) where a sub thread got into the horrible dishes. Since that thread I have thought about the food of my childhood, and while my mother often used recipes from can and box labels and cooked some really bad concoctions (I think I've had nearly everything mentioned in this thread), those meals were really the exceptions.
My father hunted and fished often so we had fresh game and fish, usually prepared very well, throughout the year.
My uncle owned a farm where he raised and sheep, hogs, and had several acres of corn fields and other other veggies, so we had a lot of fresh mutton, pork, and fresh harvest vegetables.
My family raised rabbits, so a lot of fresh rabbit was on the table.
My mother made some of the best hand made tortillas, both corn and flour, and baked the best bread.
My father's cooking derived from cow camps and other "free range" style camps. He made the best breakfast meals with home made pancakes, "campfire" biscuits and gravy, and fresh meat/veggie scrambles.
But since this really good food was the norm, the "bad" stuff stands out in memory.

[hannaone]

Dad's Hash Browns

4 large Idaho Spuds (russet potato's)
1 Large Onion
1 medium green pepper (Bell Pepper)
2 tablespoons Bacon Grease (more as needed)
Salty Pepper (his mix of salt and pepper, roughly 1/2 measure of salt to 1 measure of pepper)

Shred the potato then rinse in cold water. Place in a bowl and cover with luke warm water. Let sit ten to fifteen minutes.
Cut the onion in half from top to bottom, then thin slice each half cross wise.
Cut the Bell Pepper in half from top to bottom, then slice into thin strips, also from top to bottom.
Drain the potatos, then roll in a paper towel to remove more moisture.
Heat a cast iron skillet over medium high heat, then add bacon grease.
Add onion to hot grease and cook to a light brown, remove from skillet and drain.
Add more grease if needed, then add bell pepper to hot grease. Cook until lightly browned, remove from skillet and drain.
Add potato to hot grease in a thin layer (depending on skillet size you may need to cook in two or three batches) and cook to a light golden brown, turning once only.
Place potato, onion, and bell pepper into a large mixing bowl and toss until well mixed.

Serve with crisp fried bacon, over easy eggs, and thick sliced toast, adding "salty pepper" to taste.

[Barbara76137]

hannaone, could your family adopt me? :))

[pondrat]

My mom used to do asparagus in a pressure cooker...part of that whole WW2 generation that thought undercooked (anything) could give you trichinosos or tapeworm. It was the food equivalent of her warnings about breaking your neck or poking your eye out.

Have you ever seen what's left of asparagus after pressure cooking for any period of time ? Not pretty.

[rinkatink888]

I grew up in a small town in Wyoming where my parents ran a family-owned Chinese-American restaurant for over 30 years. Many of the foods they prepared were hybrids, due to the fact, Chinese ingredients were not as accessible as they are today, but most of folks in that town grew up loving the food and adapted it to their palate. My parents retired in the late 80’s; however, when I go back to visit my hometown, many of the old-timers remembered my parents and their restaurant fondly and wished they could eat at the restaurant again.

One of my favorite dishes at the restaurant is mom’s spaghetti she serves every Wednesday. The ingredients, in the sauce, were a mix of catsup, sugar, Heinz 57, Worchester, ground beef, tomatoes, onions, celery, carrots, etc. She would mix all the ingredients in the wok, put the cooked spaghetti in, mix it all up and serve. I grew up with it and loved every bite.

Until I went to college, that was the closest I had to “Italian” spaghetti, unless you count chef Boyardee. I remembered a few conversations I had with my classmates about Mom’s version of spaghetti and a few laughed because they thought the ingredients were a weird combination.

Over the years I had forgotten about Mom’s spaghetti until 5 years ago when my daughter brought it up. She mentioned the few times she visited my parent’s restaurant, how much she liked their spaghetti and I realized too, how much I missed her spaghetti. By that time, she and my dad had retired and moved to Southern California, closed to where I live. During that time, I realized all the food she cooked, including the many foods she cooked for us from her Canton village were all in her head and was never written down. I realized once she’s gone, those recipes she created will be gone too. Because she could never tell me how her food is cooked, I started to watch her cooking and wrote the ingredients down and how she processes her ingredients with her cooking style. One of those was her spaghetti recipe.

After several tries to make it taste like my Mom’s, I was able to come up with measurements for each of the ingredients, and tried it out on my family. With the exception of my significant other (he’s likes the true Italian pasta since he grew up with an Italian family and he hates catsup), they absolutely loved it and seeing the nostalgia look on the faces, it was worth it writing it down, and now I make it on a regular basis but my significant other still won’t eat it.

[jacquelyncoffey]

Hi, reading that your mom is from Canton, this is off-post, but I'm going to try anyway. I grew up in the Northeast, where the "Shrimp with Lobster Sauce" was supposedly the same sauce as "Lobster Cantonese". I have tried to make that wonderful pork-filled garlicky sauce, but the recipes are just not what I remember, and those "South Sea - Polynesian" restaurants that made it the way I want it are gone, and as far as I can tell, can't be found. Is it possible that your mom makes this sauce?

[rinkatink888]

Hi:

My mom makes Shrimp with lobster sauce, where the ingredients is simply chicken broth, black beans, garlic and ground pork, and at the end, an egg is lightly scramble into the mixture and shrimp, and her version of Cantonese lobster is fresh pieces of cut up lobster, quickly deep fried and mixed into a similar sauce, but it's slightly thicken with corn sauce, whereas, the shrimp with lobster sauce is slightly runny. Both dishes are delicious.

[nomadchowwoman]

Ah, memories: Chinese restaurants, and one in particular, were our family's favorite when eating out. We always ordered Lobster Cantonese--chunks of lobster in a rather bland sauce (this was my mom's absolute favorite) as well as Shrimp w/lobster sauce--thick garlicky greyish brown sauce w/ some scrambled egg white in it, onion, lots of ground pork, large shrimp (we all loved this). My mother grouses all the time that you can't get decent Cantonese anymore and has fits when she orders Shrimp w/LS and it comes with peas and diced carrots and a runny egg white sauce.

[beggsy]

Bologna Birds! Seriously. Bought big cylinders of bologna and sliced rounds on the thick side; rolled up with stuffing (homemade, I'm sure -- they didn't have Stove Top then); held together with a toothpick and baked in oven until hot. Looked more like a taco when done.. didn't roll well. Yum!!

[mgwerks]

My mom? Grape jelly on her corned beef hash. 'Nuff said on why I learned to cook for myself.

[Firegoat]

I'll eat grape jelly on a sausage mcmuffin.... if I'm wrong... I don't want to be right.

[alkapal]

yes firegoat, "if lovin' you is wrong, i don't wanna be right." <alkapal singing to her biscuit with jelly and sausage.>
<regards to jfood for his contribution to this post> ;-)

[alkapal]

i've posted my mom's good cobbler recipe on chow recipes: ""Mom's Super Easy Fruit Cobbler". Best served warm out of the oven with good vanilla ice cream!

http://www.chow.com/recipes/13522

[danhole]

So where is that porcupine recipe? Waiting patiently!

[alkapal]

look in chow recipes tomorrow! ;-)

[Peg]

My mom rarely cooked fish. One thing she made was a casserole that I deduce was made by putting in a dish: canned tomatoes, raw sliced onions, white fish fillets and dried herbs. This was baked at an evidently high temperature until the desired result was acheived - hot tomatoes, semi-raw onions and overcooked tough fish.
And before anyone makes remarks about English cooking - my mom was from Yonkers, NY.

[Sam Fujisaka]

Well, my experience is quite different.

My mother, the aunties on both sides, most of my cousins on both sides were/are great cooks. Everything cooked from scratch; lots of baking; classic sauces and methods; attention to presentation; but nothing fu - fu; all major ethnic/country foods! I'm about in the middle in terms of skills. My mother used to laugh at/be disgusted by how all of your mothers (over)cooked vegetables. I cannot scoff at mom's cooking at all--unfortunately, I have to go through lilfe trying to improve. AND, when I was growing up cooking was not something that one tried to do or become good at doing, it was something that everyone should simply know how to do. Poor mom, she was also ashamed that I got a research PhD ("Piled higher and deeper" to her) instead of a MD.

[hill food]

nothing to be embarassed by? oh Sam, I always appreciate your posts, but what a thin warp to treadle. what a wasteland of aimless teenage angst. no focus? no gripes? what an unfulfilled adolescent existence.

c'mon, surely there are some culinary "mash-ups" to draw from.

I laugh 'cause my mom grew up mostly on farms and has no clue (bless her heart) what's done to produce fresh straight off the field, that's great - store-bought, frozen or canned (even self-canned), mmm, done wrong. really dangerously wrong. we all have gripes, but fresh greens and leafies should never be considered dessicants.

[Sam Fujisaka]

Oh, LOADS of teenage angst...but just well fed angst! And at those family get togethers, everyone would have to tell a "Do you remember the time that Sammmy..." Then 10 minutes later hard of hearing Uncle Herb would pop up with, "Do you remember the time that Sammmy..." Tales about setting a dry field on fire after shooting an arrow with a lit sparkler attached, running for the tractor to put it out, and breaking a short irrigation stand pipe in doing so; or the time that a firecracker got tossed into the BBQ for laughs...

[hill food]

looking back I wouldn't trust myself with a burnt-out match at age 12.

If I'd only researched more discreet accelerants, I (and many cohorts) might have had quite different careers today...

I meant to be more articulate (than 4:00 AM EST allowed - dang Hanna waking me) that 'mash-ups' meant given where you've lived, some interesting cross-regional and unlikely dishes, that may have absolutely nothing to do with family may have been found.

[corabeth]

My mother, grandmothers, aunts, etc, were all excellent cooks. I grew up in West Virginia & their cooking style was just basic southern home cooking. Both sets of grandparents had dairy farms, so all the cooks in my family used fresh cream & butter in their cooking(my maternal grandmother made her own cottage cheese!) Also, all breads, yeast rolls, pie crusts, biscuits, were make with lard & the eggs were, of course, from their own chickens.

Meat was from home butchered steers and hogs, fresh killed chickens, & squirrels,rabbits(both wild & domestic). Vegetables & fruits were either grown in LARGE gardens or picked wild(blackberries, etc). The excess veggies and fruits were canned,frozen,made into jellies, jams, conserves, Hickory nuts were gathered to use in baking.

Now, of course if these ladies had been terrible cooks, then all those wonderful ingredients would have been ruined. But, they were all excellent cooks and bakers. It would take pages to list all the wonderful meals they produced.

I still use their recipes with the freshest ingredients I can find and now my daughter is also cooking in the same way. When our family gets together for holiday,birthday meals I cook very much the same way my mother, grandmothers, & aunts cooked- fried chicken with all the "fixens" is their favorite and I am nto allowed to deviate in any way from the my tried & true menu.

[foodisgreat]

All of this is a great read to a new reader. Brings back many great memories. My mom worked as much or more than my dad and rest of us in an old country store we had, so in busy periods there was no time for her cooking - everyone ate on the run in the store or, if lucky, we had some heated up, out of the can dishes as have been mentioned in these postings. But when my mom did have time to cook she was a great cook.

We also had a small farm and raised, slaughtered, processed (or had processed) all our beef, pork, poultry. Mother made the best beef roast (& absolutely the best gravy of any type I've ever had) from chuck. She'd mix up some vinegar, dry or yellow mustard, & pepper, pour that over the roast on a rack in a big dutch oven (with little water in bottom) & put in on back of stove to slowly cook. That flavored steam would rise, fall back down over roast, & flavor it so wonderfully. Then she would brown flour on a cookie sheet in the oven. After roast was done, she'd boil down the water & juices, stir in the browned flour, cook it a bit to make this best of all gravies. If I had that gravy over bread or potatoes, I didn't need any meat. I had this recipe (which came out of an old Garrett's Snuff pocket memo book), but lost it years ago. I've since tried to make this roast & gravy but never get the proportions of the vinegar-mustard-pepper mix just right (plus it's me rather than her trying to cook it).

Someone mentioned brains in one post. A real treasured breakfast at home was brains & scrambled eggs after we had killed a beef - a production of both my mom & dad. The brains were cleaned and simmered or poached until they were done, then were added into the eggs as they were being scrambled. So delicious! Although the brains were the meat, for some reason we always also had bacon with this breakfast, as well as toast (whereas biscuits were our usual breakfast bread). Never ran into but one other person who was familiar with this breakfast - a guy who grew up on a northern Calif. ranch & who I was in the Navy with down in Texas. One weekend Wally somewhere got some fresh calf brains, so he & I cooked this great breakfast. At first none of the other guys who lived there or other folks who were over would touch it, but once anyone ever tried a spoon full, you couldn't keep them away from the bowl. I've had people tell me they have tasted these canned pork brains & how bad they are; I agree, they are gross, but brains & eggs I've described is something entirely different. Haven't had any in years & doubt will ever have any more; have read brains now a "no-no" because of mad cow disease danger, but that old brains & eggs was one great dish. Can nearly smell & taste that breakfast, just thinking of it.

Several people mentioned tongue. We never kept the beef tongue, but my aunt who lived in town (and who was by far the most sophisticated family member) always wanted it. She somehow cooked it & then used it for sandwiches. We did occasionally have beef liver but always gave away or threw away the parts known in fancy cooking circles as sweetbreads.

We also always had big gardens & a number of fruit trees, and my mother & grandmother were both great fresh fruits & vegetable cooks as well as "put up" (first canning, then later freezing) so many of them. Only criticism was their, as others have mentioned, overcooking - but thank goodness for some reason only cabbage; never any other vegetable. Couldn't eat cooked cabbage until I was grown & discovered elsewhere that it didn't have to be cooked into a white mush. And my mother spoiled me about celery. Never knew anyone, including self, to so thoroughly string it.

Have written too much here, but thanks for so many great memories stoked by reading all your posts - and have made myself hungry with all this food thinking. Time for lunch.

[danhole]

You are a lucky person! I am jealous of you and Sam, also. My mom's roast was boiled in a full pot of water. ICK!

[coll]

My Mom's specialty was roasts, but I never heard of roasting the flour for the gravy, I'm definitely trying that soon! And Sam's stories sound sort of familiar...someone close to me may have done something very similar.

My friends in SA always tell me about brains and eggs, too bad I'll probably never get to try them now. They speak of it as one of the ultimate foods.

[cimui]

what a beautiful post, foodisgreat! i can almost taste the brains and eggs from your description, though i've never tried them. now i really want to!

[foodisgreat]

Thanks for you good folks kind comments. Pleasant surprise to hear of your friends' familiarity with and love of brains & eggs, coll. They speak the truth. Surely wish you and cimui could try the dish. Unbelievable the flavor the brains add to the scrambled eggs, & they also improve the texture. Maybe some day we will be able to get calves brains again and can all have this great dish.

And, coll, only thing I know about my mother's oven browning the flour for that particular beef roast gravy is that the recipe called for it to be done that way. She also oven browned flour for a roast chicken gravy, but did not do so for any of the other gravies she made. Don't know if any significance, but those were my favorite two of all her gravies.

As much as I enjoyed my mother's roasts, I'm sure sorry for your childhood "boiled roast" experiences, danhole. Hope subsequent roast you've had have more than made up for those early experiences.

[coll]

Well now you've put two bees in my bonnet! Brains, I'll just dream about and wait for an opportunity someday, but the browned flour idea is just in time for fall cooking! I'll try it soon and if it's well received, my Thanksgiving gravy could be upgraded this year.

[foodisgreat]

Best of luck with your oven browned flour gravy, coll. As said, don't know why my mother did the oven browning for only these two gravies and no others, so don't know how you experiment will come out. Hope it's good. I know she sifted the flour, covered the cookie sheet fairly thinly, and kept good watch on it to keep it from getting too brown or burning. Again, good luck. Be interesting to know your result.

Whosyerkitty's mention of cake frosting and delicious sounding meatloaf recipe given below remind me of two other foods from the years I was growing up. I have never been a big coconut cake fan, usually liking other cakes much better, but one aunt made a coconut cake from fresh coconut that was by far the best coconut, & one of the best cakes of any type, I've ever had. After she died, both my mother & other aunt would occasionally attempt to make this cake using her recipe, but they would readily admit, and everyone in the family would agree, their coconut cakes were nowhere nearly as good as were Aunt Vera's. And I've, to this day, never eaten any other coconut cake which approached hers.

During those years an Italian family owned a drugstore with a lunch counter in our county seat town. Whenever there with my dad & going to have lunch, I always wanted to go to Henry's for the meatloaf. It was a very "loose" meatloaf, the most so of any I've ever seen, baked in a big commercial sized pan, and it had a number of vegetables cooked in it. I don't remember what all, but I know some green beans & carrot pieces in addition to tomatoes & onions, and was fairly "spicy". Never saw any other like it, but it surely was good - one of, if not my very favorite, of all meatloaves.

[coll]

Thanks for the recipe, I'm making a turkey breast later this week, and will try this instead of the usual cornstarch. Since we like toasted breadcrumbs in certain dishes, I think there will be some good reviews! Browned is always better than raw in my book..

[foodisgreat]

Surely hope the browned flour gravy for that turkey breast comes out OK, coll. Imagine it will, but one never knows. For fried chicken, chicken fried steak, etc. gravy my mother sprinkled the raw flour into some of the drippings & food particles in the skilled, stirred it all around, browned the flour that way, added water, and continued to cook. (With some gravies my grandmother used milk rather than water, but my mother always used water to make brown gravy.) Assume that is somewhat the way you use the cornstarch. I cannot remember how she made turkey gravy - always a whole turkey roasted in different ways in the oven. Don't remember if she used the browned flour or browned the flour in the drippings. Know it was always a light tan rather creamy "giblet" gravy - always with giblets & sometime with chopped hard boiled eggs - the way everyone made it when I was growing up. Again, best of luck to you. Let us know how you come out. PS - As you likely can tell, I am not a very good gravy maker, though surely love it.

[coll]

Similar, but I add wine or vermouth to the cornstarch before adding to the drippings (and more to the pan to deglaze first). So it's a slurry. Then at the end I add some milk to lighten the color a little. My turkey and chicken gravy always came out great from the first time I made them, but for beef I usually do more of an au jus because I was never crazy with my gravy results.
I'll let you know in a few days how the flour works out!

[Firegoat]

The one thing I did learn about making gravy from my mother is now a yearly joke..... "don't throw out the potato water!"
Mom was having Thanksgiving at her house, which meant about 25 people, two turkeys, and lots of hectic activity in the kitchen. Somehow I was told to watch the potatos which were boiling away to become mashed soon. They were done, so I took them to the sink to dump the water, and there was this shrill shriek from my mom. (who rarely if ever raises her voice and certainly never curses.) She screamed across the kitchen ... "do NOT throw out the potato water!!!!!" As if I'd just stabbed the president or some such. We've never seen her either before or since lose her composure so completely. Now every Thanksgiving, no matter where it is held, the potato water joke resurfaces. (I had no idea about the starchy water needed for gravy.... I swear!)

[patmatw]

I did exactly the same thing at a friends Thanksgiving dinner once, trying to "help" but it was the carrot water. They teased me about the lousy gravy that year for years!

[alkapal]

foodisgreat, that is *exactly* how my mom makes her turkey gravy with giblets, technique and ingredients, including the eggs!

my mom grew up in the depression-era florida panhandle.

her dressing is good too, with day-old cornbread, and not stuffed in the turkey.

[foodisgreat]

Your comment above sounds similar to what I was trying to describe as my mother's doing when making gravy, coll, except she didn't use the milk. As for beef gravies - seemed they all differed - pot roast was one thing, chicken fried steak another, broiled steak yet another, and my favorite of all was that vinegar-mustard-pepper chuck roast gravy. Will await word of your results with the browned flour.

None of my folks ever used the potato water in making any gravy, Firegoat, but your mentioning that reminds me of someone who used the potato water in gravy making. Had totally forgotten that, and can't remember who used it, but someone I've known surely did.

And your comment, Firegoat, re Thanksgiving dinner and your comments, alkapal, about your mom's giblet gravy & cornbread dressing remind me of two thing. I lived in Mobile, AL, for about 30 years and know that central Gulf Coast dressing and giblet gravy is about the same as & as good as is ours here in Arkansas. Only difference is we never had the oyster dressing here which some folks along the Gulf Coast make. All dressings, so long as made mainly with cornbread, are good.

I did for a number of years get to enjoy one great dressing at friends in Spanish Fort, AL, which I've never seen anywhere else. Mrs. Lambert, who was originally from up near Birmingham, said she learned it from her Irish mother-in-law. She would boil Irish potatoes and make them into mashed potatoes except would put no milk or cream in them (some butter & a little chicken or turkey broth if needed to moisten them a little). Then she would shred these raw Irish potatoes, rinse & thoroughly ring them out several times (said she was getting the starch out of them) and would then stir the raw shredded potatoes into the cooked mashed potatoes. She would then add onion, celery, giblets, chopped boiled egg, all the traditional things and all the traditional seasonings one would add to regular cornbread dressing to this potato mixture. She would then stir into in this mixture some of the giblet gravy (she usually cooked a hen in addition to the turkey for added broth, giblets, gravies, etc.), place the potato dressing around (not in) the partially done turkey and prepare an extra pan of it, all of which she would then top with a light coating of giblet gravy and cook it in the oven as the turkey finished roasting. She would not serve mashed potatoes with her "turkey dinner" as I was accustomed to having, for in the "dressing" she had both the potatoes and dressing. This really was good but seemed to me that it was an awful lot of work, more so than making regular dressing and mashed potatoes. Maybe that is reason I've never seen or heard of it elsewhere, but it was something really good, interesting, & different.

I've also had a number of friends in southern Illinois, most of whom do "southern cooking" except for dressing. About half the families I know there make southern cornbread dressing but the other half make "light bread" yankee dressing. I remember being there one Christmas when Barbara had had a "Christmas job" in a store which lasted right through Christmas Eve. The next day at Christmas dinner she was apologizing all over the place about being so busy this year she did not have time to make dressing and had to use some of this boxed dressing mix. Remember when tasting it thinking, "Thank you, Lord, for small favors", for this Stovetop or what ever it was dressing was so much better than her made from scratch "light bread dressing" had ever been. (That's just my dressing preference; know some of you differ, which is entirely fine with me. Everyone to his own thing - or taste).

[Sam Fujisaka]

Your posts on this thread are wonderful. You could and probably should write a book (same with many of the Hounds on these boards). Just don't let any Yankee change your style.

[cimui]

the potato dressing sounds fabulous, foodisgreat. this is something i'll have to try for a friend who's allergic to wheat.

[foodisgreat]

Thanks so much, Sam, for your too kind comments, and I have surely enjoyed reading your posts; in fact, I've so enjoyed all posts I've gotten to since just recently finding this chowhound group. Such an interesting, informative, really nice bunch of folks. Never ran into any other group like this. A real blessing to find all you fine people. By the way, probably no or nothing yankee would ever have me.

And, cimui, I never thought of Mrs. Lambert''s potato dressing as being a possible dish for a person with wheat allergies, though it just might be. Know a restaurant in Pensacola served a flourless cake (believe it was made mainly from ground pecans or some type nuts) which was really good. Restaurant owner made it because her husband had wheat allergies. A question, would dressing made from mainly cornbread but with a little wheat based bread of some type in it be enough wheat to impact one with wheat allergy? Guess likely so, at least in worst allergy cases. Even though I many times ate (and some times helped with) Mrs. Lambert's potato dressing, I can't remember all the details - like exactly how long she cooked it, but guess one could just keep a watch on it. I know the shredded potatoes which were raw when mixed into the cooked mashed potatoes wound up fully cooked when the dressing was done, but they still had a substance, some texture to them which the mashed potato part did not have; could distinguish them in the done dressing. And don't remember how much giblet gravy she added to the mixture - guess just enough to add some flavor & moisture but not make it too "soupy", Know it firmed up nicely and the gravy spread thinly on top made a nice little crust. Am sure you could do this with just a turkey breast or some smaller fowl, not limited to when roast a big turkey. Best of luck. Surely hope this works for your friend. Let us know, please.

[coll]

The browned flour gravy was a hit, so much better than raw flour or cornstarch. So velvet-y. From now on I'm using cornstarch only for Chinese food. Thanks for a big moment of revelation, foodisgreat! And just in time for the holidays.

[foodisgreat]

So happy to hear, coll, that the browned flour gravy made for the turkey breast came out so well. That is great news. I'll have to start using it in more gravies myself - have over the years pretty well limited its use to those attempts at that brisket roast gravy and to the roast chicken. Have mainly used raw flour for others. Enjoy it with all that upcoming holiday cooking. Know my mother is happy that this bit of info has been of some benefit to someone.

[jenn]

My understanding is that mad cow disease takes YEARS and YEARS to develop, even if you do scarf down some bad brains or whatever. As I see it, that means when I turn about 75, I can try brains and scrambled eggs, regardless of what food scare is going round at the time.

If I'm crazy [or should that be "ier"?] when I'm in my late 80's who will know if its bad brains or common household dementia!

Its nice to have something to look forward to!

[foodisgreat]

Thanks so much, Jenn, for this info re the long incubation period for mad cow disease. With that being the case, at my age I can now eat every cow brain that came down the pike with absolutely no worry. And I know that I'm already to the point (at times at least) where I (and probably others) think I'm crazy, whatever the cause.

[coll]

You think like me, the older I get the more free I feel from worries like this. Never thought I'd make it this far!

[foodisgreat]

Good way to look at most things, coll, and same here about being surprised to have made it this far.

[danhole]

food . . .

When I got married one of the first things I wanted to conquer was a pot roast. It took me several tries before I finally got the technique down, and believe me, it does NOT involve boiling! It is one of the best things I make, and my DH begs for it, but it is not a summer time dish! As soon as it gets a bit cooler I will make it.

As far as the browned flour goes, I remember seeing Paul Prudhomme cook some flour in the skillet, getting it to a perfect light brown color and then quickly taking it out of the pan so it would stop cooking. It was not the same technique as making a roux, though. If I can find more on that particular episode I will share the info.

[foodisgreat]

danhole, I bet you've gotten that pot roast technique down to the point where each one comes out a masterpiece. I didn't mean to imply that you boiled your roasts; thought (perhaps incorrectly) that I read you'd said your mom boiled her roasts. Agree with you that summer is not the best time for making or having such a dish. Think I've gone the "summer foods" route more so this year than I've ever done before. Come a little cooler weather, some good, hearty dishes will really be tasty.

Your description of the Paul Prudhomme skillet browning flour method sounds like it produces same result as my mother's oven browning it. Understand your comment that it is not at all the same as making a roux. It's now been a long time, but I've sure enjoyed some great meals at K-Paul's Louisiana KItchen in years past.

[danhole]

Oh, no, I didn't take it as if you were saying I boiled my roasts. Not at all. I was just so desperate for a decent pot roast, that wasn't boiled (lol!) I did my best to learn quickly how to do it right.

I was looking around and I think it was an episode about making stews where he cooked the flour, and then put it off to the side, adding it later. I believe he compared the color to be like a new penny, or slightly lighter than that. I was watching on a B&W portable TV, so I'm not sure what color it was . . . well it looked gray to me - ha! I can't remember if he made a slurry before he added the flour or not. Alkapal? Whatcha think?

[alkapal]

dani, i don't recall the show, but this nyt article descibes the "chocolate-milk" colored browned flour being added into the wet ingredients already hot in the skillet, then stirring to make a paste.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage...

the article also gives some insights into his cookbook for "low-fat" recipes that don't taste low-fat, e.g., using fruit syrups and using pureed legumes, such as chick peas, as thickeners.

[danhole]

thanks pal! Maybe it was milk chocolate colored. I know he quickly took it out of the pan, so it didn't get any browner! Interesting article.

[alkapal]

dani, looks like you had better start cookin' before cousin ike shows up to crash the party!

[danhole]

Amen! I really should! Cooking will have to begin tomorrow!

[alkapal]

yes, i've seen paul prudhomme do that, too.

[foodisgreat]

Read the old New York Times Paul Prudhomme article, alkapal, and his browning the flour in the skillet seemed to be basically the same thing as my mother browning hers in the oven, and then they apparently used the browned flour the same way. I'd say her browned flour was never darker than a light chocolate, and most often really not quite that dark.

When living in Mobile I was in New Orleans often and have frequently seen Chef Prudhomme riding up & down the sidewalks on his little cart. In fact, he lived right down the street from some friends. Hadn't thought of it, but his weight did seem to fluctuate significant from time to time. Haven't seen him in a number of years now.

[nomadchowwoman]

Paul Prudhomme at one point was focusing on low-fat cooking (and he in fact ended up losing a lot of weight). He developed an oil-less "roux": he would brown flour in the oven or on a stove burner to the desired shade of brown and then add that to his stock to thicken gumbo. I never tried the no-oil technique, but it did make me realize I could use less oil in my roux, which I have done with no effect that I can tell.
I'm thinking, though, that the technique of browning the flour for gravy is essentially the same. I'm going to try it next time I make gravy.

[berkleybabe]

Well, food, here I am, another brains and eggs breakfaster. My grandfather, Austrian born, came here as a professional waiter and opened his own restaurant in the East. Came to live with us the last years of his life when my twin sister and I were probably 1 or so. I remember the scrambled eggs with brains --so creamy and delicious, something we shared only with dad who learned it from Pop-pop. It's really an elegant dish, but haven't had it in years, or actualy prepared a brain. Maybe its time...

[foodisgreat]

Such interesting information re brains and eggs in your household, berkleybade, their coming from your Austrian born grandfather, and the neat relationship which you & your sister had with your dad and grandfather. "Creamy & delicious" and "an elegant dish" are really good terms to describe them. Preparing the brains is actually simple - just wash the brain mass well, remove all the external membrane covering, simmer in water until done; then just gradually stir the cooked brains as small pieces into the eggs as scrambling them. Don't know where the dish came from in my family. Somehow think it was from my dad's side rather than from my mother's. Hope you get to try some before too long.

[alkapal]

danhole, gooooooo and get it --- over on chow recipes! (georgia faye's famous porcupine meatballs and sauerkraut). good for a day like today, with the tropical storm hanna keeping us cooped up! thankfully, no winds!!!)

[danhole]

Thanks Pal! I'm sure my DH won't try it, but I sure will! Hope hanna leaves you alone. We are keeping an eye on ike now.

[alkapal]

yes, most of my family is in sw florida, so ike is a big unknown bad boy right now...

if you make the recipe, just observe how long your dh takes to try "just a meatball" (then maybe a lit-tle more....) ;-) i can never resist "taste-testing" near the end of the cooktime. it is a kraut-y smell for a while as you cook, but light a nice scented candle.... it is **totally** worth it.

if your dh likes it mild, you can always split the recipe, rinse kraut in one-half, leave the other half unrinsed, with kraut can juice..... the tomato soup component really does mellow it out, plus the meatballs really flavor the kraut to something new and transformed from the traditional flavor profile one associates with kraut!

[Val]

alkapal...I'm in SWFL, too...I think we are "out of the cone" now...praying that it will stay that way! I saw your porcupine recipe...my mom never made it with the sauerkraut but always with the Campbell's Tomato soup and always in the pressure cooker. I do admire the sweet (tomato soup) and sour ('kraut) twist to it! Not sure I want to re-create it, but I might, I might.....

[alkapal]

the tomato soup is not really a "sweet" profile, more an acidic tartness that tempers the "fattiness" and calms the kraut. go ahead, val, give it a shot when the weather gets cool. december?

[Cinnamon]

If you ever have a chance to go to the LaBelle Swamp Cabbage Festival, do it. There was a beautiful rendition of it (hearts of palm) with white pepper and cream and white bacon.

[alkapal]

i grew up in fort myers, so i've been there at the swamp cabbage festival more than once. i've even won a prize betting on an armadillo race, and have the baseball cap with a drawing of an armadillo to prove it -- a lovely burgundy color, may i add.

[Cinnamon]

:D Are the swamp cabbage purveyors still cooking up really delicious swamp cabbage dishes?

[alkapal]

haven't been in a while, but the jaycees (lion's club?) always had great grilled steak and swamp cabbage. i liked to wander around, soaking up the atmosphere, and then getting an indian fry bread from one of the seminoles in another booth -- pure greasy goodness.

[cheetobrain]

Everything in my house was ground beef based. Stuffed cabbage, lasagna, stuffed peppers, spaghetti, chili, meat-filled perogie. I RARELY buy ground beef as an adult. We just had a very bland, polish palate in my family, so we used BOTH spices and not much else. If it wasn't for my adventurous city aunt I probably would never know what spice tastes like. My father also gets very little enjoyment from food, so he just mixes everything up on his plate and shovels it in his mouth. So yeah, not much experimenting with food in our house...

[Val]

Same here, cheeto...I feel your pain...no experimenting...my father thought that enjoyment of food was horrid and I'm not kidding. When it wasn't ground beef, it was a can of hash, cooked in a pan but not even crispy=sitting in grease, and a can of green beans. I vowed to never, ever cook that way.

[cheetobrain]

Val, perhaps our fathers were separated at birth? :)

Despite my family's ground beef, La Choy from the can kind of lifestyle, I always loved food and love to cook now.

[janetofreno]

I may have mentioned it before...but my mother was known for many things..not cooking. One dish she did that could certainly be classified as "weird" involved steamed broccoli in a casserole, topped with hard boiled egg slices and cheese...then the whole thing put in the oven until the cheese melted. Or something like that. She would make the broccoli stand up like little trees..... Susancinsf might remember the exact details. What I remember is that I liked the broccoli..(it was fresh) and fresh steamed broccoli is still one of my favorite foods.

[susancinsf]

I loved it and regret to this day not trying to get the recipe while she was still around....pretty sure it was cheddar cheese but it could even have been american...time to do a little experimenting in the kitchen!

[foodwich]

my grandmother's specialty was a yemeni dish called sufoot. made with ground lamb, veggies it was delicious. aunt's specialty was brains cooked with a cilantro pesto kind of sauce and very delicious too and mom as mentioned before was the adventurous one. loved to try new foods and recipes. thankfully i have a little bit of each of them in my cooking style.

[chocchipcookie]

Wow, brings back memories. My mom was famous for her "homemade" spaghetti too-right out of a jar of Ragu. The fact that ground beef was added made it homemade. My DH will only eat sphaghetti this way. He complains when I make it from scratch. I guess we all still like certain things for nostalgic reasons. I think many of us have become adventurous cooks in spite of what we learned as kids. Here were my moms favorites, mind you she only used S&P and cooked most dinners in an electric skillet.

Stuffed peppers (with ground beef tomatoes and rice, topped with breadcrumbs and stips of Kraft singles)
City ckicken? Chicken breaded and cooked in some sort of gravy w/mushrooms
Super dried out meatloaf. Ack!
American chop suey
Chef Boy Ardee pizza from a box (which I still kinda like-nostalgic)
Salmon patties-never ever liked

This thread has statred me thinking, the reason we were served (some, not all) of this junk is b/c they were easy to make. I have learned from my own 2 picky eaters that spending the entire afternnoon making dinner and having it pushed around on plates and not being consumed is very disheartening! I can only throw so much down the disposal before I just say no. But that is a whole new topic!

[riverwood]

These posts bring back a lot of memories! When I moved to NYC in the early 80's my roommate made the 'slumgullian' for dinner one night. Another roommate's specialty was ground beef, elbows, one can of cream of mushroom soup, one jar of mushrooms and a large jar of Cheez Whiz. One night as a teen I spent the night with my neighbor and we made a Chef-Boy-R-Dee boxed pizza with cut up Vienna Sausages on it....mmmmmmmmm

I grew up in the South. Whitebread, margarine, 'French' dressing, jello, casseroles, canned vegetables, canned soup, canned biscuits, etc. Dad said moving up North ruined me....he called my fresh steamed green beans 'Yankee Green Beans' and wouldn't eat them. I always had to microwave a can for him. And all he wanted in his salad was iceberg, cucumbers, radishes and French dressing.

'Watergate Salad' was always part of a company meal growing up. Spaghetti was spaghetti with sauce made from ground beef, canned tomatoes and one of those packets. Did anyone ever have to suffer through Pat Nixon's Chicken Salad (poor Richard)? It was Mom's favorite, baked and covered in crunched up Lay's potato chips. She did make good lasagna but like someone else mentioned, I never saw a garlic clove until I was grown and on my own. Mom liked to mix a can of Campbell's Chicken Gumbo soup with ground beef and call it sloppy joe's (not bad). Also, elbows with ground beef and a can of tomato juice was goulash. Sunday was always pot roast with over baked carrots and potatoes. Her favorite appetizer was a couple leaves of iceberg, topped with a pineapple (canned) round, a blob of Duke's mayo and shredded cheese.

A couple years ago she came over for dinner and requested my recipe for sauce and meatballs. I wrote it all down for her and a couple weeks later she told me she used my recipe but it didn't taste right. I asked if she followed the recipe exactly and she answered, "Well, I didn't have garlic cloves so I used garlic powder, and I didn't have red wine so I used beef boullion (huh?), I used Rago instead of going to all that trouble of making sauce, but I did it just like you said!" Gotta love Mom!!

RW

[Whosyerkitty]

My mom made "slumgullian" of sorts, too but used rice and called it "Spanish Rice"; ground beef, celery, onions, canned tomatoes, rice and some spices. Once in awhile I crave this and make some up-- kids like it, plus you're sneaking lots of veggies in there.

My mom was WAY ahead of her time in that steak and beef roast was made RARE ( and quite excellent). "Spaghetti" (WHEN exactly did pasta other than spaghetti and macaroni become available in the US?) sauce from scratch, simmered for hours and she made the best damn meatloaf on the planet that I make today. My sisters and I all still make her "cheesedip", too; grated onion, cream cheese, mayo and worcestershire. Sophisticated? No, --and SO 50's, but people LOVE it and we always need a lot for family parties.

Salads were pretty standard fare, too, basic green ones with tomatoes and bottled dressing, but salads nonetheless. I cannot comprehend, though, why on earth HOT veggies were always canned (icky!) or frozen. I find fresh veggies really simple to steam and far better tasting--and LOOKING. My own daughter has never had a canned veggie. I wonder if back then (60's-70's) fresh veggies were that much more expensive, although I know that seasons were far more restrictive.

I do recall some convenience foods during the week --Mac and cheese, blue box with Kosher (this, for some reason was a must) hot dogs, "veal cutlet" with a "sauce from Campbell's tomato soup, Hamburger Helper, some kind of frozen weird fish casserole and even pot pies.

I also loved, still do, and now make sometimes, breakfast for dinner.

But my mom made, hands down, the BEST pork roast and chocolate cake frosting (on a mix cake, or OCCASIONALLY "mayonnaise" chocolate cake) that I've not been able to duplicate. Sigh.

[goodhealthgourmet]

Whosyerkitty...any chance you'd be willing to share that recipe for "the best damn meatloaf on the planet?"

[Whosyerkitty]

I had to think about this because there was never a recipe, per se. But actually, it's REALLY simple and very forgiving:

Pre-heat oven to 350.
INGREDIENTS:
*2 lbs ground beef, room temp OR a ground meat mixture (but I don't eat veal, so I use all beef-and I think about 80/20 or 85/15 is best. You can also use 1 lb of ground turkey to cut back on fat, but all turkey isn't flavorful enough, really)
*One medium onion, chopped
*1/2 green pepper, 1/4 yellow pepper 1/4 red pepper, chopped
(mom used only green--other colored peps just weren't around then)
*2 eggs beaten with about a tbsp of worchestershire, 1 tsp salt and 1/2 tsp pepper or to taste.
*1/2 c. commercial breadcrumbs OR toast the heck out of a piece of white bread (which I also don't eat) OR I have successfully used CRUSHED CHEERIOS in a pinch and it was surprisingly light and didn't alter the taste at all. Either way, just crush them in a baggie with a rolling pin, wine bottle, can, whatever
*1 can tomato sauce
*Splash of red wine, opt.

INSTRUCTIONS:
Dump all but breadcrumbs in a bowl
Smoosh with your hands. Wet them first. Get your kids to help--they LOVE this part and they don't realize all the veggies you're sneaking in there. LOOK at it (this is mom talking); you want an even mixture of peppers and onions and you can add more peppers if you want.

Mix in your bread crumbs, splash in the wine or not
Smoosh some more. Form a loaf in the bowl Be gentle, though, so it doesn't get tough.

Turn on to a baking pan. Make a nice loaf (think cats).I use my cast iron frying pan because I take the meat loaf out of the pan, let it rest and then make gravy on the stove in the same pan. DO NOT USE a loaf pan because you then are going to

DUMP the tomato sauce on the meatloaf, coating the top and sides. It makes a lovely crust. You can also artfully place strips of the remaining pepper across the top--this is a good kid project, too. The roasted peps are yummy.

Crack some black pepper over the sauce

BAKE at 350 for 1 to 1 1/2 hours. You can LOOK at it (mom again) or cheat and use a meat thermometer stuck in the middle to WELL. Much easier.

Let it rest while you make some gravy on a platter or cutting board or something. If you use a baking pan, scrape the bits into a saucepan to make the gravy.

Since you MUST have mashed potatoes with this (it's a dreadfully fattening meal, but good with egg noodles, too), use some of the potato water to thin the gravy and you can also use the tomato sauce can for the H2O.

DON'T eat the whole thing because it makes great sandwiches the next day.

Enjoy!

[goodhealthgourmet]

thanks - it's always interesting to see someone else's take on a classic. [love the Cheerios incident, BTW - very resourceful!]

[Whosyerkitty]

Cheerios are fortified! :)
EEEWWW, I did just thing of something nasty. CARL BUDDIG PRESSED CHICKEN in my school lunch. Blech!

[coll]

I always add oatmeal to my meatloaf, rather than bread, so Cheerios wouldn't be that far removed!

[alkapal]

riverwood, you said "I grew up in the South. Whitebread, margarine, 'French' dressing, jello, casseroles, canned vegetables, canned soup, canned biscuits...."

fresh veggies and homemade biscuits were the standouts in my southern upbringing! and casseroles are just fine with me -- esp. a good eggplant casserole made with campbell's mushroom soup, cheddar cheese, and ritz crackers! jello, not so much, but some of those molds are amazing!

and i think everyone has had watergate salad.....

[riverwood]

We did get fresh vegetables and homemade biscuits, dumplings and delicious hoecake (?) at Grandma's. I think Mom was trying to leave all that behind her when she left the mill town to move to the 'big city'. Probably why we were fed formula, too. : ) BTW, I have been back in the South for almost 20 years so I'm not knocking it! And I miss that hoecake!!

RW

[foodisgreat]

alkapal, from this & other of your comments re your food "back home", it definitely sounds like we had many of the same sorts of foods when growing up - and they still sound good to me. And same comments apply to that great food you had at your grandmother's, riverwood. I just now noticed, tho, alkapal, in your initial post to this section you mentioned your mom serving potatoes with mayonnaise. Made me think of the spicy boiled potatoes they bring to you to nibble on while waiting for meal at Deanies out in Bucktown area of New Orleans. Always liked those so, to eat them with tartar sauce squirted on them & with crackers. Really liked the spicy potatoes better than most meals there. Always wondered how they did it and a year or two ago I somewhere ran across a recipe, if not the one they use, one which at least comes close. Though they are now beginning to kinda run out, so far this spring, summer, & fall all the grocery stores in this area have had the best ever very small red potatoes. I've surely enjoyed the last few months the many spicy red potatoes I've cooked this way - with tartar sauce squirted on them and eating them with crackers. They also make up into a spicy, kinda different, but very good potato salad.

Potatoes and mayonnaise also make me remember that when my grandmother was growing up in a real rural area they had no electricity or refrigeration, so she learned to cook using vinegar instead of mayonnaise for many dishes, and she continued to do so all of her life. Her deviled eggs were egg yolks, salt, pepper, & vinegar. And her potato salad started out as mashed potatoes (but with no butter or milk added). To this she would add chopped onion & hard boiled egg, salt & pepper, and vinegar, beating it to mashed or creamed potato consistency (but with the little chunks of onion & egg in it). Was served warm when first made at noon - just like mashed potatoes. Then if any was left over it firmed up and was great for just slicing off a slab to eat or for making a potato salad sandwich. Her standard Sunday dinner was roast beef or chicken, this potato salad, field peas, deviled eggs, and the best made from scratch banana pudding you ever tasted. I still at times make her vinegar deviled eggs and potato salad. Just have a craving for that vinegar taste.

[alkapal]

foodisgreat, yes, we did come from similar food heritages. good food! try that sauerkraut and porcupine meatballs recipe i posted. it is really tasty. i always double the recipe (and eat so many of the meatballs by my little ol' lonesome self standing at the stove!) ;-P <lickin' my chops>

[foodisgreat]

Thanks, alkapal. You are right re our food backgrounds. I had noted your porcupine meatballs & kraut recipe with great interest and definitely plan to try it, but am waiting until a little cooler weather. Somehow it seems to me to be a natural "cold weather" dish.

I've always been a "ground beef" fan - any sort of ground beef cooked any way - "steak" (included in that term a good hamburger, one of my all time favorite foods), meatloaf, meatballs, stuffed bell peppers, meat sauce, etc., but I'm accustomed to most of these dishes being "all beef", only occasionally any meat mixture; don't know why; just way its always been. So I'm anxious to try your multi-meat meatballs.

I grew up having (and even now have) kraut occasionally, but not routinely as do so many other vegetables. As a kid, when we killed hogs in the winter, we always had a mess or two of kraut with fresh pork backbone and/or ribs. And kraut (always store bought, canned or bagged, never homemade) was/is a side dish always served with pork - pork chops, pork roast, pork sausage, etc. So the use of sausage in the meatballs is to me a natural for the meat element of a kraut dish. I am quite anxious to try it. Bet the meatballs & kraut really meld well together (see tale below). To me, the tomato soup is the real surprise ingredient in this recipe. Would have never thought of its being included, and can't imagine what it will be like, how it will add to, impact taste of dish, but sure looking forward to finding out.

I have two favorite kraut memories. My childhood playmate (same age kid right across the road) had one set of grandparents who came as children to US from Switzerland. Was entire Swiss community near town. I always loved to go with him to visit those grandparents. They were entirely self sufficient, raised all their food. Always had homemade table wine which they used as routine meal beverage (but never gave any to us kids). Remember a lot of their vegetables included onions - plain mashed potatoes had onions chopped in them, as did all peas & beans & many other dishes. They made their own sauerkraut, which to me was alway so much better than our store bought, guess because it was homemade & the various ways they served it. This friend's mother, up until her recent death as an elderly lady, always prepared some special kraut dishes for any family holiday meals or for any type potluck. Not aware of any of the current generation of Swiss descendants who know, cook any of these foods which their parents & grandparents did. And all the older Swiss were also great bakers - breads & sweets.

At a Navy duty station in Texas, the centerpiece for most parties at the O Club was this beautiful white glazed with red apple in his mouth whole roasted pig. All evening everyone would be snacking on all the other foods on the table & admiring the pig. But then as the evening wore on, got closer to party break up time, everyone got more liquor in them, someone would finally stab the pig & pull out a plug of him to eat. When that happened, you had better be near by to quickly grab a fork & plate if you hoped to get any. In no time at all after that first assault, that pig looked exactly like he had suffered a piranha attack - absolutely stripped to the bones. But one of the most delicious parts of the pig was the sauerkraut with which he'd been stuffed. During the cooking process all the pork juices had so infused that sauerkraut so as to make it absolutely the best I have ever eaten. Thus looking forward to the meatballs cooked on top of the kraut in your delicious sounding, slow cooked recipe. Still can't figure out the tomato soup tho. Thanks. By the way, alkapal, is your mother's name Georgia Faye (or was that name of recipe originator)? My mother was named Georgia Lucille (went by middle name).

[alkapal]

yes, mom is georgia faye! and that whole roasted pig stuffed with kraut sounds fantastic. give me some crunchy bits of the pig, too!

i hope you love the recipe! i'm tasting it (in my mind) right now. i think when the weather changes, maybe late september, i'll make a big batch. i'm happy to eat leftovers for breakfast, lunch and dinner....for at least a couple of days. i know it sounds crazy, but i think you'll see why i call them "famous".

[foodisgreat]

Thanks so much, alkapal. More similarities -not only in our mothers' names- but also apparently in some of our tastes. I've never been that much of a traditional breakfast foods eater. I now enjoy them much more than ever before, but even now like them much better as a supper than as a breakfast meal. While I have always often skipped breakfast (despite "authorities" saying it is the most important meal of the day), if I have breakfast I've always enjoyed left overs - left over hamburger, slice of roast beef or ham, pizza slice, piece of fried chicken, etc. - better than traditional breakfast foods. And there are so many dishes which only get better when left over & warmed up a time of two. Never understood a number of folks I know who refuse to ever eat any left overs. So am glad to hear that the porcupine meatballs & kraut make such a good leftover dish. Who knows, I may like it even better that way than when first cooked (and understand the problem of not eating all the meatballs while they are cooking). Surely anxious to try the dish in all its various modes - meatballs while cooking, complete dish when first totally done, and then as leftovers. Another reason to look forward to some cooler weather. And sure hope & pray tonight for best for all Chowhounds, for everyone, down along Texas, western Louisiana Gulf coast.

[alkapal]

i'll even eat 'em cold!

[foodisgreat]

That sounds like a winner to me. Wish I had some now. I'd better get in the kitchen & scrounge around for a bite of something before it gets any later. Be looking forward to & will let you know when I do the meatballs & kraut - but gonna let weather turn a little cooler first.

[berkleybabe]

I would love it if you would post your recipe for spicy potatoes--just the thing to snack on as the weather turns cooler! Thanks

[foodisgreat]

Glad to do so, berkley, but it's not my recipe; it's one I found somewhere a year or two ago, after years of wanting one of this type.

3 lbs. small red potatoes, unpeeled
1 tbsp. salt
3 tbsp. Zatarain's Liquid Shrimp & Crab Boil OR 1 bag of Zatarain's Shrimp & Crab Boil spices
2 shakes of Butter Buds or MollyMcButter
2 oz. Louisiana Hot Sauce (not Tabasco)
Water

Cover potatoes with water. Add crab boil bag or liquid spices. Bring to boil. Add salt, hot sauce, Butter Buds or McButter. Boil 10 to 12 min. or until potatoes reach desired doneness. Serve hot with sour cream & butter. Good cold with sprinkle of salt.

As earlier said, my favorite way to eat them is as a snack or appetizer - at room temperature or cold - with tartar sauce and saltine crackers. Also like to cube them & make potato salad.

Believe the liquid crab boil makes potatoes spicier than the bag of crab boil spices. For first time at least, I would go conservative with the liquid crab boil (if used) and hot sauce - using amounts specified at most. Tho not called for in recipe, I always add a bit of black pepper to cooking water. May or may not sprinkle little salt and/or pepper on potatoes as eating them.

Hope this comes out OK for you, berkley, and that you & yours enjoy. I need to cook up another batch next week.

[betsydiver]

my mom used to make cabbage and boiled potatoes and serve with vinegar, sometimes would let us sprinkle a little sugar on the cabbage....

[meleyna]

My mom does the same thing with the Gumbo, but she calls it "chick-burgers." No idea.

[poptart]

So much fun to read the foods we all grew up with...there sure is a common thread.
Just had to mention that I started reading "Toast" this weekend, a memoir by Nigel Slater (food writer from UK) and it's very enjoyable & recommended!

[FriedClamFanatic]

I read some of these and they bring back memories (not always good). I was born in the fifties. My mother never had learned to cook (We lived with my granfather and had an Irish maid until I was 8 - Grandfather died). He had a huge garden and even hired high school kids to help out. Froze tons, literally! I never remember a memorable meal.

After Grandpa died, my Mom started cooking. The ONLY thing I remember as memorable was codfish cakes and beans on a Friday night.

The funny thing is here over 50 years later, I work as a cook for a woman who is in her late eighties. What does she like? Chicken legs cooked until they are like burnt paper, Crab "goop", popovers, meatloaf that could sink a sub, etc.! It brings back the memories, but it sure is easy.

[Passadumkeg]

I've hesitated because of the title of this thread. Both my parents were excellent cooks and taught me to love food. But I guess from a kid w/ 1st generation Russian immigrant s parents I sure was embarrassed when my WASP buddies would come over ask me why my house always smelled of cabbage?
Mom's "weird" foods: Borscht (and cold summer borscht, holodnik), schi (cabbage soup, holopsi (stuffed cabbages), ribs and/or pork chops baked in kapusta (saurkraut) with kolbasi, pielmeni, pierogies, beets in all forms, herring w/ sour cream & onions on great rye bread and home made babka and pasks (Easter cheese) We decorated Ukrainian style Easter eggs and had huge family get togethers where Russian was the primary language, lubricated by copious amounts of vodka and Grandma the matriarch.
A a Russian Pennsylvania coal miner's daughter mom is a gifted person. She also cooked excellent spaghetti w/ excellent meat balls, great meat loaf, excellent fried chicken, liver, onions & steamed potatoes. Steak and baked potato for Sunday dinner. Lots of lamb, pork and veal dishes and suppers during the work week were rich thick peasant soups with soup meat (I had to explain what this was to my Yankee wife.) and excellent corn rye slathered in butter for dunking. She cooked like her mother taught her and I still cook most of them. She took me on monthly "cultural" trips to NYC to museums, the Met , the NY Philamonic, Shakespere at McCarter's Theater in Princeton. And great restaurants too to introduce me to fine dining.
She did all this in the 60's while teaching on a provisional certificate AND taking evening and summer courses at Rutger's U.! She graduated with a degree in English Literature 2 weeks before I did from high school. She is now approaching 93 and beginning rapid memory loss. She is soooo pleased to be on meals on wheels now. One hellova a woman!
And did I mention, she taught me to cook.

[Eileen]

What a fun thread! My mom always made the same meals- roast beef with baked potato and string beans, fish and spaghetti, pork chops and applesauce. She also made a canned salmon loaf. My dad used to like liverworst and mash it on white bread. Mom also made a Watergate cake - I think it had pastachio pudding in it. MIL made the spaghetti and ketchup dish with butter.

[Whosyerkitty]

Now I would LOVE a recipe for borscht. I don't like beets, but I do like borscht. I don't know why. I have made pierogi from scratch and OMIGOD what a mess and a lot of work! My BIL's mom was Polish and she was one of those ones that cooked all the time. If we went to her house at midnight she'd be cooking for some reason. And then you had to sit down and eat regardless of the hour. I think that people that were Eastern European during WWII just RELISHED (no pun intended) the fact that food was so plentiful when they came here.

[ChineseChou]

I know this is a LOOOOONG post but I couldn't help but add to it. My mom was never a good cook. She grew up in a rather wealthy home in Vietnam so she never had to learn anything domestic. Of course, all that changed when we arrived in a basement tenement in L.A. While she did try and some of the stuff she made was edible, my favorite memory is when she tried to make gravy from oyster sauce--"C'mon try it. It's brown like gravy. It's saucy like gravy. It's gravy!"

[alkapal]

chinesechou, that was very sweet. thank you!

[Chinamerican]

LoL, my dad makes gravy from oyster sauce, in the sense that it is a gravy for any sort of meat or gravy for say, a traditional Thanksgiving turkey. It's actually quite delicious.

[lisavf]

My mom was... well-intentioned but short on cash and, frankly, not a great cook. (Excellent baker, though!) Some of the more memorable:

Franks and beans: slice hot dogs, fry the cut sides in a large pot along with some sliced onion, add a can or two of Campbell's Pork-n-Beans, some ketchup and brown sugar. Heat through and serve.

Chicken and rice: put cut-up pieces of boneless chicken, a can of Campbell's Cream of Tomato soup, rice (maybe about a cup), water, and probably something I'm forgetting (memory loss serves me well here) into a deep casserole dish, stir, put into the oven for I'd guess an hour or thereabouts, until the chicken is cooked through and the rice has absorbed all the liquid. I loved this as a child.

Rattatouille: Take whatever squash came out of the garden, add whatever other vegetables were on hand, some garlic, and some sort of liquid, and cook the crap out of it... I mean, simmer for a reallllllly long time, until it's a tasteless plate of mush. Even the dog wouldn't eat this, seriously. I have one memory of sitting at the table until bedtime because I refused to eat it, just refused. I tried to slip it to the dog - she ran away.

And who can forget the dreaded tuna noodle casserole?

OTOH, she made the most delicious chocolate cake, and when we were really young, she would cut it up and reshape it into the most wonderful shapes, decorated so beautifully: an Easter bunny, a Christmas tree, whatever would suit the occasion. She had a little booklet that showed how to cut the cake and form the shapes, but she sure had an eye for the decorating. And the cookies! Christmas would start right after Thanksgiving, at least where the cookies were concerned. That was heaven!

When I was growing up, I weighed next-to-nothing. Everyone thought I was a picky eater, and so did I. What I realized when I got older is, I was a picky eater - I wanted GOOD food! I also realized that my parents had very limited financial resources, so Mom did the best she could with what she had. And we always had plenty of food. And I'd gladly eat her ratatouille every night if I could have her back on earth with us. So if your mother is still making you weird foods, eat up! Enjoy the day! And take notes, even if they consist of what not to do!

[walker]

I was touched by your comments; we should all savor our moments with each other.

[operagirl]

My mom is actually a good cook -- she never over-steamed the brussels sprouts or served us lots of canned things.

The only "weird" thing I can think of is her Chutney Cheese Paté, which was delicious! Maybe more 70s than weird, and no doubt a holdover from my grandma's days of catering with Narsai David. In any case, it involved cream cheese, sharp cheddar, major grey's chutney, chopped green onions, a touch of sherry . . . I'm not sure what else. Eaten on triscuits.

[mlgb]

Yes, there were a lot of cheese balls and doctored up cheese spreads in those good old pre-cholesterol days. Ramaki, anyone?

[HuaGung]

Some perspective first...

My mom was raised by parents who were born and raised in Kilbotn, Norway, which is up above the arctic circle. They were fishermen.

My mother's favorite meal to this day, and my least, is a plate of boiled white fish balls; boiled, peeled new potatoes; and white gravy served on a Melmac plate and had with a large glass of milk.

I realize other cultures, including the French, enjoy all-white meals but this one is my nemesis.

[Passadumkeg]

Fiskeboller med hvit saus! Needs a little Tabasco. I miss the smobrod and a polser (hot dog) with shrimp salad dumped on top.
I once wrapped a can of fish balls for a Chrismas gift exchange. He he he.

[Cinnamon]

In desperate need of bird chilies, coconut, dried shrimp, lime and cilantro.

Or at least herbs d' provence. No, scratch that. Bird chilies, coconut, dried shrimp, lime and cilantro.

[Seeker19104]

Kidneys -- my mother came from the South and used every part of the animal. While I was okay with the taste, cooking them involved (I think) combined vinegar to counteract ammonia in the organs. Revolting!

[The Professor]

Vinegar revolting? Seriously?
I guess it's a matter of personal taste. I love cooking with vinegar. There's a classic bean soup (green or yellow beans) my grandma made that contained a combination of sour cream AND vinegar. Sublime.

[foodisgreat]

Don't know anything about cooking kidneys, but surely agree with you, Professor, that vinegar is great. Can think of little else with so many uses. As mentioned in an earlier post, I love it used in lieu of mayo to make deviled eggs & potato salad (as my grandmother did). Couldn't get by without it in pickling of all sorts, various cooking, and it is my "seasoning of choice" for so many foods - greens, cabbage, okra, beets, any type field peas, some beans, some fresh pork, etc., etc. Tuna salad has to have a little vinegar added to it. There's its uses in salads and dressings. And all these uses apply to just plain apple cider or distilled white vinegars; not considering all one does with what I call all the "fancy", "specialty" vinegars. And its good for all sorts of cleaning.

[alkapal]

mmmm, fresh boiled field peas (with snaps) cooked with some rendered bacon pieces, plus a splash of texas pete's pepper-vinegar at the table! http://www.texaspete.com/product_pepp...
served with a hot hoecake. man, that is some fine eatin'.

and eatin'.....and eatin'..... ;-P

[foodisgreat]

You are so right about those field peas (all are good but my favorite are purple hulls), alkapal. And they absolutely must have some pepper vinegar or just plain vinegar sprinkled over them before that first bite. Vinegar or pepper vinegar is even more essential for greens & cabbage. And after our beets and okra are cooked, vinegar is poured over them in their serving bowls & they are served that way (little butter also added to hot okra to melt). And any of those vegetables absolutely must have some sort of cornbread (any type of it) to accompany them. Cornbread crumbled into pea "pot likker" with little vinegar added to it to kinda "curdle" it, is so good that I can do fine with that after the peas have all been eaten - or if the peas are about to run out, others can have the peas as I'd just as soon have the pot likker, cornbread, vinegar "mess". Like you said, alkapal, all this is some fine, fine eatin'.

[alkapal]

oh yeah, crumbling in cornbread to the pot likker is mandatory.

my favorites are cream peas! http://www.ajc.com/living/content/liv...

i could probably polish off a pound of the things. trouble is, you have to keep the amount of the hoecake or cornbread in "balance" with the remaining amount of peas, so if you have too much of one, you have to add to/"top off" the other. a lovely vicious cycle!

[foodisgreat]

You are certainly 100 per cent correct, alkapal, in your praise of cornbread crumbled into pea pot likker (good in greens pot likker but better in that of peas). My dad was like you, with cream peas being his favorite, but somehow I like purple hulls best of all. However, all field peas are so wonderfully delicious it really doesn't much matter what kind I have. And you are right about the problem of balancing the proportions of peas & pot likker (or just pot likker if all the peas are gone) with the cornbread. I fear at times I am guilty of purposely getting the mixture out of balance as an excuse for adding more of one or the other & thereby getting more of the total to eat. Of course this mixture then has to be tempered with a little vinegar to make it "curdle" just right. Oh, so good!!!

[recipelover]

Anything creamed is food of the Gods! My favorites are creamed peas, creamed brussel sprouts, and creamed chip beef. Still make them.

[RavenWilde]

Vinegar also makes a great antiseptic if you get a cut or scratch and don't have anything else on hand to disinfect it. That is what my Mom always used when one of her cats accidentally scratched her. Also, if someone in the house had a cold or the flu, sliced onions in saucers in every room, especially in the sick one's room. No one else ever got the cold or flu..She said the onions attracted and absorbed the germs. I do know no one was ever sick for long!

[hill food]

ever read Angela's Ashes by the late Frank McCourt? Onion boiled in milk was a home remedy for, I believe, croup mentioned.

[sccrash]

Vinegar is one of the foods I'd have to have if marooned on the proverbial desert island.
We make the bean soup as well, it's good with or without vinegar, but better with.
My family also makes what Grandma called Club soup, or sour soup. Diced potatoes, onions, and (raw) meatballs cooked in just enough water to cover. When they're done, round out the broth with some whole milk, then add vinegar to taste. Looks disgusting, tastes wonderful. I make it for my brothers and cousin at Christmas, the only problem is making sure the one brother doesn't sneak out the door with the whole batch...

[tracey McAllister]

Did anyone mention shake n bake? I had this quite a lot growing up, whether chicken or pork chop. It was usually accompanied by scalloped potato (par boiled spuds with packet of mushroom soup and water) and corn. I have to admit that I loved it and would get Mom to make it for me now if we could get shake n bake here in Ireland.

[bubbles4me]

This is a great thread. I feel lucky but like some others have mentioned a bit seprived as my Mom was a good cook, not fancy but very solid. The one thing I thought was weird was the pile of cottage cheese with an up-turned half of canned pear that was filled with mayo...never quite "got" that and never really liked it

[hill food]

bubbles: that is a classic 1962 Home Ec class/1953 Good Housekeeping magazine recipe. now that iceburg lettuce wedge and bleu cheese have come back, that can't be far behind. ick.

only worse was the version with a canned peach and the mayo mixed into the cottage cheese.

[bubbles4me]

hill food,
Makes sense as Mom was born in 1945....why oh why would they mix mayo in the already fatty cottage cheese?! Oh my....she always served that pear thing with pot pies, smelled the pies I knew there were mayo pears in my future. I used to sneak into the kitchen and slice bell peppers very thin and dress them with red wine vineager, garlic powder, salt and pepper to fill myself up before the pears arrived....funny thing is now I cannot stand bell peppers, (green ones) too many pears and mayo I guess.
She also made this dish in the crock pot, browned stew meat, tomato sauce and paste, sour cream and a TON of bay leaf....served it over rice...hated it like poison.

[hill food]

oh God, the SO and I were joking earlier tonight about mine maybe making a pot roast to a similar effect. curdled was our prediction.

actually though if your mom's had been wrapped in cabbage leaves then baked (not crock potted) in tomato sauce and the sour cream added last, that sounds like goluptsi (SP?) and pretty good.

I do however curse the person that introduced the crock pot to the general public.

it's like the gun cvontroversy, appliances don't kill meals...

[alkapal]

my mom called this a "pear salad": one leaf nice crisp iceberg lettuce, one canned pear half, upturned, one small scoop cottage cheese (winn-dixie is her fave brand), one-half maraschino cherry (if you want to be fancy). that is classic cafeteria food.

i don't recall mayo with the cottage cheese, but sometimes just a pear with a little dollop of mayo was the "pear salad". my granddaddy liked canned cling peach halves with cottage cheese. it is tasty. not something i ever make, but i would happily eat it if served the dish at someone's home!

[bythebayov]

I love peaches and cottage cheese....My husband's grandmother mixes cottage cheese with ripe tomatoes, celery and sometimes, bell peppers....this salad is actually really delish and refreshing.

[alkapal]

bythebayov, oh, yeah, i know that salad -- with cukes, too! it is a filling, nutritional dish -- but guilt-free! love it with lawrey's seasoned salt, maybe a splash of rice wine vinegar, maybe some fresh chopped chives or green onion. i'm tasting that now in my mind! ;-P

btw, is it intentional your screen name ends with a "v" and not a "u"?

your blog is nice. the tuna looked awesome, and your pic with the philly cheesesteak is hilarious! good to know a hound down around hampton roads!

[bythebayov]

No, I live in an area called oceanview and OV is the abreviation for this area, hence the ov :-) Will have to try the salad your way...sounds awesome! thanks for the comments and glad you liked the blog. think you are reader # 5 now :-) I am def a hound and it's great to meet you too! Ps. The cheesesteak challenge was "wicked fun"

[alkapal]

good screen name! and enjoy that salad while summer produce is still so wonderful-- try the lawrey's on it. (i think cottage cheese is one of the few dishes i use it on...)

[marielee]

Not my mother, but my paternal grandmother, and two of my aunts on my dad's side make ricewurst. Which I am guessing somewhere along the line was a traditional recipe, probably much adulterated. I can remember my grandmother telling me that her family used to make it with offal as well but she couldn't stand it that way. It's made from rice, various spices and the meat from a pig's head. It's put in a loaf pan and the individual slices are fried slowly and served with white bread. My mum ate it until she got a piece with a bit of shot in it...and hasn't had any since.

[The Professor]

The ricewurst sounds great...much like the Hurka sausage my grandma made (with the offal...and it was delicious). The only difference would be that my grandma's was stuffed into a casing.

[marielee]

If I remember correctly the original family recipe had kidneys in it. She had a phobia about eating Kidneys. Which is strange really as I have memories of eated corned tounge and crumbed brains at my grandmothers!

[bythebayov]

My mother made scones, beautiful scones...with garlic salt! She is convinced she is a good baker and she is, but will, on occasion, add salt instead of sugar (by accident of course) to a recipe or will omit a crucial component to a dish then serve it like nothing's happened. I love me mother :-)

[mpjmph]

With the exception of wonderful homemade pie, my mom was a terrible cook when I was a kid. She used to serve brown-n-serve rolls with dinner a few times a week, but we called them black bottom rolls because we honestly thought that particular style of bread was supposed to be served with a burnt bottom that you peeled off to get to the soft, doughy interior. She's come a long way, and now is a pretty good cook, though still a little hesitant in the kitchen, which kind of makes me feel bad for teasing her about the rolls.

In other bread related oddities, we always referred to the 2 ends of a loaf as the heel and the toe, because it always seemed wrong that a loaf would have to heels.

[joschus]

This is the best thread!! I've been laughing for a half hour....OK a couple of my all time most hated dishes:

Mom's Meatloaf - Make a regular meatloaf recipie but bury 3 hardboiled eggs in the center of the meatloaf and then bake. This dish taught me to hate meatloaf to this day. When she would serve it, the eggs would have broken apart and the broken pieces would be hard as rocks. The baking also magnified the taste of the eggs which somehow tasted rotten to me. The eggs also tinted the meatloaf a yellow color. YUK.

Hillbilly Pancakes - I have to give my ex-father-in-law the credit for this culinary horror. In a large cast iron pan, fry up a pound of bacon. When the bacon is almost done (do not remove bacon grease), add 3 eggs per person until over-cooked. Finally, cover the entire greasy mess with enough pancake batter to come halfway up the pan. Cut and serve when done. Can you even imagine what a greasy, salty, disgusting breakfast this made? He loved it and we had to pretend because it was his "specialty".

[The Professor]

wow...the hillbilly pancakes do sound a bit much. Moreso in the execution rather than the ingredients.

I do love hardboiled eggs buried in a meatloaf though...it's classic, and delicious.

[alkapal]

i was thinking of the poor eggs in that "pancake" dish, too. did your parents have an anti-egg bent? ;-)

[joschus]

Hi!

The Hillbilly Pancakes were my ex Father-In-Law's "specialty". I don't believe my mother would have ever thought up that horrible dish! But, you never know!

[alkapal]

sorry joschus, i didn't think clearly.

[biondanonima]

The hillbilly pancakes actually sound kind of amazing to me, but then again I love anything carby fried in bacon grease. I hope there was maple syrup for dipping!

[weewah]

I think they sound good too, but would have to drain the grease. Would be better with sausage.

[krisrishere]

My dad was famous for his American Chop Suey: ground beef, tomato sauce, onions, peppers, mushrooms and elbow macaroni.

My mom made us kids egg noodles with pan fried hot dogs, parsley, butter and parmesan cheese.

I have to admit, I eat both of these things atleast once or twice a year...they're too good to be forgotten!

[pang]

For holiday parties: mini hot dogs in a heated sauce of grape jelly and yellow mustard. Seriously good!

[sadiefox]

One of my mom's classics: "Hot Dogs and Noodles"
Cut up an onion, and throw it in a pot with a large can of stewed tomatoes and some cut-up Oscar Meyer hot dogs. Serve over shell pasta with Kraft parmesan cheese.

Another classic was Stroganoff made with ground beef, mushrooms, a can of cream of mushroom soup and some sour cream, served over shell pasta.

Actually, my mom was and still is a great cook... but she didn't feel like spending all night cooking dinner after working full time. Sometimes I still crave her "classics."

[mustardsally]

Was anyone ever served this dish with no name: Franco American spaghetti from a can combined with ground beef and canned peas? Truly a bad one-pot miracle born of necessity, I hope. Wow, it was the pits...

[DaisyM]

When I was growing up in the 60's there was a special on tv about a possible relationship of eating a diet high in red meat and cancer. Well, that was all my mother had to hear. From then on it was chicken every night to the point that one night my father started to "cluck" and he said, "I can't take one more piece of chicken". So while she was on this chicken binge that lasted I think for years she cooked something quite exotic at the time called either polynesian or hawaiian chicken. I remember the canned pineapple rings and maraschino cherries (red dye #2 anyone?) Huge surprise after my father died (at a very young age of cancer) she became macrobiotic.

[betsydiver]

i remember that "Hawaiian chicken w/pineapple and maraschino cherries... w/ the pineapple juice, please, and rice

[BabsW]

My mom still makes this!

[Chocolatechipkt]

My mom is actually a very good cook. She didn't have a lot of time to cook, working FT and with three kids and my dad to cook for, but she used fresh foods as much as possible and rarely bought packaged or frozen meals. However, she can eat the same thing over and over and over, so at one point growing up we had zucchini (mostly sauteed with onions or steamed) every day for at least two years. She denies it, but it's taken me a long time to get back into zucchini. We also had spaghetti a lot, usually with a quick, from-canned-tomatoes-and-leftover-vegetables sauce, sometimes with cubes of leftover meatloaf or chicken. Economical and fairly healthy the way she did it ... but not so appealing many, many times later, esp. as a kid. Other kinds of pasta I'm fine with, but I still don't really like spaghetti, even when cooked differently. (shrug) ... luckily she's made a lot of great things too, like crunchy chicken, which was chicken coated in yogurt (and sometimes lemon juice) and then tossed in crushed crackers or cornflakes or something, or fabulous roast chicken, or chocolate cake, or grilled or roasted salmon, or potato salad with both mayo and plain yogurt (and other stuff).

Fun thread to read. Thanks for starting it Alkapal.

Have any of y'all read "Tender at the Bone," by Ruth Reichl? This is the story of her childhood and her mother's weird cooking, and how she ended up in the food world. Great read.

[bythebayov]

thanks for the tip...Im always looking for good foodie books :-)

[TheSnowpea]

My mother is not a horrible cook, but not a great one either. Mom learned to cook for defensive reasons because Grandma was simply awful in the kitchen, but she never became really good at it. She's lost her sense of smell too, so she's actually lost interest in cooking.

However, she did have recipes I remember loving as a kid. They were usually reserved for special events, celebrations, or for having guests over.

One dish was Hawaiian Ham, which involved cubed ham (usually leftover from a whole cooked ham), green pepper cut in 1 inch squares, pineapple cubes, some onion, all in a sweet and sour sauce that involved pineapple juice from the can, brown sugar, powdered Keen's mustard, vinegar and corn starch. This was served over white rice.

The other dish was Pepper Steak: strips of round, strips of red and green bell pepper, onion, sautéed in a deep pot. Once cooked, add a sauce made from broth, soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, other things I forget and corn starch. This too was served on rice.

Hawaiian Ham and Pepper Steak remain among my mom's Special Day dishes to this day! Oh and the appetizer is usually shrimp cocktail or avocado salad with shrimp served in the cleaned out avocado skin. I think she recently remade that bizarre salad that involves fruit cocktail, sour cream, and other weird stuff for some friends and they loved it (they'd never had it before).

As a child, I remember one of my two favourite suppers was Swiss Fondue. I loved when we'd pull out the caquelon pot, put fuel in the little burner, cut up chewy baguette bread. The other big fave was pancakes for supper when the family did not really feel inspired. Usually it was a cold day. My mom would make the batter, my father would man the big cast iron pan and I'd man the small cast iron pan. Pancakes with maple syrup for supper were the BEST! LOL

[alkapal]

snowpea, this is so sweet: "My mom would make the batter, my father would man the big cast iron pan and I'd man the small cast iron pan."

thanks for sharing that wonderful, joyous, loving picture with us.

[bubbles4me]

thesnowpea,
Thanks for sharing your pancake story, it was very sweet and may just make me give them a try again....my pancake story is that when my mother and I fell on a very hard time we lived on pancakes for 2 weeks straight....every meal and worst part, no maple syrup...Karo syrup....shudder. It has been 30 years since I touched a pancake but I may just give them another shot.

[foodisgreat]

snowpea and bubbles, your pancake stories are a lot more touching than my waffle story. I always had pretty good luck with pancakes so have no experiences with them to relate, but once was given old waffle iron by some friends I'd helped move. No instructions with it & I'd never made any waffles, but one cold, dreary, winter afternoon decided I'd make some waffles for supper. Went to store & got box of pancake & waffle mix, read instructions on package and made up recipe for what package said was for four waffles. Looked into waffle iron and saw four sections, thought that was what recipe was referring to, so poured entire batch I'd made up into waffle iron & closed lid. In just a bit that top started rising and waffle batter started flowing out of all sides of the waffle iron. I started trying to wipe it up from counter top but just couldn't keep up with it - it was running into sink, onto floor, down the counter, against the wall - just everywhere. Put a couple of trash cans around to try to catch some of it running onto floor and kept wiping & scooping a while, but finally just gave up, went over & sat in chair & waited till all had finished running everywhere. Then cleaned up the mess & the waffle iron, made some pancakes with remaining mix, & had rather unenjoyable supper. The dismal weather didn't help matters either. Have never attempted to make waffles since (other than those at motel breakfasts). Stupid me didn't know the amount of batter I'd made & poured into iron all at once was meant for four different pourings. Snowpea, I like pancakes, but feel for you with nothing but pancakes to eat for two weeks straight - and with Karo syrup to go on them! At least I hope it was dark Karo rather than clear Karo. And did you have any butter or margarine to go on them? If you do decide to do pancakes again now, I hope that you really, really enjoy them.

[foodisgreat]

My bad, apologies - I said Snowpea, but see it was you, Bubbles, and not Snowpea who had the two weeks exclusive pancake diet. Bubbles, I do hope that any current pancake adventures are most delicious and enjoyable.

[alkapal]

foodisgreat, your "ever overflowing" waffle batter story reminds me of when i had a summer rental apartment, and had no dishwasher soap -- only liquid dish soap, which i put in the dishwasher.

. the dishwasher was like a monster with rabies, foaming and foaming and foaming at the seams -- billowing foam all over the kitchen floor. it musti've been going on for at least half an hour, and by the time i noticed it, it was too late to stop the onslaught. there was probably a foot and a half of foam all over the small kitchen vinyl floor. the dreaded foam monster even began to encroach into the adjacent carpeted living room. i don't remember how many towels it took to clean up that soapy mess!

[foodisgreat]

alkapal, this sounds like more similarities in our backgrounds, unfortunately so in these instances, but as bad as my waffle experience was, your dishwasher experience was even worse. Condolences! Fortunately, neither of our experiences as bad as that of friends who recently had washing machine malfunction while they gone, flooding nearly entire house and requiring replacement of most carpet, tile, & hardwood flooring in the home. Guess the old saying about "as bad off as you are, you can always find someone in even worse shape" is true in all these cases.

[TheSnowpea]

Making pancakes' a family thing! And it's funny how for example my husband and I have different pancake styles. Mine are dense and eggy crêpes, and my husband makes a more American style I guess, thick and fluffy.

Having to eat them for 2 weeks straight might prove a challenge. I have NO clue what karo syrup might be like, and I get the hunch I don't wanna try! LOL Besides, I live in Quebec. Anything else than "real" syrup, AKA maple, is anathema!

But perhaps it IS indeed time to reconnect with family with a pancake supper!

As for the stories below, I'm both amused and horrified at the overflowing waffle makers and dishwashers! I've seen a rabid dishwasher. NOT a pretty sight :-0

[foodisgreat]

The Snowpea - Sounds like pancakes are quite the thing in your family, and hope you all get to soon experience that good family pancake supper. My pancakes are more along the lines of your husband's. Talking with friend today who is active in Kiwanis Club (a civic club); they are busy preparing for their annual day long pancake breakfast (an annual charity fund raising event) later this week. Karo Syrup is a corn based syrup. Tho there are some other varieties now which I think are more suitable as an "eating" syrup, their classics are light & dark Karo which are, in my opinion at least, more suited to cooking (have you ever heard of Karo Pecan Pie?) than eating. Agree with you about the pure maple syrup and am looking forward to (at least hoping for) my annual Christmas gift of such. If pure maple isn't available, there are several other syrups I prefer to Karo for pancakes & waffles. Be careful and avoid overflowing machines of all sorts.

[TheSnowpea]

Actually, my parents and I haven't had pancakes that way in years. I think it's time to revive the tradition, with the addition of my husband. I don't know if we can fit three cooks around the stove but perhaps we should try! LOL

[foodisgreat]

TheSnowpea, hope you can get all those family cooks around that stove and whip up the best batch of pancakes you all have ever had. Let us know how this meal turns out. And think I'm going to be doing some pancakes this weekend myself.

[MARISKANY]

My mother was not a good cood, but she tried her best. I still remember her "Tofu Lasagna", and frozen brocolli cooked in a pressure cooker along with beef liver cooked to the consistance of show leather. I still make her "Spanish Rice" and Chile when the weather turns cool.

[CadienBelle]

Actually mom was an excellent cook. I don't remember anything being weird. But, my ex-MIL was another story. Spaghetti and sauce consisted of over cooked spaghetti and 2 cans of Campbells tomato soup. No meat or spices. On the side was buttered bread. Meatloaf was the same. Meat, s&p, and some onion. Campbells tomato soup on the top. She wasn't the type to try anything new or different... such as spices!!

[alkapal]

anyone have the halved grapefruit, with brown sugar on top and put under the broiler? growing up in florida, we had this somewhat frequently. i think it was popular in the '60's. it is good.

[Bigley9]

oh we had that lots - and I grew up in PA. I think it was a cheap (there were 9 of us, also in the 60s) and good for you dessert. The funny family story was my brother, at about 5 years of age, instructing a waitress how to make it when it wasn't on the menu at a local diner!

[jeanmarieok]

I had that for breakfast this summer at the Opryland hotel, and I really liked it!!!!!

[betsydiver]

i've posted this somewhere recently but that was a 7th grade home ec. recipe that I thought was the weirdest thing I'd ever heard of..., circa 1965? I thought somehow that home ec. was supposed to prepare us for married life and I couldn't imagine any man would want broiled grapefruite for breakfast, yuk!

[alkapal]

i guess you don't like grapefruit.

[The Professor]

I love broiled grapefruit (and I'm a man)...

my college girlfriend turned me on to it 40 years ago and have _loved_ it ever since. A very light sprinkle of brown sugar, and popped under the brolier...YUM.

[meleyna]

My mother is a fantastic cook, but when my parents divorced when I was about 12, money was tight and she had to get well, creative. One that I particularly remember was browned ground beef mixed with canned green chiles serves over rice was "Scoopee Over Rice." For some reason we called Finger Steaks "Meat in a Pan" instead. To this day I admire her ability to open the fridge, check the pantry, and be able to have great dinner on the table.

Although she is a great cook, she makes a lot of comfort food from her childhood. Stuff that's already mentioned here. Campbells Chicken Gumbo mixed with ground beef on buns for Chickburgers, Manwich out of a can, Sh!t on a Shingle (though she does do homemade bechamel with the canned chicken), and the bane of my existence, goulash. Pasta, canned tomatoes, ground beef, sugar. I know its something her mother made, and my whole family loves it except me. Ironically, I think my stepfather married her for this haha. He's always telling his friends at work how his wife makes the best spaghetti, and a few months ago he volunteered her to make some for a potluck. My mom refused--she KNOWS how flavorless it is, its just comfort food for her lol. Her spaghetti sauce does include brown gravy mix though, which I've never seen anyone else do.

One story that always gets brought up, and reflects more on my mom than me: I was a pretty adventurous eater as a kid, but I was all about the iceburg. One time my mom put some sort of green leaf lettuce on my sandwich, and when she caught me taking it off she told me I needed to eat it. When I didn't I got sent to my room to pout. A little later she called me out telling me she had fixed my sandwich. I came out to find a good four inch layer of lettuce between my two slices of Roman Meal. Talk about a meltdown... My mom, ever the jokester, thought she was hilarious. And of course my three brothers and sister at the table joined in in the pointing and laughing.

[alkapal]

meleyna, i love that lettuce sandwich story! now, was there mayo on that roman meal bread?

btw, does ANYONE remember the sliced sandwich bread called "monk's bread" -- a white, fine textured dense loaf with a unique flavor (a little sweet/malty?). it made such good sandwiches. there was a faux-monk's bread that came back in the '80's, but it wasn't the same! ;-(

[alkapal]

oh, look, monks' bread is still around: https://monksbread.com/cart/index.php...

apparently, it has been made since 1953, but i think they changed their recipe from when i was growing up in the '60's and '70's.

i never see it in my stores these days, but maybe will ask so they can stock it.

[alkapal]

bigley, that is a precious picture! did they get it for him? ;-)

[Bigley9]

no I believe they thought him quite the spoiled boy! Mom made it the next day though!

[jeanmarieok]

My mom used to make this pork chop dinner, that was just sauteed pork chop and onions, then smothered in a sauce made of equal parts of ketchup and water. And depending on whether we had mashed potatoes with it, or not, determined how much ketchup and water was used, because those pan dripping were drizzled over the mashed potatoes. I thought it was really really awful once I became a teenager, but I have to confess that my husband loves it now.

My dad was a terrible griller. His idea of barbecued chicken was chicken boiled until rubber, then grilled until the barbecue sauce was burned black and charr-y. Once I was married, my husband took over the grilling from my dad. My mom admits that she doesn't let him grill at all anymore, since he doesn't have the knack for it. Or maybe it's just those manhattens he's always swilling while he's grilling.....

[walker]

My grandmother used to fry pork chops and then add a mixture of ketchup and orange juice and simmer a while -- made the chops nice and tender. I should try it again some time.

[sarahjay]

My mom tried to sneak veggies into our meals. Once when I was pretty small, probably about 4, she heard from who knows where that bean sprouts could replace some of the noodles in "spaghetti" (ground beef in tomato sauce, blargh)
I don't know what she was thinking but she did made spaghetti with bean sprouts. I and my 2-year-old brother refused to eat it and were sent to bed without dinner. Later we were caught snacking on graham crackers in the linen closet and she took pity on us and made us sandwiches. We never had bean sprout spaghetti again.

[1sweetpea]

My mom is not a great cook. At best, she's merely adequate. She thinks she's pretty great, though. So does my dad. I think his mother must have been a terrible cook, so it was probably a big step up for him when he met my mom. For my entire childhood and into young adulthood I loathed salmon. My mother only shopped at a Jewish meat shop. Nothing was truly kosher, but the selections were in keeping with Jewish tradition, so there was no pork or seafood. The only fish types available were whitefish, pike, carp, perhaps sole or flounder and salmon. My mother would bring home salmon, place it in a 9X9 pyrex baking dish, put a couple of spoons of margarine on top, then sprinkle with some tasteless ancient dried herb, possibly tarrragon or dill, but who could tell for sure? She'd cover the dish with cling film, turn back one corner or stab the film with a fork, then nuke the crap out of it in the microwave. What emerged several minutes later was always rubbery and tasted fishy. What was odd was that sometimes she'd open a can of sockeye salmon, remove the skin and bones, then make salmon patties for my dad. Only he ate them. The rest of us thought the smell was vile. The joke to me is that there was virtually no difference in fishy smell between the nuked salmon fillets and the canned and fried patties.

I love salmon today in sushi, lox, or a lightly steamed fillet done with ginger, green onions and sake or sherry and a bit of sesame oil. If it's cooked all the way through, though, no matter who cooks it, the memories of overcooked, rubbery catfood come rushing right back. My parents have finally moved up in the world ... from nuking to grilling, on their George Foreman grill. They think anything grilled on that thing is manna. Whatever floats their boat, I guess. I'm just glad the days of margarine, dried tarragon and rubbery fish are over. Just in case they aren't, though, I never take a chance and eat at my parents' home anymore. I just take them out to a restaurant to "give mom a break from cooking" ... LOL!

[hill food]

your mother and mine can never meet.

[lihsiawang]

When I was a child in Minnesota 100 years ago my mother struggled to cook Chinese food in Norwegian country. Her version of mu-shi pork used pork and cabbage on buttermilk pancakes. And it was very tasty!

[alkapal]

LOL -- mu-shi pork with BUTTERMILK pancakes! but ya know, buttermilk pancakes could probably go well with just about anything. (i grew up lovin' mu-shi pork -- even made it a while back after diligently searching out the "golden lily threads"!). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moo_shu_...

[jarona]

My mom had a penchant for boiled tongue as well--she would make tongue sandwiches. As I come from a family that is large and Irish--she would eat pigs feet during her pregnancies--there were many pigs feet months growing up. On Fridays, we would never have meat due to religious reasons, so we always had sara lee fish cakes and spaghetti. My mom also made kidneys and eggs for breakfast--a lot! The weird thing was all us kids loved the kidney and egg breakfast.

The weirdest dish she made was one that none of us liked, but she insisted on making it at least once a month--it was this awful concoction she called "Slumgullion" (no kidding--that was the name). Anyway, this slop consisted of: 1 box of elbow macaroni--naturally you MUST overcook the macaronis by a good 15 to 20 minutes. 1 can of DelMonte tomatoes (I don't even know if they even make Del Monte canned tomatoes anymore) 1 chopped pepper, sauteed. 1 pound of chopmeat--cooked till it has the consistency of rubber. Mix it all up and put in a big bowl and watch it disappear--you will watch for a long time!

Its funny though, because to this day, despite some of the odder things my mom made, she did make the best roast on earth. The woman was a genius at timing--her roast beefs were perfectly rare and her legs of lamb and fresh hams were amazing.

Now I'm getting kinda sad because I would love to be able to ask her for help but she doesn't even know me anymore--Alzheimer's has taken her mind and her spirit away. But thank you for giving me a few moments of good mom memories! I appreciate your post!

[alkapal]

"As I come from a family that is large and Irish--she would eat pigs feet during her pregnancies."
________
a new pregnacy craving. i think there has to be some innate biological sensor that tells what a body needs at the time. i used to get a "rare roast beef" craving during that "time of the month." it is not so intense anymore. damn this aging process!

but, i'm so sorry about the fact your mom has alzheimer's. it so robs people of their lives and good memories. my 86-year-old mom also suffers from a big memory loss. thanks for sharing.

[jarona]

didn't matter what time of the month it was for me, I , to this day, can only eat very rare red meat. As far as pregnancy cravings go--thank God I did not follow my mother's pig feet wants. I craved pizza and listening to The Who.

[alkapal]

i just thought of something, was it "we won't get fooled again"? heh heh. really, i don't think that way about children. no... really. hey, my best friend in college and i always had a running debate about beatles vs. the who. of course, i was right. ;-) (beatles. lovin' "polythene pam" -- one of THE BEST guitar solos ever, along with brian eno's "baby's on fire" ** -- truly -- just a coincidence. -- don't listen to the lyrics, unless you are in a snarky-momma mood).

** and, of course, derek and the dominos, "layla". and jimi. dang, stop it, girl!

[alkapal]

(for all you foodie aficianados....the fripp-e is here -- think frappe without the accent mark, which i still cannot do)! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvPHbb... -- you know, that name just might be a little prophetic!
;-).

btw, i can't get a complete "pam".... (as in "Well you should see Parmesan Pam
She's so good-looking but she looks like a ham
Well you should see her in drag dressed in her shrink-wrappy bag
Yes you should see Parmesan Pam
Yeah yeah yeah....").

hounds, work with me here.....

[smalt]

Chinese eat pigs feet AFTER the birth.... :-)

Our house does a variation of the slumgullion - ground beef, tomato sauce (well, I throw in a can of El Pato), sliced onions and some form of pasta - but I prefer the pasta al dente!....That's a frequent lunch request in our house and in fact the leftovers get sent off with a college kid as it's her favorite lunch, too!

I'm somewhat in the same boat with the dementia thing - I've got to start playing with Mom's famous short rib recipe - I think I know it, but have yet to execute it.....It's the right weather for it and I'm facing an impending layoff, so I'll have more time to play in the kitchen for awhile....

[Cinnamon]

Thank you SO much for including a "the" in your first sentence.

[Emmie9999]

jarona, my mother made something similar, and called it "hamburger helper". It wasn't the boxed kind at all, but an onion and green pepper chopped and fired, then mixed with cooked ground beef and an 8 ounce can of Hunt's tomato sauce and a pound of cooked elbows. The pasta was never overcooked, but the peppers were cooked to mush. My DH's family makes the same thing and calls it "American chop suey". NYC vs New England, I suppose!

I empathize completely, my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's when I was entering my teens. It saddens me to know I will never learn the recipe for his famous giant "stuffed" hamburger, or learn many other things from him. But I agree, it is so nice to think back and remember!

[alkapal]

i don't know if i mentioned my mom's salmon patties. i loved them so much, i'd scarf them from the paper towel next to the cast iron skillet, while they were really hot. every now and then, i'll make some. they bring good memories, and that is part of our personal food tradition, isn't it?

i think a major part of our food preferences is just purely childhood nostalgia -- when the world was not so scary and unsettling. then again, i crave thai food, and had nothing like it growing up. the Good Lord has blessed us with so many tasty things to eat. one of His major gifts is GARLIC!

[haolebaby]

My mom made me olive and cream cheese sandwiches.

and when I was growing up chili was made with buttered bread on the side vice cornbread.

Her salads were so bland. A chopped cucumber, shredded carrot and iceberg lettuce.. Praise Jesus I realized there were real salads out there that didn't follow that form.

While the spaghetti growing up was a decent red sauce with meat, every once in a while she did the crazy melt a piece of cheese on top.

Other than that I grew up with a lot of German food like sausages with sauerkraut..

She made some craziness called "Chicken Divan" too which I've only ever seen on that Paula Deen show. Ridiculous, it's like a sauce of curry powder, cream of mushroom soup, sour cream, mayo and cheddar over chicken and broccoli and served with rice. Heart attack, anyone?

[alkapal]

one of my fave sandwiches is green olive and pimento cream cheese (made by mincing the pimento-stuffed olives into softened cream cheese) spread on good pumpernickel bread with rare roast beef, grilled until the cheese is melty.

try my mom's meatballs with kraut, to compare: http://www.chow.com/recipes/13527

my salads from mom (i made them, but these were the ingredients) were tomato (but GOOD tomato), crunchy cukes and iceberg. sometimes fresh bell pepper rings. tomatoes had to be cut in chunks, and not wedges. served usually with thousand island dressing, or french dressing. you got shredded carrot? that was only when i got "fancy" and added it! ;-)

[Bigley9]

Wow- I grew up with cream cheese and olives, and we ate rare roast beef, but never together - Is this grilled like a grilled cheese or under the broiler? I think I may have to go buy the makings for that sandwich!

[alkapal]

bigley, that is done on the grill, like grilled cheese. do two versions, one with toasting the bread first, one without. i think toasted lightly helps the sandwich hold up better. but i wouldn't butter the outside of the bread like is done with some grilled sandwiches; maybe just add a little neutral oil or butter in the skillet.

it is soul-satisfyin'! i'm sure you'll enjoy it. i like the harris teeter brand "london broil" or dietz and watson rare roast beef. (in fact, it may be time for a deli run tomorrow! ;-).

[sivang]

I grew up with cream cheese and olive... I would always pick the olives off and eat them, then throw the rest away.

Also was subjected to my dad's specialty of hot dogs mixed with scrambled eggs and "beef stew"--one can of tomato sauce with some frozen peas and carrots and stew beef thrown in, cook until the beef is no longer raw but far from edible....

I took over the cooking when I got to high school. Thank god.

[scarletfan]

It seems like a lot of people ate cream cheese & jelly or cream cheese & olive/pimento sandwiches but I remember my mom making cream cheese and pistachio nut sandwiches. So delicious....

My mom is a decent cook but my dad doesn't like a lot of spices (hates garlic, doesn't like onions, doesn't like any salad dressing) so we didn't get a lot of flavor or variety in most dinners. It was the standard meat, vegetable, potatoe fare.

I also recently found out that at 61 years old, my mom has never had Mexican food and never plans to. It's a miracle that I don't have a ton of food issues! :)

[alkapal]

your mom's attitude toward mexican food reminds me of this guy i knew in law school. once at a party, when i was explaining how easy it was to make (delicious) guacamole, he sniffed, "i don't *approve* of mexican cuisine." oh no, he didn't just say that, did he?!? i couldn't believe how incredibly stupid he was! i laughed in his face. i laugh about it to this day! ps, tom, i hope you "got with the program," bro.

[hill food]

alka: I'm sure millions of people are distraught over this revelation...

yeesh, where does one come up with such an approach?

[alkapal]

inbred.

~~~~~~~
as in.....inbred family lines......
or maybe he learned it in his connecticutt prep school. i don't know which....

[alkapal]

i don't know when connecticut earned an extra "t."

[hill food]

you were likely sparing many the involuntary cringe by utilizing the first 't' in that particular syllable instead of his richly deserved 'n'

[alkapal]

or maybe i wasn't wearing my reading glasses when i typed it! LOL!

[breakfastfan]

Oh, some of what Mom made was good, not great, but traditional comfort food, meatloaf, american chop suey, pot roast.
However, she could never convince me to eat "hot dog casserole". Slice potatoes, hot dogs, onions (if she felt like it) , put it all in an oven proof casserole dish, and barely cover with water. Heat until bubbling and serve in a bowl. "shudder" uhhh I can't believe my siblings could eat that. Me, I was having peanut butter on bread for supper on those nights...Just to mix things up, "Pork Chop casserole" same thing, always onions.
6 to feed, small budget; I guess you need to do what you can...

[Steady Habits]

This doesn't make for an interesting post, but out of respect for my mother, who passed away when I was in my early twenties, I feel compelled to post in her behalf that she was a great cook. She was from northern New England, and mostly made just good honest Yankee dishes. She was the Queen of Oven and Pot Roasts; they're still the standard by which I compare any I encounter.

But...she did pick out one special thing to make each week, something outside of her repertoire, and it was usually something from Julia Child or James Beard. The one thing I really didn't like were the beef rouladen. I don't think they're weird, exactly, at least not in Germany. But something about pickles cooked inside meat just didn't do it for me.

And the other thing was all the excitement on the part of my mother and my Rhode Islander father over the occasional New England Boiled Dinner. You would have thought Queen Elizabeth had been invited to dinner, the way they anticipated and fussed over things preparing those NEBDs. I know this might get me kicked right over the border into New York, but I just don't get New England Boiled dinners. I know she made it correctly, and seasoned it well, but...I don't know, boiled meat and a bunch of boiled root vegetables isn't my bag. I like 'em sauteed and roasted and accompanied by crunchy things (like walnuts) and glazes and caramelization.

[jwalker23]

I grew up in small town West Virginia, and learned all kinds of strange recipes from my family and their friends. A few that stand out to me; a mock apple pie, where you use allspice and crumbled ritz crackers instead of apples. Mayo biscuits, where you use mayo instead of butter and eggs; Potato candy, which involves mixing powdered sugar, water, and a mashed potato together to form a paste, then coating it in peanut butter and rolling it up into a log. Also, "kilt lettuce"; you cook iceberg lettuce in leftover bacon grease. and serve it over bread. The strangest thing I recall though was this "dessert" a coworker of mine once made for an office party at my recurrent summer job ( schooled in nyc, summered in wv, I lead a life of contrast). Canned fruit cocktail mixed with mayo, crumbled white bread, and a tub of cool whip.. I recognize, a lot of these recipes come from making due with what you've got. Regardless of how strange some of the products were, I admire the spirit behind them.
We used to eat cornbread crumbled in a glass of buttermilk as a dessert too...and that is actually fantastic.

[hill food]

I understand jw, we laugh because they made these out of a combination of love/frustration/limitations/ but never spite. (I was also subjected to the fruit, miracle whip (not mayo) and cool whip combo - never understood that one)

[Sparkina]

About that fruit-cool-whip-mayonnaise/miracle whip dish . . . of mayonnaise, I'm not a fan, but use Fage yogurt instead of the mayo or miracle whip, and then you'd have something going

[RavenWilde]

Sounds like what your co-worker was trying to make was Ambrosia, which is made with Fruit Cocktail, shredded coconut and cool whip, but the crumbled bread part I have never heard of. I make mine with Pineapple Chunks, Mandarin Oranges and Very Cherry Fruit Cocktail, Cream of Coconut and Cool Whip. You can make it with fresh fruit of any kind. I never liked the little pieces of coconut so I use the creme Of Coconut instead, adds a creamy consistency as well as the coconut taste!

[berbadeerface]

My grandmother used to cook the most awful things most of the time. The only thing she cooked that I actually liked, was something she called Country Captain Chicken. The funny thing is I always gave her credit for inventing it, but a quick search on Wiki gives me this, and it's the exact same thing I remember from 20 years ago!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_...

Funny that it says the recipe originated in Philly, because that's where she was from...

[bluecatbeads]

I can't say that Mom had too many weird/horrible recipes. But she did have one that I've never seen anywhere else "Lunch Meat with B-B-Q Sauce". It's quick and really tasty:

1/2 cup chopped onion
2 tbsp butter
1 cup catsup
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup water
3 tbsp vinegar
1 tbsp prepared mustard
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
10 oz. can luncheon meat cut into strips (Spam is much tastier than the Treet that we usually got. Now I use Spam Lite).

Sauté onions in butter, then add remaining ingredients. Simmer luncheon meat in sauce for 15 minutes. Serve with rice or noodles. For noodles we usually used egg noodles.

[pharmnerd]

Canned corned beef tacos. No other types of meat, just Hormel or Hereford in our house. I thought it was normal.

[hill food]

ok I think we have a short list and it's been a tight race for all contestants.

bluecatbeads vs. pharmnerd

both sound unexcusably vile.

[Caffeine826]

My mother is an amazing cook and baker, but there were some, ah, interesting things that she made. To her credit, she's stopped making these.
1) A "salad" made with one leaf of iceberg lettuce, a canned pineapple ring, a dollop of Miracle Whip, a sprinkling of grated cheddar cheese, topped with a maraschino cherry. I'm 25, and she made this pretty much until I graduated high school.
2) "Chicken Tetrazzini"- Overcooked spaghetti, cream of mushroom soup, dry shredded chicken breasts, and cheddar cheese. I still won't try making the real thing, because I'm afraid it will taste like my mom's.
3) We never had real spaghetti- for some reason, my dad liked his (Kansan) grandmother's recipe, which was sweet and sour, and not actually that tomato-y. Ew. Is it any wonder that I crave Marcella Hazan's tomato sauce constantly?
4) Waldorf salad made with mushy apples and Miracle Whip. I didn't discover Hellman's until I was in high school and started cooking. Needless to say, I haven't bought a jar of MIracle Whip since I left home.
5) Ham steaks with canned pineapple and melted swiss cheese.

Sometimes, when I'm in the grocery store, not buying cream of mushroom soup or Miracle Whip, I'm overcome with gratitude that I am an adult and in total control of what we have for dinner.

[alkapal]

caffeine, my mom's "salad" also included a scoop of cottage cheese, and mayo instead of miracle whip.

[bythebayov]

I feel you my friend, I love the fact that I am now in control of what I put in my mouth and in my cart! My mom wasn't the worlds worst cook but I did learn to cook for myself at an early age for a reason! ahhh freedom, you gotta give for what you take yah yah.....

[Cinnamon]

I too have had Miracle Whip Waldorf. Which is pretty much why I don't do Waldorf. Although... once in Vegas at a conference when I had to stay at a midrange hotel on the strip, the buffet had the most marvelous, light, but probably involving nondairy, Waldorf with some fluffy whipped-creamness. No trace of sour. It seemed realllllly retro but I could see getting a craving for it and trying to experiment it back into existence.

I've gotta say here too, while it's not because of mom's cooking per se (she made some great things!), I'm so tired of middling American concoctions that I've been on a jag of exploring fruits, veggies and cuisine that are all just not reminiscent of what I've had around the nation all these years. So not much in the way of peas/corn/asparagus/etc., more green-papaya/water-chestnuts/long-beans/dragonfruit, etc., when and where available for not a lot of $. It's easier here in L.A., but so far I'm enjoying the dissociation. Fine to go try the occasional artisanal restaurant that uses beautifully fresh U.S. produce in terrific recipes - so you get to taste corn in an exalted state, for instance - but just over the run-of-the-mill presentations - you know, the canned/frozen/food-service approach.

[Caffeine826]

While I do love middling American concoctions (Miracle Whip aside), it's amazing how the availability of interesting produce/"ethnic" ingredients has just exploded in the last ten years (if that long). I think that's one of the big differences between how we (collectively) cook and how our moms cooked- we have access to things like chipotle peppers, fish sauce, coconut milk, bok choy, etc., etc. It does make me wonder if my future children are going to be talking about how gross their mom's tortilla lime soup or whatever is....

[rudeboy]

I like this post - I'm wondering how my one-year old daughter will think of some of my "concoctions" in the future. I'm training her right, though...she tries all sorts of things - sopresetta, gorganzola, fish sauce, etc. and chipotles. Ten years ago, many things were not accessible here....

[Bigley9]

As long as you aren't combining those ingredients I'd bet you'll fare well

[precia]

My mother was and continues to be a terrible cook. Not only does she shortcut recipes into disrepair, she is incredibly cheap about it, too. Some people have mentioned shortcuts along the lines of using garlic powder instead of cloves, and I wish that was the worst she'd ever done. For a few months, she decided to follow specific menus in a diet book - I don't think we ever ate that well. Stuffed zucchini, a delicious white chili, French onion soup paired with a small steak... It was great until she started to loop back through the menus and make things easier. She made the onion soup no problem, but decided that instead of making a steak, she'd dump a comparable amount of BROWNED GROUND BEEF into the soup. Into delicious light French onion soup. I have no idea what she did to that white chili, but it was just flat out awful the next time we had it. If we ever liked any new recipe, we knew we'd never see it again, at least not in that same form.

She was also a cook of great quantity. One summer of my childhood was marked by a blended cauliflower soup. Huge vats that the rest of us refused to touch. It was quickly nicknamed baby poop soup, but she kept blending and cooking and eating. One of the last incidents before I moved out was a giant bag of broccoli, steamed to mush (as with all veggies) and put in the fridge for future eating. Maybe about a week later, a vile smell started leaking from the fridge. Her largest mixing bowl was in there, half full of slowly decomposing broccoli. She always buys in quantity because the unit price is less, but ends up throwing so much away because cooking in quantity doesn't really work out to the same value. Of course sometimes she'll refuse to toss it and just keeps on eating. I once caught her pulling a much expired yogurt [the foil lid was puffed and everything] from the garbage. She claimed that she was planning on "checking" it later to see if it was ok, but everyone knew she'd just eat it regardless.

We did see a lot of the canned cream of soup recipes, and they were the most edible things around. The chicken with gravy (cooked in the big electric skillet with slightly watered cream of chicken soup) was pretty good, but I'd never make it myself. OTOH, I keep several cans of cream of mushroom soup in the pantry and sometimes whip up a batch of tuna casserole. Quick, cheap, and helps me keep up with my pledge to get more fish into my diet.

One of my aunts makes a Waldorf salad every holiday, but with lemon jello instead of mayo/miracle whip. Not something you eat a huge bowl of, but a little bit on the side of the plate is very worthy. Not too sweet and very refreshing between all that turkey and stuffing. I can't imagine Christmas without it.

[hill food]

yeah...

memories.

[alkapal]

but they ain't "misty, water-colored," though.

[hill food]

actually that describes my mom's stew, although maybe "watery, misty-colored" is more accurate.

[Cinnamon]

Yikes!

[danhole]

Alkapal,

Re-reading this, I was curious about your Moms boiled potatoes with mayo. What was that like and how did she do it?

Dani

[alkapal]

it's really the simplest thing, dani. she is not really cooking anymore, but here's what she did. peel ** and boil in salted water plain white potatoes, quartered lengthwise. then, when served, the individual dollops a tablespoon of mayo on/beside the potatoes on his plate. (as he eats the kraut & meatballs, he may take a bite of the potato, with a dab of mayo).
the combination of the silky mayo, with the savory juices of the meatballs and kraut, absorbed and foiled by the potato, is delicious.

naysayers, just hold your nays until you've actually tried this with my porcupine meatballs and sauerkraut recipe. ;-) http://www.chow.com/recipes/13527

** i just got a call from mom (bless her heart) while i was finishing this post, so i read over my response, and mom clarified that if the potatoes are old, peel 'em, if they're new, don't peel 'em. she was surprised when i told her i am putting some of her recipes -- and family stories -- out on the world wide web!!! (she is 87 years old, so it's really more of an intellectual concept, than something she can actually visualize) ;-)).

[hill food]

that's actually not too weird (ok I've never had porcupine), some methods are roasted and some are boiled, (granted the mayo is usu. homemade and infused with garlic or paprika, but...)

I'd eat it.

[alkapal]

hill food, i don't know if you were being funny, but you'll see that no porcupines are harmed in the making of the "porcupine" meatballs. the "porcupine" aspect is from the rice in the meatballs.

and....i think it is in germany that mayonnaise is served with potatoes -- maybe not. (i know it's served with pommes frites). what's the origin of southern style mayo-laced potato salad?

maybe "mayo with potato?" is a new thread in the making! ;-).

[hill food]

sorry took you literally about the porcupine.

mayo and potatoes is a classic all across most of Europe. it's only here in the US one gets weird looks.

[MazDee]

I don't remember if it was my grandma or great grandma that made porcupine balls, but I loved them. Ours were in a whitish gravy that may have been cream of mushroom soup. I always thought they were called porcupines because the balls were rolled in rice, but now I don't see how that could be! You couldn't brown them that way. I will try your recipe, but the tomato soup part kind of turns me off. We will see.
My mother always worked full-time and didn't like to cook. We had decent food, none of it weird that I recall, but mostly not too inspired either. She did a few things that were awesome good. Floating Island "pudding" for some special occasions, with an absolutely perfect custard. A peanut butter concoction that was pbutter, butter (probably marg, since we only got real butter when we had company), honey and raisins mixed together in the "Mixmaster" for our sans or toast. Some kind of quick dessert that consisted of white bread coated with sweetened condensed milk, topped with coconut and baked or broiled. Boy, was that good! For parties, she would make that ribbon sandwich that has layers of avocado, cream cheese, olives, deviled ham, I don't remember what but each layer was a different color. My brother and I still talk about that one. I miss my mom! And, glad this thread is still going!

[alkapal]

maz dee, you wrote "the tomato soup part kind of turns me off."

what about it turns you off? it works great in the overall dish.

[MazDee]

Just that I loved that creamy non-tomato version I recall from my childhood, I guess! But I agree that the tomato would go nicely with your saurkraut version. I really am going to try it.

[RavenWilde]

Southern Potato Salad, one of my favs.. But some people also put Mustard in it which I despise! My Mom made great Potato Salad, Potatoes, Hard Boiled Eggs, Chopped onion, Mayo, Salt and Pepper. I revised her recipe and use Red Potatoes with the skins on, Hard Boiled Eggs, Chopped Red Onion, Kraft Real Mayo, Garlic Salt, Salt , Pepper, and a generous squirt of a good Ranch Dressing! (I use Kraft or Ken's) I like sweet relish in mine but since no one else does I usually make a small bowl with relish for myself. Every time I go to one friends house she begs me to make her some of my Potato Salad!
Mom always mixed her with her hands, and now I do the same thing. After it's mixed I get to lick my fingers! LOL

[alkapal]

hand mixing helps to preserve the cut potatoes' integrity, if one uses a very light "hand." ;-).

have you tried marzetti's classic ranch dressing (the chilled dressing, not the shelf-stable one)? it's the one i like the best, if i haven't made my own (which is the best, using mayo and buttermilk).

[DragonLady2000]

I love Miracle Whip and my mom made ham salad with it, and she would grind the bologna and sweet pickle relish. I don't remember mom buying mayo.

I love cream cheese on toast or crackers with jelly. We usually had that after the holidays when we ran out of banana bread to put it on.

We used to have homemade mac & cheese and my dad usually have whole tomatoes cold from the fridge that mom squished on top; it was very good.

I can't eat food that has tomato soup in it except grilled cheese sandwiches & tomato soup is great. My mom used to make homemade waffles and when we had a lot leftover we ate them with a can of mushroom soup poured on top. She did the same after Thanksgiving, turkey gravy over waffles.

A girl friend started me eating spaghetti sandwiches-buttered white bread with spaghetti in the middle. I never saw spaghetti put on the table and then the sauce on each plate until I was at her house for dinner. My mom always mixed it together before putting it on the table.

My mom was Italian and my dad was German but they grew up in a neighborhood in Western PA in the 20's with a lot of different ethnic foods so I am not sure what comes from where. Mom made Pigs In A Blanket (Cabbage Rolls) and lots of people call those hot dogs wrapped in a dinner roll that. I didn't have a taco until I was 16 in the mid-70's from people who lived in Spain and in the Southern states as Taco Bell was not around in Ohio until the mid-80's. I still don't see the big deal about wings and ribs. We raised our own cows, pigs, chickens and turkeys and among having a garden. I had mom bake me a cow toungue one time but I was the only one that would eat it-dad was trying to gross me out. It tasted and looked just like a beef roast.

[redviper]

I love my mom to bits, but I'm a WAY better cook than her.

I taught her that you really, really, REALLY need to brown beef before using it in beef stew. She called me shortly afterwards and said "Honey, you won't believe it - it looked and tasted like beef stew!"

Yes, Mom. That's why.

To be fair, she turned me onto quinoa in 2002 and recently gave me organic unpasteurized buckwheat honey from a small farm in Gettysburg, Pa....so I think the lesson here is that anyone can keep learning and improving.

[capeanne]

My Mom's best friend ( who must be gone 30 years now) was the worlds worst cook. My Mom made lasagnas, corn chowder etc and brought it to Alice who passed it off to her husband Eddie as her own for many years. She tried to cook a few times several of which are memorable,. My Mom would walk her thru recipes . Making a turkey my Mom emphasised being sure the cavity was clean and sure enough Alice used SOS pads. Making a simple white frosting she reached for the vanilla and poured in Kitchen Bouquet instead ( brown, liquid and in a small bottle..) . Eddie beiieved she made the best beef stew until he took out the trash one night and the Dinty Moore cans that had been squirreled away for months all tumbled out..some of us just don't have the gift but she was a good soul

[goodgirl]

When I was newly married and immersed in a Ukrainian culture I was amazed at the culinary inventiveness. One day my husband said he was going to make "buttermilk and potatoes." Ack! But it was super: fry thin and thick and different sizes of potatoes and onion diced. Get it very browned then put into a soup bowl and pour cold buttermilk over. Think of a baked potato with sour cream and multiply the satisfaction of that by at least a 2 digit number.

Another one: fried bologna. OMG. But, again it turned out to be good. Quarter a bunch of slices of bologna, fry til quite brown, then toss in minced onions to taste, stir around for a few minutes, then stir in a can or 2 of cream of tomato soup. When nice and hot, pour over mashed potatoes.

[smalt]

smile. we used to have fried bologna sandwiches with ketchup when i was growing up. or tossed in with tomato sauce & noodles.

[hill food]

Ukrainian? I thought it was a German thing - guess fried bologna or sausage in general is sort of universal. we'd just put it on bread, no need for any condiment with the grease expressed. but yeah try to sell it to the uninitiated...

the buttermilk potatoes sounds like a nice variant on Vichysoisse. (which I've been thinking about a lot lately)

[jenisnotacook]

These stories are funny! We always ate Kraft American Singles on white Wonder Bread with Miracle Whip - which we knew only as mayo, and called it that - I thought Miracle Whip was a brand of mayo until I tasted real mayo. I still don't eat real mayo. Typical dinners were canned Campbell's Soup and a grilled cheese sandwich; homemade pizza - still a favorite with my brothers and I; she makes "fried chicken" with boneless, skinless chicken breats dipped in spiced flour and then fried in the skillet - my southern husband was utterly confused by the lack of skin and bones... haha! She makes an awesome dessert we call "cheesecake" - with cream cheese and lime green jello - no baking required - it is amazing, better than regular cheesecake I think. She also would make us homemade frosting to spread on graham crackers as a snack, something she called Spanish rice that was just white rice, A LOT of tomato sauce with browned ground beef and chili powder; hot dogs or Spam with mac and cheese and sauerkraut as a sidedish.... And her meatloaf is actually not in a loaf, its a patty and it is dry so that we could put my grandma's homemade vegetable soup on top and it would soak up the juice. And we would always have cucumbers cut up in vinegar during the summer. My grandma liked to add sliced onions to hers... My husband doesn't understand a lot of what we eat, it makes me feel like a freak sometimes! lol! He's from the south and wants steak and chicken all the time, anything with BBQ sauce, and loves deviled eggs! It was our first Thanksgiving last year and you should have seen his sad little face when we got there and there weren't any deviled eggs - which seemed weird to our family. So now I am the official deviled egg of the family. But I changed that to be my own too; I didn't have any paprika the first time I made them for him, so I sprinkled cayenne pepper on top instead. It is pretty good!

[alkapal]

cukes in vinegar...bingo!

you should see the deviled egg thread....lots of great ideas!

jenmaylearntobeacook!

[Passadumkeg]

My Russian immigrant grand mother used to make verischaka just before lent; a blini covered w/ lamb, veal, beef, pork chunks in a rich gravy. I haven't had it since the 60's.
Mom's veal roast stuffed w/ prunes.
Dad, the creative sandwich maker.

[googletrickedme]

Mom: vegetarian boxed chili. Just about the only thing I could stand eating as a kid!

Dad: Friday whitefish casserole topped with canned crabmeat and ritz crackers. LOVED this--mostly for the canned crabmeat and ritz topping.

[lrohner]

Good Lord, my mother (God rest her soul) was THE worst cook in the world! Unfortunately she preferred all meats, poultry and seafood to be blackened -- and I don't mean with spices. I mean charred. And she loved her cast iron skillet, and would use it religiously to cook leftovers (pre-microwave days). Let's say there was leftover pork chops, mashed potatoes and peas in the fridge. She would put them altogether in the skillet (not mixed together), pour in some water, cover it and walk away. So it wasn't bad enough that we had to eat charred food. Now we had to eat soggy charred food!

My sister and I went to a Catholic elementary school and they didn't have a cafeteria so we had to bring lunch every day. My mother actually bought a book of "365 Sandwiches" and decided to make them all for us. Imagine my surprise thinking I was getting ready to bit into a peanut butter sandwich and it turned out to be a "Mashed Baked Bean Sandwich". BLECH! I also remember the April Fool's Day where she packed us fake cheese sandwiches made out of foam. Funny Mom. But she forgot to send us a real lunch!

But probably the strangest was her love of tomato juice. For holidays or when we had company over, we always had a first course (served quite elegantly) of shooters of tomato juice. Huh?

[hill food]

make the shot a sort of gazpacho and I'm with her on that. but then it wouldn't be weird.

[alkapal]

i think tomato juice "cocktails" -- sans booze -- were popular as an "appetizer" in the '60s http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,161,1... .
i can picture this in a small juice glass in many cookbook photo spreads -- and in the real-life cafeteria lines all over the south.

[buttertart]

They were. We only ever had it at holiday meals when I was a kid. To make really fancy, a piece of lemon was put on the rim. Have no idea why, because I don't think it was particularly expensive (we lived in SW Ontario tomato country).

[LJS]

Thats so true: canned tomato juice was served with great style (and the essential slice of lemon) until very recently as a course all by itself. in the homes of my mum's friends..whats really funny is that until this moment it never occured to me to question 'why"...it was just so much a part of my growing up (in SW Ontario and Newfoundland). Why on earth would this have been considered a big treat worthy of being trotted out at holidays and parties?

[RavenWilde]

LOL.. I too had to endure the Hockey Puck Fried Pork Chops and Hamburgers, fried in the big Cast Iron Skillet! Although Mom's Fried Chicken made in the same Skillet was awesome!

[vorpal]

My mom is who inspired me to cook. When I reached the age of eight, I decided that I'd had enough of inch thick, eight inch wide pancakes, and I tried making my own, figuring that I could emulate Golden Griddle (yes, a sad influence) and make something better. By comparison, my first attempt was delicious and I was bit by the cooking bug.

Other gems from my mother's repertoire included:
* Raspberry pancakes of the above dimensions with no sugar added (so sour!)
* Roast chicken covered in Lipton onion soup mix
* Lemon chicken cooked in the microwave
* Mashed potatoes (made with red potatoes) with no salt or pepper, mashed into a lumpy paste with white margarine and skim milk (it took me years to realize that I didn't hate mashed potatoes)
* Vegetables of any type cooked to a soft mush
* Spaghetti sauce made from a can of sauce and a pack of hamburger, served with Kraft pre-grated parmesan
* Flavourless fried rice (the entire ingredient list consists of a little oil, 1 tbsp grocery store soy sauce to about 3 cups of rice, and some frozen veggies - I dreaded Asian food for years)
* Crepes with blueberries and Cool Whip (an acutal dinner - we loved them and would eat about six of them each)
* Chicken coated in broken up Ritz crackers and baked on a cookie sheet (they taste salty and aluminum, all in one go)
* Boiled potatoes (again no salt or pepper), served with margarine
* One of those ugly pink boneless hams wrapped in plastic and a can's worth of pineapple rings toothpicked to it (I thought for years that I hated pineapples)
* Fried eggs cooked until you could write on a chalkboard with the yolk
* Her "french fries" were old, old potatoes, cut into strips and then baked on a cookie sheet with about 1/8" of oil covering the bottom of it. (My mother still has a terrible fear of and aversion to deep frying and detests the fact that I like to deep fry many things - I am constantly nagged over this over the phone.) Actually, to this day, I still like potatoes made in this way, although I found you have to cook them at a much higher temperature than she did to get them to turn out well.

I also thought that whipped cream = Cool Whip and mayonnaise = Dream Whip until I was about 22.

I love my mom dearly. Her cooking, on the other hand, not so much. It took me about two years after I left home to realize that I wasn't a picky eater... I just didn't care for most things the way mom cooked them. I'm still getting over certain things, too... I'm convinced I hate scallopped potatoes, but then it occurs to me that I haven't eaten one since I was 16 and living with mom and dad.

[hill food]

yeah for a long time I thought I had an eating disorder.

I do like chicken marinaded in Good Seasons salad dressing and grilled or baked, but I do it at a different temp (not setting off the smoke alarm and not resulting in raw interior).

where does the fear of temperature and method come from?

[Soyabean]

For Sunday lunch, my mom would make a variety of things, that never 'go' with each other, for example she would make chicken curry, potatoe salad, garlic sauce, chow mein and roast beef. She cooked all this with the thought that she would not have to cook during the week.
Little did she realise that her greedy kids (my brother and I) would pile a bit of everything onto our plate. But the combinations worked well, eg the chicken curry tasted lovely with a bit of potatoe salad mixed in!!

[LJS]

Oh gosh, I just remembered "dessert suppers"! When my Dad was out of town on business, especially if it was a Friday night, my mum would spread the car rug on the living room floor, turn the TV on while we ate (an unheardof treat) and lay out a picnic, dessert-only supper.

There would be fruit cocktail and we had to drink our milk (everyone knew that milk prevented everything it couldn't cure in those days).

But other than that, it was a meal composed soley of dessert things: a brownie, junket rennet custard and jello with chilled evaporated milk whipped in it in a graham-crumb crust... all featured prominently.

My mum has been gone for 3 years now and she was 90 when she died. I did have a chance to thank her for her imaginative approach to life. She was a terrible cook and she knew it, but she loved a party and made everyday things into events every chance she got!

I phoned my daughter the other day (who grew up with her nana, my mum) and they were having a special dinner...it was "Doggy Got His Tags" Day...good genes that kid has!

[Pixie Muse]

No matter how hard I try, she murmurs how it's not good enough. When I bake, eh, it's too sweet. When I marinade, eh, it's too fat. When I just leave it alone, eh it’s too bland.

But there was a time when I showed up with osso bucco, which had been floured and fried ever so lightly and then cooked in a delectable blend of wine, lemon, bay leaves and fresh finocchio which savoured the dish with anise-laced overtones. Well, well, she looked at me and said in her northern Italian accent "You maka dis?" Yes, that was a compliment.

[debbthebee]

This is actually a scary story about Turkey Day at my grandmother's house. Not to speak ill of the dead but she used to prep her big, 25lb. Turkeys a day or 2 beforehand including loading lots of stuffing into the birds. Then into the fridge the whole bacteria culture went until it was ready to cook then and grace our Thanksgiving table. I think that the only reason noone ever seemed to get sick was that she was the queen of the sterile household. All the same this story always triggers my gag reflex a tad.

[hill food]

reminds one of the character in The Accidental Tourist who cooks the turkey at something like 180 degrees for 12 hours...

[gexx]

Leftover Stew
EEEEW! It was sooo gross on so many levels.

Whatever was left over from dinner would go in the fridge. Unlike a normal family, we were not allowed to eat the leftovers. Instead, they would pile up for about a month (my reasoning for why I am immune to food poisoning) and then my mother would take her big stock pot, put in a 32 oz can of diced tomatoes, 2 huge onions (chopped and raw), and every single leftover in the fridge. Spaghetti and sauce, pork chops, mashed potatoes, baked chicken, ham, mac and cheese (Kraft, of course), greenbeans, peas, toast, brocolli, and more.

It was so disgusting, but it was the only thing she would serve until it was gone, so it normally lasted about a week. My father would never come home for dinner, meaning my brother and I had to eat more of it ourselves.

[The Professor]

Yow.
I think we have a winner here.

I am very open minded and adventurous when it comes to food. But this one really sounds like a mess.
Glad you survived Mom's mystery stew.

I think this dish would even make me long for some chicken sashimi. LOL.

[LolaP]

Holy crap. That is amazing.

[miss_habibi]

Sounds epic indeed. Your country should award you a medal. Yuck haha.

[sonia darrow]

Wow. I've always been a fan of leftover soup, but not like that.

[chicgail]

You win, gexx. That's a full-fledged gag story.

[kurisu10]

My mother was one of the few women in my family that just didn't have the genes for cooking. She had basic know-how, but unfortunately not the love or passion that my grandmother, aunt, or I seem to have. -_- Let alone taste buds. My mother made 'basics' that just weren't basic. Whereas my grandmother made the normal home-style meatloaf with the ketchup topping, cooked veggies on the inside, my mother just diced up onion and garlic, sometimes a bell pepper, mix it into some ground beef, put it in a casserole dish and covered it with velveeta or kraft singles. I used to hate it. It was the kind of meatloaf that wasn't even good on a sandwich IMO. At one point she told me she put pineapple in it, and she might have, ONCE... but mostly I think it was to get my brother and I to eat the giant chopped onions that weren't cooked enough.

The other odd concoction my mother made was the never ending chili-pasta... It had two versions. Her actual chili, which used a 2-alarm base and everything in her pantry... or the tomato, salsa, italian soup SOMETHING that mutated after 4 days of her trying to turn it into something it could never be...good. Every day, she'd take the same tomato pasta spicy soup (which tasted like a jar of salsa, some pasta salad, and minestrone combined and each day add something else, telling me, "IT GETS BETTER EVERY DAY!" The next day it was a jar of rotel, after that, a can of mushrooms and more cumin. It was radio-active by the 4th day, when she realized my little brother and I hadn't eaten in 2 days because it SUCKED HORRIBLY...

Perhaps she just lacks the ability to understand cooking, period. I've explained the concept of brining to her. My grandmother and I discussed this once before in front of her, and i was talking about a kosher salt/brown sugar brine for pork and chicken. My mother interrupts with, "Oh I know about brining. I do all of mine with sugar." And both her mother and her daughter had to explain that she was just soaking it in sugar water, not actually brining anything...

In her defense she could produce some good dishes on thanksgiving... but they're mostly tried and true recipes from other aunts, or a southern living cook book. I think the years of smoking and nicorette gum have dulled her tastebuds though, as she has been known to dump mountains of pepper and other spices into her food. (I drew the line when it came to sage however.)

Yes, my mother's food sucked, horribly.

[alkapal]

>>>>>Every day, she'd take the same tomato pasta spicy soup (which tasted like a jar of salsa, some pasta salad, and minestrone combined and each day add something else, telling me, "IT GETS BETTER EVERY DAY!" The next day it was a jar of rotel, after that, a can of mushrooms and more cumin. It was radio-active by the 4th day, when she realized my little brother and I hadn't eaten in 2 days because it SUCKED HORRIBLY...<<<<
~~~~~~~
that made me laugh out loud -- i can't say that i've never made an "evolving" dish. ;-)).

[atandt]

I love this thread and I love my mama! I have an immigrant mother too - she got here in the 70's from India. She is actually an amazing cook, my family and friends always talk about her delicious food. Growing up we would ask for 'American' food, and while she is actually quite adept at replicating those tastes, I guess occasionally she felt they were way too bland and she made her own concoctions by adding millions of spices to recipes that didn't ask for them. Her crazy hot Indian-spiced spaghetti sauce, fried chicken and meatloaf were actually awesome, as were chicken curry and keema curry grilled sandwiches (made in those sandwich presses - pre-panini popularity). I was not a big fan of her improvised 'tartar' sauce for fried shrimp, however: ketchup mixed with mayonnaise. I can't recall other misses at the moment, but there were certainly some flops.

[hill food]

atandt: I'm jealous, I wish my mom's "experimentation" went more the way of yours.

[nomadchowwoman]

What a walk down memory lane! While I consider my mom a terrific cook, especially of Italian dishes, but lots of other things as well, this thread reminds me that she was indeed a product of her generation (married late 50s, raising kids in 60s & 70s)--and not the part that was trying to "Master the Art of French Cooking" with Julia Child.
--Jello w/fruit and Cool Whip--and does anyone remember those gagatrocious Jello desserts that would separate into three layers--jelly, creamy, and something in between as they set?
--Macaroni salad: elbow macaroni, thick-sliced celery, Miracle Whip
--"Spanish" rice: white rice with a can of tomato sauce
--Open-face beef "dinner": boil-in-bag chipped beef over sliced white bread, untoasted
--Potato "pancakes": leftover mashed potatoes, shaped into patties and fried
--Celery stalks "stuffed" w/peanut butter
--Fried (packaged) lunch meat and "baloney"

But it was really an aunt who sent me fleeing in terror from her kitchen. My cousin always wanted me to stay for dinner, but I always made sure my mom picked me up before dinner. (Once I got older, Mom told me she always knew why I was so eager to separate myself from my best friend-cousin and get home!)
Proving that family food favorites are often more about love than food, my cousin's all-time favorites from Aunt's kitchen: "weenie" spaghetti (yep, sliced hot dogs in a tomato "sauce" that seemed more like thinned canned tomato soup) and potato stew (potatoes cooked to death in a light roux w/canned peas served over rice). But one of her concoctions that she often brought to family dinners, I actually loved--pork shoulder cooked with lots of garlic and chunks of sweet potato; it was very greasy but delicious. One time she decided to "doctor it up" w/ canned black beans and pineapple chunks. Not so good.

[Andria]

Both my parents were great cooks, but looking back now, I have to wonder... what were they thinking?

School days, we came down for breakfast where Dad had placed three chocolate chips in a bowl and poured milk over top. By the time we got there, the cookies were soft enough to stir into a porridge-like consistency.

The morning after slumber parties, my friends were treated to our family's Sunday breakfast special: fried hamburgers with fried onions... and the buns had to be buttered and fired too. Imagine my horror when I went to other girls homes and their parents served us eggs, toast, and that dreaded full glass of whole milk.

While other kids brought bologna or ham sandwiches to school, my brother and I had smoked oysters and mayo on slightly toasted white bread.

Toasted peanut butter and melted butter sandwiches still bring me back to my youth.

[hill food]

I'm again jealous!

[Andria]

Was it the cookie porridge or the greasy burgers for breakfast? Perhaps you are envious of my smelly school lunch?

[Chinamerican]

Good gravy, I love reading about what people eat since I'm a 2nd gen Chinese immigrant that ate mostly Chinese food growing up.

My father played many roles in the restaurant industry in NYC, as did his brothers in the late 70s, 80s, and into the 90s so he LOVED to cook. My mother was decent but I really didn't like her cooking much. Some of my least favourite things included:

1) Homemade dumplings - I think she used only pork in them and didn't spice them enough. The skins were also WAY too thick, probably due to the fact she didn't have a proper, weighted rolling pin. The result was a bland, scratchy meat pocket in soy sauce. It wasn't until later in life that we all discovered better alternatives for dipping (e.g. maggi, black vinegar, etc.).

2) Elbow macaroni in chicken broth - my brother loved this to the point, that when he was about 4, he grabbed a hot bowl of it and gave himself severe burns to his nether regions. Again, it was usually strips of dry scratchy pork that was not marinated well. You'd think I'd have an aversion to pork right now but I don't. Macaroni elbows in broth is actually a popular thing among Cantonese/HK-ers I believe b/c she'd order that for me at Chinese cafes and I still disliked it.

3) Spaghetti in meat sauce - not that I have a problem w/ this b/c I learned to make it on my own but Cantonese people seem to really hate sour tastes (e.g. tomatoes, sour candy). The obvious solution to this adding sugar to counteract the acidity but it didn't sit right in the jar sauce we got. They would make the meat, drain it of oil, then dump a jar of sauce in there with a few heaping spoonfuls of sugar.

4) Steamed cake - my mother couldn't bake. I'm not quite sure she knows how to operate an oven actually. This did not stop her from making a horrible, dry, tasteless yellow cake in a shallow dish by steaming it in a wok. I don't think it had any yeast in it since it didn't rise much but I do remember her mentioning baking powder. It was more like rough peasant bread made with bourgie ingredients than actual cake.

One weird thing we did do in our family, which I absolutely love to this day, is spreading condensed milk on toast. I think it was because we would open a can of it to make milk tea but we could only drink so much of it. It has to be on white bread since my parents refuse to eat wheat bread (it reminds them too much of when they were poor). Sometimes I get another slice and spread Yeo's brand coconut jam (it's bright orange and comes out of a can) and make a sandwich out of it.

I don't know if it's an east coast thing but I've eaten bagels with cream cheese and jam/jelly. It sounds very much like a variation on Russian blini/crepes with sour cream and raspberry jam (seeds in please!).

[Andria]

We also do the bagel/cream cheese/jam combo. But, the very best way to combine cream cheese & jam is on thick sliced bread, then dip the sandwich in French toast batter & fry!

[Bigley9]

We'd have cream cheese and jelly on bagels or white bread , and at "Happy Hour" on Sundays we kids would have cream cheese and jelly on crackers as our hors d'oeuvers (with cranberry juice "wine" in little apperitif glasses)

[biondanonima]

Funny that you mention condensed milk on toast. I remember when I was a kid, I went to girl scout camp, and one of the fun campfire things we made (in addition to smores and such) was thick cubes of white bread, soaked in (slightly thinned) sweetened condensed milk, skewered and roasted over the fire. Totally random but DELICIOUS.

[foiegras]

Campfire Girls made something similar that was fabulous when you were outside and starving ... hot dog buns halved and soaked in condensed milk, rolled in sweet coconut and roasted over the fire.

[Meann]

A can of sweetened condensed milk, plopped into a pot of boiling water and allowed to caramelize over hours. Then spread on saltines. My mother's idea of cheap luxury.

She was right.

[ChristinaMason]

dulce de leche. :) i hope she cut vents in the top of the can!

[Teri Davis Newman]

My mother couldn't cook worth a flip but my Dad is a great southern cook! Country fried steak with cream gravy and mashed potatoes, a good rare steak and my favorite which was pre-buttered biscuits. Dad would make biscuits and as soon as he pulled them out of the oven he would tear them open and toss in a pat of butter and slam the biscuit shut. When we ate them, they were warm with drippy melted butter oozing out of them--and I got in the habit of doing the same thing with my husband and his kids, so "pre-buttered" biscuits are a tradition. Dad taught me how to cook the basics and my mother's mother was a GREAT cook and I have her cookbook with recipes written in her hand. The funniest thing is that I got a book called "The Best Recipes From the Backs of Cans, Bottles and Jars" and it's hilarious how many of them are in my grandma's handwriting in her book! I guess she copied in the ones she tried and liked! When my cousin called me for Grandma's chocolate chip cookie recipe, she told me that grandma had told her that she used the one on the toll house chip bag but that my cousin didn't believe that was the recipe. I had to burst her bubble--it was EXACTLY the recipe Grandma used! LOL

[ChristinaMason]

:)

[hill food]

sweet. I know some think we're being snobs, but I get an overwhelming feel of affection.

[kitINstLOUIS]

Okay, I'm from St. Louis and I don't think anyone else has posted this way of making chili because I actually did a search for the phrase "chili brick" and didn't find it here. My mom wouldn't know cumin from cinnamon so she got all her chili spices from something frozen called "chili brick." Chili brick was complete with fat and meat and some tomato sauces, so theoretically, you just added beans. Thankfully, my mom also added a pound of ground beef, and used Brook's Chili Hot beans (which I haven't been successful at finding everywhere in the country). No onions, no garlic...and the gristle from the chili brick made you wonder whether you were chewing little erasers. I think Wendy's introduced me to more proper chili and I learned to make REAL chili with beans from scratch myself.

My poor mother would make the most awful 50s style convenience food you can imagine. Creamed beef on toast (again, no onions!), beef stew without herbs or extra broth flavored with ketchup, and of course, vegetables would be boiled into near-paste.

[The Professor]

Sounds dreadful, except for creamed beef on toast...nothing at all wrong with that. It's a great, tasty dish if it's made right.

[alkapal]

yep, sometimes i get a craving for the creamed beef on toast....
it's a comfort food.

[hill food]

I'm from STL and I have never heard of this - where did your mom find the brick? our version was just sort of a watery chili broth. which we had the other night (I'm back in the fold of the Motherlode thru mid December and may have to share more recipes) and believe me I understand the fear of spice. the fewer the better, they're just decorative for the shelf, right?

it was soft taco night Thursday and I found (relatively) dirt cheap avocados at MACE (79/ea. vs. a dollar or more back in DC) for fresh guac, which confused the heck out of them, but they went back for seconds.

[MandalayVA]

My mom was hugely fond of simmering meats in Campbell's cream of mushroom soup mixed with Lipton's dried onion soup mix, something my siblings and I still do (mm, pork chops). Overall she was a good cook--she made spaghetti sauce our Italian neighbors went insane for and half the neighborhood kids found a way to our house for dinner when she made fried chicken--but she did have a couple misses. She would make chicken or shrimp curry from a recipe that only called for 1/8 teaspoon of curry powder and serve it on top of white rice. Not attractive. Then there was the time she made homemade ravioli ... and stuffed them with salami. They were awful, even the dog wouldn't eat them. I was five years old at the time and I can still remember thirty-eight years later how disgusting they were. Mom's been gone for thirty years but if there's an afterlife I'm sure she's up there pissed off that we still tell the ravioli story!

[hill food]

like

[weewah]

That sounds like my Mom. She'd try an "exotic" (read: gross) recipe & then get pissed 'cause no-one liked it! We used to jump up and down when dad got to cook.
Every kid in the neighborhood would show up at our house for her pizza or doughnuts, though. Couldn't beat 'em. I guess your memory struck a nerve as she's been gone 30 years... Thanks for refreshing my memory : )

[sue423]

I appreciate much more all of the efforts my Mom made with cooking. I didn't believe that we had an ethic influence with our food but apparently she did some of the standard Lutheran Church influenced meals. She also must have lived in the south in a previous life. Homemade Fried chicken, french fries and a whole loaf of wheat toast is probably our all-time favorite. The more unusual was her corned beef casserole, which I absolutely love and my brother in law finds absolutely horrendous! One can corned beef, half a block of velveeta, can of cream of mushroom soup, and egg noodles topped off with potato chips for crunch! We also crave the homemade donuts she would make for us. Thanks for the blog -

[dkennedy]

I am only 1/3 of the way through reading, but I felt compelled to jump ahead to post, this is a very fun thread!!! I am feeling very grateful at this point that my mother did not make a lot of the dishes lamented over by other readers.

Here are some of her quirky dishes that I remember fondly:
Velveta cheese on toast (especially when I was sick)
Date nut bread on cream cheese
Chicken with 1890 sauce (as in the salad dressing)
Peanut butter chicken (don't ask, it was nasty!!)
Salmon cakes (I did not like these)
Keftes (jewish meatballs)
Borekas (savory pastries filled with spinach or potatoes)
Tons of jello (yuk)
Wonderful, elaborate, deli sandwiches

[Bigley9]

how were her Borekas - if you liked them I am jealous!

[dkennedy]

Delish! I think the ones I ate growing up were made by 2nd cousins and unrelated "Aunts" that were somehow connected to my family, only 700 times removed. My strongest memory associated with these pastries involves taking them on road trips and letting them heat up by placing them on the dash board with the sun beating down. May sound gross, but they were sooooo good!

[alkapal]

dk -- """Date nut bread on cream cheese"""

that's how i like to eat it, too! ;-). (i.e., lots of cream cheese on the bread). that was a signature baked item i made in high school. i wonder if i still have the recipe? hmmm.

[BamiaWruz]

Not my mom's, but my mother's story about her mother's waffle soup (leftover waffles cut into strips and thrown into soup/broth the next day) she always hated this dish.

My grandmother was the type to throw together some strange things. Sometimes good and sometimes not.

[EWSflash]

That really sounds strange to me.

The lady across the street used to make chili by cooking ground beef in Campbell's tomato soup. She was from Delaware, not Texas in case you hadn't guessed. Heck of a baker, though.

[BamiaWruz]

I recently heard that my grandma's mother in germany used to make the flat German pancakes and dry the leftovers out after cutting in thin strips (ie. tortilla soup?) then add them into a broth.
I figure this is where she probably got the idea for the leftover waffles in soup the next day but no one in the family looked forward to it.

[ChristinaMason]

What you're describing is a German dish called Frittatensuppe or Pfannekuchensuppe, which is actually pretty widespread in Bavaria and throughout Austria. It's beef consommé with thinly sliced crepes floating in it. It's delicious! Here's a photo: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid...

[Reed422]

My mom used to make pizza on white bread with american cheese and for pepperoni she would use salami.

[The Professor]

Salami is great on pizza.
After all, pepperoni is basically just another type of uncooked salami sausage anyhow....so it's all good.

[hill food]

NOOO!!

she changed her meatloaf method - no more round baking bowl, no more range of crusty to raw. actually puts ketchup and flavor on the top...

my childhood is forever lost.

[EWSflash]

At some point in the early '70s my mom started smoking pot- after that her cooking changed for the worse at times. Like the mac and cheese she made by putting down a layer of cooked macaroni, pouring some cream over it, layering it with sliced tomatoes, and puting the cheese on top. Bake a while and serve with the macaroni sitting in watery pink cream and not one single shred of cheese anywhere on the pasta, which by then was soggy and overcooked. She made it over and over again, too. Must have hit a munchie button with her because she was the only one who liked it.

The meatballs, on the other hand, were fabulous- about 1" across and there were millions of them, although dinner would often be late due to the complexity of forming all those meatballs.

[jeanmarieok]

EWS - HI-gh larious post!

[hill food]

in the 80's I also indulged and that sounds like something I would have loved (when not sidetracked by odd things in the spice cabinet or that pesky door that needs fixing and darnit, wait oh yeah, that sounds good)

[SpudPal]

I love this thread. My mom didn't cook much. Her version of spaghetti and meat sauce: overbrowned ground beef and a jar of Ragu. Also, she used to make me peanut butter and jelly French toast served with pancake syrup. It was kinda gross, kinda delicious. I may have given her the recipe from my WhimWham kids' activity and folklore book.

[melanemac]

I feed my son cream cheese and jelly sandwiches. He is allergic to peanut butter and just doesn't really like the texture of nut butters.

I remember growing up eating saltines with mayonnaise for a snack or peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches.
My aunt used to burn her sausage gravy, so we would eat biscuits and gravy with ketchup on top...I think my bap-paw started that tradition.

My husband's mom wasn't a cook; needless to say there were some interesting substitutions, such as the time she ran out of sour cream and used strawberry yogurt in the cornbread.

[Andria]

My mom makes her super-secret-easy-to-make-apple/biscotti/custard friendship cake for every special occasion. I haven't had any other birthday cake in years! In fact I would feel guilty suggesting anything else. Check out how she makes it here:

http://josephmallozzi.wordpress.com/2...

[alkapal]

padre pepe and stories of induced vomiting? hmmmm. well...the cakes sounded good.

ps your avatar reminds me of tim's "hidden" neighbor, wilson, on "home improvement."

[Emmie9999]

New to the forums, hello all!

My mother used to make corned beef hash that I thought was absolutely delicious. I forget when I noticed that every single ingredient, no matter what else was in the house, came from a can or a jar. I think it was when I was sent to the basement pantry one day for a can of potatoes, and remembered on my way back up the stairs that we had just bought a five pound bag of potatoes that day. All four of my grandparents were from Ireland, so although corned beef is more an American dish, the potatoes should have been a no-brainer, or a chopped onion (we bought those that day too)...but no, canned beef and potatoes, onion powder, salt and pepper. I must admit, when I had hash made with "real" corned beef and veggies, it tasted very strange. (delicious, but strange.)

A friend of mine when I was about four told my mother about peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches. We tried them...and ate them for months like that. I can't bring myself to try them again now. One day I will tell my mom about putting peanut butter on bread and topping it with whipped cream...yummmmm!

My husband's family talks about something called "mince", which I finally found out was small chopped onion, carrot and celery fried with ground beef. A year or two ago I found a recipe in a book by Frances Mayer for using old soup vegetables: chop the celery, carrots, and onion very fine, add a bit of garlic and parsely, saute in olive oil and serve it over spaghetti. My DH and I loved it, but when we told his family about it we got squeals. "EWWWWW! Mince is bad enough, but that is mince with no meat! ICK!!!!" I had to laugh at their reaction, it was just too funny.

Emmie

[mandycat]

Since my mother was a very good cook, whenever we had steak for dinner she made a classic and from-scratch Caesar salad -- garlic rubbed croutons, anchovies, raw egg, the works. Not so weird except that she always made a very large bowl of it so that after everyone was safely out of the house the next morning she could enjoy a late breakfast of cold steak and leftover salad. She liked the salad wilted as much as fresh but I think she set aside some of croutons the night before so they’d still have their crunch.

[_nemo_]

Oh, cream cheese and jelly sandwiches! I'm going to have to have one this weekend. I loved them lots more than PB&J.
My mom was a great cook but she would make this one dish she called Polish Spaghetti. It was spaghetti baked with green peppers (ugh), tomato juice or tomato soup, I can't remember which, some american cheese and sauteed ground beef or little meatballs. I would smell that cooking and just want to cry, it was awful. I probably wouldn't have hated it so much if the green peppers weren't included.

[EWSflash]

Mandycat, that sounds like heaven to me!
My mom's culinary epiphany happened when she moved from small-town Illinois to LA. Her first Caesar salad was something she never forgot, although oddly enough, as much trouble as she went to to put great meals together, she never made a Caesar herself. It wasn't until I read your post that it occurred to me to wonder why not. Hmm.

[doughartyc]

my mom was a great cook....for the 60s, when everything was related to Kraft products. My least favorite was this disgusting salad she made all the time: lime jello with prepackaged coleslaw mix on it, served with a dollop of mayo! why oh why???
my grandmas weird sister 'aunt gert' was NOTORIOUS in our family for her cakes. somewhere she came up with oversized cake pans that took a whole box of mix per pan. then she would ice it up, and top it with coconut, choc chips, jujubes, sprinkles, colored sugar etc. she was a pistol--a former burlesque dancer who ballooned up to 300 lbs and always wore a boa. Ya gotta love that. All my family is gone now, but all my friends know just what i mean when i say=reminds me of an aunt gert cake! my grandmas legacy that i still crave on occasion is a peanut butter and pickle sandwich. gotta be chunky peanut butter, and bread and butter pickles on toasted bread---delicious!

[buttertart]

Great story. Everybody should have an Aunt Gert. Mine was an Aunt Erie. Not a former stripper (but a bit of a goer, was a divorcée in the 1930s) and also a creative cook!

[foiegras]

Just wanted to say that this thread has inspired me to try my hand at midwestern 'goulash' ... my mother despised the misuse of the term, and didn't make it, but I certainly had plenty at church suppers.

I seem to recall that the goulash of my youth had cheese in it (and occasionally odd assorted vegetables like corn, but I think I'll skip that ...) I'm challenging myself to make it really good purely with seasonings. I have to get some macaroni ... the fancy pastas in the cupboard simply won't do! (But it's going to be Italian macaroni, LOL, and don't tell me that's cheating ...)

[tenacity]

This is one of my most favorite threads, ever! *grin*

My mom generally was OK - her lasagna was delicious even though it had cottage cheese in it. Other "oddities" (though not as impressive as some of the stuff here!!!):

Cherry Cheesecake - my favorite dessert for many years. I only found out later that real cheesecake is baked, when I heard this I thought, "but it would MELT!". My mom's cheesecake filling was a mixture of cool whip and cream cheese. Teeth-aching sweet.

Cherry Chocolate cake - just a box of chocolate cake mix with a can of cherry pie filling added - the cherry flavor was inbeued in the cake and the cherries themselves sank to the bottom for a moist treat.

How about my dad? He could make some interesting stuff:

meatloaf-stuffed green peppers that forever made me hate cooked bell peppers - icky and bitter (though I love bitter melon now)

"pigs in a blanket" - pounded out chuck wrapped with bacon, except the chuck got tough and the bacon was mushy and fatty.

Oh, and the idea of building flavor through sauteeing, fat, heat, etc - not employed. Every single one-pot meal was started with a pot of water. THEN the aromatics were added to the cold water before the stove even started.

The fact that I can still eat canned mushrooms is amazing, however. :-)

Andrea
http://dukecityfood.com

[Pharah]

My mum is a pretty good cook, and my dad's cooking is okay except when he does a stir-fry. He is the only person I know who can make a veggie stir-fry and get ALL the chili peppers stuck in the broccoli florets so when you bite into a broccoli floret it's like chewing on a whole chili pepper.

My grandma always made lasagna with cottage cheese and hard boiled egg in it. I don't like lasagna without the egg now.
They also used to make a "boiled dinner" which my dad used to make also, before we became vegetarians. It was a chunk of cured meat, ham, cottage roll, or corned beef, boiled for an hour or more, and then cabbage, potatoes, carrots, and rutabaga were thrown in and also boiled for ages, then served with mustard. I think it's something traditional in Nova Scotia, where they are from.
We used to have fish&chips every friday and a roast on Sunday(again, before we were vegetarian). My dad used to take me out to Dim Sum all the time, and that is one thing I really miss, we haven't been to Dim Sum since I became a vegetarian. That's not really my mum's cooking, but it is something no one else I knew did.

My mother-in-law and father-in-law cook some of the most horrible stuff. They really live up to that stereo-type that people from England eat terrible food.
My father-in-law's roast dinner is a piece of overcooked meat of some sort(usually turkey), frozen vegetables that he starts boiling about 5 hours before the meal and turn into whitey-greyish foul muck, potatoes that are boiled then roasted with no seasonings at all (They always have this rock-hard shell on the outside and are mush on the inside), and "gravy" that is just Bisto and water in a ratio of about 1:8 so it's basically just water tinted with a bit of Bisto. Yuck. I try to get out of these roast dinner whenever I can.

My mother-in-law's favourite thing to cook is macaroni with veggies, stewed tomatoes, baked beans, kidney beans and cheese grated on top. I'm not a big fan of this, but my hubby likes it after he dumps every seasoning we've got on it.

Something hubby used to eat as a kid was deep-fried spam and chips(French fries), and a Savaloy and chips.
I think his parents fit into this thread better than mine.

[Sam Fujisaka]

Bisto: "Browns, Seasons and Thickens in One". Introduced in 1979 in the UK.

[buttertart]

Gotcha Sam, the granules maybe, but it was around much earlier than that even in Canada (I remember it from my early childhood, as something my family scorned).

[robyn76]

Looks like this thread has been going for a long time, but wanted to throw my 2 cents in...

My grandmother had a recipe called Christmas Spaghetti. It has a tomato sauce with pine nuts and raisins (I'm not sure what else is in there). It can be eaten hot or cold - some prefer it straight out of the fridge. My family is divided between those that love this dish and those that don't. The majority of us cannot stomach it, but my mother makes it for all the major holidays for the 3 people that do enjoy it.

We looked through a bunch of Italian cookbooks trying to see where this originated from, but haven't found anything resembling it.

[buttertart]

Is your background Sicilian? Pine nuts and raisins are in a lot of Sicilian dishes.

[coll]

Or Neopolitan?
http://events.nytimes.com/recipes/870...

[hill food]

or even Spanish influence, there's a great recipe out there for spinach with pine nuts and raisins baked under a mild white cheese.

my guess is any country with some sort of trade with Northern Africa.

[DetectDave]

Hill food, I am from STL on the east side and wanted to tell ya I saw chili bricks at Switzer food supply last week in Belleville.

[hill food]

Dave I'm returning to STL soon for good. so thanks for the tip, sadly they don't seem to have a website.

[robyn76]

Definitely Italian, but the Sicilian link is on my other side of the family. Now that I think of it, the recipe doesn't call for raisins. It actually calls for GREEN OLIVES, pine nuts, tomato sauce and spaghetti.

[dimsum41]

I think this has been mentioned somewhere on these boards before, but my mum was one of the weirdos who used to put sugar on iceberg lettuce. Whole leaves of lettuce, thinly coated in mayonnaise and then dredged in granulated sugar. I loved it at the time, but looking back it does seem a bit weird. No idea where she got that one from.

See also - toasted cheese and banana sandwiches. I loved them as a kid, and would probably still love them now, but my husband finds the idea repellent. I might make them for him and see if I can change his mind.

My mum is still quite a weird eater. She doesn't really cook a great deal (thankfully) but for breakfast she likes to eat toast with Marmite AND jam/jelly. I guess those of you in the States etc won't have tasted Marmite, but for those who have - gross or what?!

[hill food]

marmite and jam - odd, but not terribly weird, I think I'd prefer that over just marmite..

we also used to get served a "layered" salad similar to your mom's but with parmesan cheese (freeze dried powder variety) bacon bits and raw broccoli mixed in with the sugar. I think it must have been something viral in the late 70's.

[buttertart]

That was big in rural sw Ontario too (may well still be, I just haven't been back in a long time). Frozen peas for color.

[shoop]

And in rural Michigan as well! It was seven-layer salad with broccoli, bacon bits, onions, mayo (of course!) and apparently three other ingredients. :)

[hill food]

oh yeah, cauliflower also played a sinister role

[weewah]

I forgot about lettuce and sugar : ) A huge treat for me as a small child in the early '70's was to sit with Grandpa and eat fresh washed lettuce, just out of the garden, sprinkled with sugar! Mom did not approve but she allowed it as she saw how much it pleased her Dad to share w/ me... sigh

[mamachef]

I've heard of folks eating their iceberg with vinegar and sugar and pepper; no oil, just cold. Hmmm. I think I might like it.

[Aislyn]

My husband's late mother (German) used to put both sugar and vinegar on leaves of lettuce and then put it in the freezer until it formed ice! I thought this was the strangest thing I had ever heard until he made it for me one hot summer day - surprisingly tasty and refreshing! Who knew?

[julesincoq]

My Mum is a good cook but I'm always suspicous of her ingredients. Everything she finds in the fridge is "perfectly good". She cuts the mould of anything that has gone bad and uses it anyway. Even if jam had not sealed, she would scrape the fuzz off it and use it anyway. Oddly we were never sick.

My mother in law was another story. Peanut butter and banana sandwiches...with Miracle Whip! Blech!! She has also been known to use up leftover COOKED vegetables in a salad. As she always boiled the heck out of all veggies the smushy gunk in salad was horrible.

[weewah]

Oh boy, your Mom & my Grandma!
I routinely recieved dinner invitations from Grandma where she stated 'if you don't come over by tomorrow I'll have to throw this away'. Oh horrors. I don't know how I made myself -and my kids - endure those dinners for years. That is love, I guess.
I knew that if it were intimated that there may be something not quite up to par with the food there would have been some serious anger on her part. Very old fashioned lady who grew up poor enough to be hungry throughout her childhood.

I've seen Grandma scoop the mold out of jars and feed the oblivious men at the table the rest of the contents of the jar. But the worst thing I ever saw in her kitchen was the time my two kids and my niece were seated at table and she and I were serving up the lunch she'd made, to them. There were oven baked fries and Grandma said that the ketchup was in the CUPBOARD. I was suprised at the ketchup being in the cupboard, but was truly stunned when I squeezed out a pile of MAGGOTS onto my 4 year old daughters plate! Well, she had re-bottled the ketchup into one of those red plastic squeeze bottles with the plastic tip of the spout cut right off. The kids eyes were big as eggs, but I wiped up the mess with a paper towel while Grandma was at the stove with her back to us. I asked the kids 'does anyone else want ketchup?' and got a unanimous 'no thank you'! My daughter is 19 now and the whole family still laughs about that.
She is gone though. Poor old Grandma!

[susanpmccoy]

Loved this thread! So many happy memories! Mom use to make all the dishes that have been mentioned so many times--as long as it contained campbell's mushroom soup-it was "good eats!" But she had one that hasn't been mentioned : Special K cottage cheese loaf...awful stuff! I used to dread coming home and smelling this.
But one thing in her defense was that she did not overcook veggies, like so many of you mentioned. She cooked them longer than I like, but her broccoli, etc was still green.

[Memily_G]

My mom used to give me and my brother "peanut butter lollipops" as a snack. Take a table spoon, scoop out a large lump of peanut butter, give it to your children to lick.

[Memily_G]

Oh, and my mom also did hamburger helper and the variation packs (tuna noodle helper, etc.) And we LOVED it.

[howboy]

My partner's cousin once treated us to her famous microwave pork chops for a special dinner. It wasn't a weird combo or anything, but it was quite an experience. It was like Flubber. It defied mastication.

[The Professor]

Not surprised...microwaves are great for maybe doing bacon and certainly great for reheating foods, and occasionally for quick popcorn (although stovetop is so much better) ...maybe for quasi nachos as well....but for cooking stuff in general, the microwave is, well...bleccchhhh.

[hill food]

agreed - a steamer basket on the range and a toaster/convection oven are just as good and even more versatile used in tandem. although I must dispute the bacon idea even with the special tray - needs the char of a fry or broil.

[buttertart]

Our bacon-mad cat of happy memory wouldn't eat bacon that had been microwaved. Makes you think.

[alanbarnes]

It's another post (or several) for sure, but the microwave, properly used for the right applications, is a great cooking tool.

http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/390268
http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/464400
http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/505258
http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/679406
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/din...

[jett1001]

Mom made many things on a budget to feed 6 kids ... My favorite was her "sukiyaki" with Minute rice ... When I first ordered sukiyaki at a restaurant, I sent it back thinking they gave me the wrong dish as it wasn't sliced celery, watery beef broth and a few canned bean sprouts ... Other than that anything that could be made with mushroom or tomato soup was dinner ... imagine thinking pizza was Wonder bread with tomato soup and a slice of American cheese melted on it ... better yet (and even with a more sophisticated palate) I still dream of what we called American Spaghetti ... spaghetti, tomato soup and some weird dried bright orange American Cheese powder that I understand they don't make any more ... There was always the Friday special of tuna in mushroom soup with canned peas over Minute rice .... Mom called it tuna casserole, we had many other names for it ...

[jimant60]

I've been reading these posts and just thought I'd mention this one. talk about strange tastes. My grandfather had oatmeal every morning as long as I can remember. grandma would make it then put it in a bowl and stick it in the freezer. lo.l I asked my mom why? She said cause your grandpa won't eat warm oatmeal. It has to be cold.

[jimant60]

Yes Jett, We were always having food that was economical. Never had good steaks very often, usually was round or chuck. occasionally T-bones, very rarely though. We were a white family in predominately Hispanic area while growing up. School was 99 % Hispanic. This recipe was a favorite for us. Canned refried beans, boiled potatoes and flour tortillas. Heat the beans and add the potatoes(chunked) in with the beans. Heat through. Then take the tortillas and warm them in a skillet. Spread thin layer of bean mixture over the tortillas. Eat with fork or hold in hand. Don't roll it though. I guess it could be called an open-faced bean burrito today. Then they called it bean tortillas. That was in the mid 1950's.
We loved those.

[jenscats5]

I have never heard of anyone else ever mentioning "sukiyaki" before!! My mother made the same thing - watery beef broth with sliced onion & celery with beef & served with spaghetti. No clue where that came from, but I found it very interesting you mentioned it.

[CathL]

my mum was experimenting, and paraded into the dining roomn with what looked like a severed head! in fact it was a cabbage stuffed with mince and tomato sauce,leaking out the top.
foul!!
we have never let her forget the incident of the severed head! YUK

[Isoldamay]

My mother made something very much like your "sukiyaki." The real thing is tasty, but my mother's version was a salty mess of ground beef, green bell peppers, onions, sprouts, the water broth and lots and lots of soy sauce, all over that strangely-acidic tasting Minute rice. All three of my brothers and I recall it as the most repulsive meal of our childhood. The soy-laden green peppers were so traumatic that it was years before I could eat green peppers in anything.

[alkapal]

chun king sukiyaki mix http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=336&dat=19650211&id=KkMJAAAAIBAJ&sjid=gUkDAAAAIBAJ&pg=887,2457253

~~~~~
chun king's creator was italian! i love america!!!
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_g1epc/is_tov/ai_2419100249/

a 1962 time article re chun king: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/art...

[hannahmontana]

My dad made "tuna noodle casserole": spaghetti, canned tuna, cottage cheese, and peas. All mixed together. That's it.

[miss_habibi]

Hahaha I loved reading these posts, although some made me quite nauseous... My family wasn'T rich but thankfully, my mom was kind of health obsessed. Also, crunch obsessed.

- She would add sunflower seeds (shelled, thank god) and nacho crumbs in Kraft Dinner;
-Tofu lasagna: layer firm tofu, pizza sauce, and cheese. Repeat. Bake. Enjoy. It was actually good and still comfort food today;
- Oatmeal or Cream of wheat porridge as a Sunday treat: way to make us think we were getting spoiled!;

I'll try and think of more!

[Bigley9]

Whenever we had stuffing we had to have stewed tomatoes served over top, no gravy. My dad called it Irish pizza. No idea where it came from

[LaPomme]

Ironically, my mother always complained about what a horrible cook *her* mother was, and prided herself on making better food than her mother. I guess partly, it's not her fault she didn't know how to cook, and she was anything but an adventurous eater.

She only made about a dozen different meals. She hardly ever cut up a vegetable other than iceberg lettuce or a tomato. Everything was cooked with a healthy slice of margarine. Never saw her buy a head of garlic or use any seasoning other than table salt. The only vegetables she served (corn, peas, green beans) came from a can or from the freezer.

So here are the dishes that I grew up on:

Kraft Mac 'n' Cheese with canned chile
"Stew" consisting of chunks of beef, onions, potatoes in a watery ketchup sauce
Macaroni casserole made with Kraft Mac 'n' Cheese, sour cream, onions, and ground beef
Scalloped potatoes made with a flour, margarine and sour cream paste. (It took me a while to realize there should be cheese in there.)
Spaghetti made with Ragu and baked with huge slices of cheddar cheese on top
Meatball stew, in which beef meat balls, carrots and potatoes were boiled in canned gravy

Cakes and brownies came from a box. Chef Boyardee Spaghetti and Meatballs was a special occasion treat. Later, when I was in my late teens, she prided herself on her fajitas, which came from a bag in the freezer section, and to which she simply added chicken and sour cream.

[shoop]

I grew up in the rural midwest, and my mom certainly paid homage to that "genre" of cooking. I think I've eaten every possible variation on meat and potatoes, and literally hundreds (if not thousands) of casseroles. A few standouts:
- Cheeseburger casserole: This must've been a quiche crust, filled with ground beef and sauteed with onions, ketchup, and covered in a very thick layer of melted Colby-Jack.
- Chicken chalupas (or so we called them): Boiled chicken mixed with cream of chicken soup and cream cheese, wrapped in tortillas with onions, again topped with a mass of melted Colby-Jack
- Baked beans: A big glass jar of Great Northern beans, mixed with a package of cut up bacon, nearly a cup of brown sugar, an onion, and a green apple (my aunt claimed this made them gas-free, haha!)
- And finally, with every single meal, a salad of shredded iceberg lettuce, chopped tomatoes, and five different varieties of salad dressing set out on the table (always including Ranch, French, and Italian); a loaf of homemade white bread; and dessert.

Until I moved away, I never recognized or appreciated my good metabolism. Years later, my parents helped me move into a tiny studio apartment in NYC, and while I unpacked, my mom went to the grocery store to get me a starter batch of groceries, just enough supplies to last me my first week. She brought home a loaf of bread, some meat, a half-gallon of milk, and... a box of 12 sticks of butter. I toted that box of butter with me from home to home for the next few years, I think, but my mom's perception of that as just enough to get me started always makes me laugh (and certainly illustrates the food philosophy I grew up on!).

[ZenSojourner]

My mom actually almost never cooked in my memory (I started doing all the cooking at age 6) but she gave me what I now recognize as some pretty weird recipes. Spanish noodles was hamburger, onions, egg noodles, and condensed tomato soup. Sloppy joes was made from hamburger, onions, chili sauce, and catsup. There were some weird casserole dishes that I quickly forgot how to make as soon as I moved away from home that involved things like condensed mushroom soup, noodles, tuna, and peas, and other similarly shuddersome combinations.

My dad absolutely loved souse (also known as head cheese, and if you've ever seen a whole block of this you'd know why) and some kind of liver loaf thing that I can't remember for the life of me what its called, but it comes in a brick and you slice it and fry it. It's horrible! He also loved ham hocks in various kinds of soup. His family was of German descent (mostly) so anything that could be killed, ground up, and stuffed in a casing was called sausage and was considered delicious.

I'm not a sausage kinda gal, myself.

Ummm, they both loved liver and onions (bleah!).

My mom ate something called pimento cheese that came in a little glass jar. We would keep the jars and use them for juice glasses. I don't think I've seen this stuff in the grocery for over 20 years now, but honestly I haven't looked for it very hard. Or at all.

My mother went on a health food craze in the 70's and banned processed sugar and flour from the house, along with nearly everything else that tasted good. She made me cook with turbinado sugar and wheat germ. The only packaged cereal allowed in the house was Grape Nuts. A bowl of Grape Nuts with Turbinado sugar was like eating a bowl full of gravel with sand in the bottom That stuff wouldn't dissolve in anything short of hydrochloric acid. Forget baking with it, bleah!

Pot roast and corned beef were boiled to mush with carrots, onions and potatoes (for pot roast) and cabbage (with the corned beef) also boiled to mush. Hey, that's how my mother insisted it be cooked. It wasn't my idea, LOL!

While on the one hand I was making some fairly sophisticated dishes, I actually did not know you could make macaroni and cheese except from a blue box labeled "Kraft" until I was in college. I still have actually never made it from scratch. Recall that I cooked what my mother told me to cook - apparently she only liked Kraft Dinner (which meant macaroni and cheese in our house) and not from-scratch macaroni and cheese (although possibly SHE didn't know you could make it from scratch either, LOL!)

On one of the few occasions I can remember her stirring herself to do any cooking, she got a wild hair about organ meats. She was cooking kidneys - which smell absolutely horrible, I swear to god just like sewage or wet diapers, at least the way she was cooking them - when my younger brother came into the kitchen and asked what was for dinner. She said "Kidneys".

He got a horrified look on his face and said, "KID KNEES! What a HORRIBLE thing to do to a poor little kid!"

I grew up making jelly and jam and canning stuff from the garden. It was common in our household to scrape the mold off the top of a jar of jelly (we made it sealed with paraffin wax and sometimes the seal was less than perfect ant it would grow mold) and eat it anyway. Needless to say I throw things that are moldy away now, but til the day he died, my dad would, if he got the chance, just scrape the mold off and eat it anyway. That was not at all uncommon growing up in the depression, pre-electricity (and therefore pre-refrigeration), poor, as he did.

Every fried thing was either cooked in bacon grease, which was kept in a (cleaned out) coffee can on the back of the stove, or swimming in Crisco. I have to admit that to this day there are still things I prefer cooked in bacon grease, including fried eggs, scrambled eggs, and home fries or pan-fried potatoes of any sort.

We routinely ate scrambled egg sandwiches, a concotion that I can't tolerate at all now but loved as a child. The same goes for peanut butter mixed with maple syrup or dark karo syrup.

Something called "heavenly hash" which she loved and consisted, if I recall correctly (and I have made EVERY effort to forget the details of most of these recipes) mostly of whipped cream, marshmallows, mandarin oranges, and drained fruit cocktail.

"Bologna salad", you would run chub bologna through a meat grinder with whole kosher pickles and I forget what else, mix liberally with mayonaisse, and slap it on bread and pretend its an edible sandwich. Personally I could never pretend hard enough.

There were a TON of horrible casserole recipes that called for cream of mushroom soup, and/or condensed or evaporated milk, Durkee fried onions, egg noodles, velveeta (which in my book doesn't even qualify as a food-like substance). I avoided actually making any of these culinary horrors by trying to come up with recipes that looked like they might be at least slightly edible and just ignoring casserole suggestions from the parental units. Sometimes I got specific orders to make one of these and was forced to do it anyway. Bleah!

[alkapal]

wow, you sure have some winners, there! ;-).

the oddest thing to me was this: >>>"""On one of the few occasions I can remember her stirring herself to do any cooking, she got a wild hair about organ meats."""<<<

of all things! that's just offal!

[ZenSojourner]

LOL! It's a good thing I wasn't eating or drinking anything when I read that. Otherwise my poor netbook would have suffered the indignity of having partially masticated food items sprayed all over it.

[ZenSojourner]

We once had a fatal error with the bologna salad. My younger brother was absolutely fascinated with the meat grinder and wanted to grind the stuff up. So, I let him.

Have you ever seen chub bologna? It comes with some kind of a waxy-papery-plastic-y red outer covering.

Guess what he didn't peel off before grinding the bologna?

[QueenOfTheSlipstream]

The bit about Grape Nuts actually made me laugh out loud. You should write your memoirs- sounds like they'd be hilarious. :)

[ZenSojourner]

Why thank you! Isn't it funny how things that made us cringe in horror at the time seem hilarious in retrospect?

I've thought about writing a memoir at times, but I'm pretty sure if it was truthful, the siblings would sue me!

[alkapal]

oh, just change the names to protect the guilty. they'll never notice.

and add some disclaimer about the characters not being based on any real life people.

oh, another tip: don't call it a "memoir."

[ZenSojourner]

LOL! That'd probably be the only way I could pull it off. I'd have to go into hiding like Salman Rushdie otherwise.

[alkapal]

and for that level of security, you might consider the witness protection program or plastic surgery.

[miss_habibi]

Ooooo, I just remembered my mom's version of sloppy joes. I personally had never had neither sloppy joes nor liver.

Well, my mom's version was 1/3 liver, 2/3 beef, cottage cheese, grated carrots and ketchup, mustard, Worcesteshire sauce and I forget what else.

It was actually good!! Now when I make it, i don't use cottage cheese though lol. I find it highly unappealing and unnecessary..

[hill food]

I think that beats my mom's liver and swiss cheese pizza.

[alkapal]

my mom was always telling me that i needed
'iron". maybe she just couldn't recall adolescent malaise.

[Breadcrumbs]

Oh my goodness, where to start!! I'll share two that were real standouts. My mother could bake but cooking was definitely not her thing. She came from England in the 60's so the only two "spices" we kept in our house were salt & pepper. When she purchased her first electric frying pan, there was no stopping her. Two specialties were:

Spaghetti with Meat Sauce: heat frying pan to highest possible temp and cook ground beef until bone dry. While meat is cooking, open one can of chef boy r d spaghetti with tomato sauce and rinse off all traces of sauce. Add (now soggy-er) noodles to charred meat. Mush noodles around so they are no longer than 1/2". Add one can of Ragu and boil. Serve over buttered toast.

Mustard "Pork": Heat electric frying pan to highest possible temperature. Add bacon fat. Add one can of spam, sliced. "Fry up" spam until crusty. Pour in about half a cup of bright yellow mustard and any leftover gravy you may have on hand. Add leftover boiled-to-death carrots or cabbage (or both if you're lucky). Boil and serve over unseasoned, lumpy, mashed potatoes.

[ChristinaMason]

you poor thing.

[LolaP]

holy moley. Why did she rinse the sauce off the canned spaghetti and then add the ragu back in?

[Breadcrumbs]

LOL Lola! I'm going to take a guess here, I think she felt the Ragu would make the dish more authentically Italian! You just can't imagine how mushy those noodles were in the end. I still gag thinking about it. All we could do was pray that there wouldn't be any leftovers!!!

[hill food]

wow. just wow Breadcrumbs.

I can understand the ingredients given the time and place she came from, but not the method.

[pikawicca]

Holy crap!

[elismamie97864]

My mother was not a great cook- although she thought she was- I was in the 2nd grade and having dinner at a friend's house when I realized that food didn't have to be dry and mostly burnt.

[dekethedog]

My mother and father were married after he returned from WW II in 1945. Mom was 32 and lived with her German parents, two sisters and a brother-in-law. She was a concert pianist who worked as a choral accompanist in Peoria, IL. Shortly after my birth in 1946, we moved to my dad's family farm 60 miles east. Mom had hardly ever cooked in her life, and she was thrown into a completely new life of feeding her family and hungry farmhands. She must have been a natural, because she could cook some of the best country food I've ever eaten. Specialties were pork roast with boiled potatoes, gravy, sauerkraut, and noodles with toasted buttered crumbs; pan-fried (in lard) chicken with cream gravy, roast beef with brown gravy and mashed potatoes, real country fried round steak, and baked ribs and sauerkraut. Whenever Mom cooked sauerkraut, she always cooked some fat from the roast with it.

We were Catholic, and Friday night suppers were usually a special treat. Sometimes it was fried whole catfish and real french fries, or french fried smelt; sometimes spaghetti with mushroom sauce and homemade crunchy bread sticks; sometimes pan fried halibut, sometimes fried eggs and potatoes. Most of her frying was done in country lard, and with that lard she made flaky, delicious pie crusts. Her lemon meringue and coconut cream pies were something that I just can't duplicate. Mom made her own sweet butter from the two cows we kept, and there was always a pitcher of cream in the icebox. Our drink of choice was cold, rich whole Guernsey milk. When we made chocolate milk, you could see the clots of cream swimming around the top.

One of the our more unusual suppers was a large can of cold red salmon emptied into a bowl and doused with cider vinegar, accompanied by German fried potatoes, and a dish of cucumber and onion salad. Dad had some strange farm tastes, like rutabagas or turnips cooked to a mush, well done beef liver, and home canned rhubarb. Mom quickly learned that many of these foods caused some problems at the table with us kids, and quietly never served them again. Our "mayo" of choice was Miracle Whip (which I still use), store-bought pickles and jams were rare, and it seemed that Mom was canning and freezing food all summer. Peaches, apricots, bing cherries; green beans, tomatoes and sweet corn. Grape jelly from our own vines, and big sweet onions from the garden. We bought eggs with bright orange yolks from local farmers, and had our own pork butchered at the local locker. That included cured bacon, and sometimes mom fried uncured bacon. I was indeed blessed with a mother who could cook.

[alkapal]

sounds like you were blessed with a lot of good food and a loving mother who enjoyed making it for her family.

[hill food]

hey! that's not weird!

but makes me nostalgic for a country neighbor's Sunday dinners out in central Missouri. or my cousins family meals near Centralia Illinois. yes, some were odd by city kid standards, but still darn good.

[weewah]

My mother was an excellent cook, but we traveled a lot. I can rememeber the chicken sandwiches served by the Middle Eastern airlines my dad worked for. Cold chicken on white bread, no salt or seasonings or ANYTHING else on those sandwiches except a generous smear of *butter*. Greasy & YUK.
And dairy was practically nonexistent in Saudi Arabia in the 60's & 70's. Powdered milk and canned Kraft cheese was what we had. I would eat a worm before I drank powdered milk!

[Deedine]

Those sandwiches Were revolting...And on the powdered milk.... Me Too! Weewah <3

[pikawicca]

Great yogurt and feta, though. I'm not a milk drinker, so I didn't feel deprived living in Riyadh in the early 70's.

[hill food]

dang Alka, who would've thought this thread would go for over 2 years (just noticed the original date) doesn't feel that long.

[alkapal]

it is the gift that keeps on giving, hill food!

[mamachef]

In the early 80's, my mother got it together to home can some Albacore. She managed to do it without exploding anything and the tuna was actually pretty darn good. However - she read a recipe for tuna with orange-ginger sauce, and evidently didn't think substituting canned tuna for tuna STEAKS would be an issue. It was.

[ChristinaMason]

<she read a recipe for tuna with orange-ginger sauce, and evidently didn't think substituting canned tuna for tuna STEAKS would be an issue. It was.>

*shudder*

This reminds me of the time in childhood when I made snickerdoodles. My uncle assured me that it would be no problem substituting vegetable oil for softened butter. It was.

[mma800]

Just spent my entire day laughing and smiling at these 2 yrs worth of Mom's posts!! No regrets :) I also wondered what my 3 kids will say about my cooking!
I grew up outside of Boston, very Irish Catholic family. My mom had her own combination of meatloaf, American Chop Suey, pancakes for dinner, etc etc. She would always say she hated cooking but loved baking (though Pillsbury cans were her secret ingredient). All time WORST was her day after Thanksgiving......... TURKETTI

She would dice up leftover turkey meat and skin and mix it in a large stockpot with EVERY OTHER LEFTOVER. Stuffing, gravy, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes, turnip, sweet potato, creamed onions, olives/celery from the relish tray, honey glazed carrots, that weird jello thing my Aunt makes with cranberry and Nilla wafers..... it all was brewed in the big pot until a foul smell permeated the house. That's when it was time to add 2 boxes of cooked spaghetti. My dad is the only one who could eat his portion and smile. No wonder I always signed up for overtime on Black Friday!
Now that I cook Thanksgiving dinner, I make sure I pack up enough leftovers for her to make
Turketti the next day. My dad always winks and says "Thanks a lot!" on his way out the door. Horrible food but wonderful parents!!

[alkapal]

that turketti makes the old turkey tetrazzini look like haute cuisine. the jello salad addition to the pot really got me!

~~~~
your dad really, really, really loves your mom! nice!

[Barbara76137]

OK, I confess, I also had a crush on Robert Conrad in Wild, Wild West :)

My mom is 76 and still a very good cook, but always overcooks vegetables. I'll have to remember some of her weird cooking.

[alkapal]

robert conrad.... <sigh>....

[guilty]

I have more spaghetti stories . . .

My mother would make a spaghetti casserole of spaghetti, butter, LOTS of cheese, onions and garlic. Fatty and delicious.

My father would sometimes make spaghetti omelets. Only now do I realize that this might be unusual.

[Passadumkeg]

God! Mom was a great cook and took me to live Shakespeare performances at an early age. Gone 2 years now, at 93, spunky til the end. Mom I miss your stuffed veal roast, and vereschaka on "Pancake Tuesday".

[mariacarmen]

In honor of my recently deceased mom, i will say that she comforted me as a child on rainy cold days when I would come home for lunch with toasted liverwurst sandwiches and Campbell's tomato soup. She was not a good cook, but she made the best papas doradas - basically parboiled, thickly sliced potatoes that were then fried to perfect golden discs, with plenty of salt. She made one Bolivian dish I liked - aji de pollo - just a simple chicken stew-like thing, which was a bit tomato-y, and had peas in it, cooked in the pressure cooker.

and she taught me how to make rice. perfect rice every time. I miss her.

[alkapal]

my condolences mariacarmen. i know it is hard. i miss my mom, too. before she passed away earlier this year, i had a chance to laugh with her about the many stories on this thread. (though she never did laugh about the pork chops ;-). she's in a perfect place now, and i look forward to laughing with her again.

~~~~~~
in fact, i want to add my condolences to all of you who have lost one or both parents. i hope that you find some consolation and levity in this thread. our food memories are so deeply ingrained, and are a gentle way to "stay connected" with those whom we loved (and still do love) and who nourished us in life.

for those whose parents are still alive, there is no better time to connect than NOW. happy thanksgiving to you all.

[mariacarmen]

thx for that, Alka, and same condolences to you. very sweet.

i thought of another thing my mom made a lot - apanados - basically steak breaded and then pounded very thin with a rinsed glass coke bottle. i make them now too, but i rarely pound out the meat as thin as she did.

[Passadumkeg]

Did she make Saltenas????

[mariacarmen]

No, PDK, she did not! she was not a good cook, by any means. no one taught her. her own mother died when she was kind of young. she could make a few things, but they always tasted the same to me. saltenas were always an order-in item for us - luckily in L.A. at the time, that was an easy thing to do.

[hill food]

yes, Alka, I hope the comments made here are understood to be stated with love and not a sneer. a snicker, sure, but one with genuine wistful fondness and devotion.

[caseygirl]

Baked Spaghetti -
Cook spaghetti - layer in casserole dish with grated cheddar cheese and cream of tomato soup (not diluted) .cover with buttered bread crumbs.. (or ritz crackers) and bake..till toasty on top

if any left over - you can have fried spaghetti next day - (fried in butter) !

[GTM]

@biondanonima,

The Wednesday spaghetti jingle you picked up possibly began as an advertising line for the Prince brand:

Wednesday is PRINCE SPAGHETTI day!

Maybe others will remember this too?

[alliegator]

This is a funny story and by no means meant to be a recipe. My mom is a pretty cool lady a horrifyingly bad cook.
I was 12 years old and we were driving to my dad's hunting cabin to spend a long weekend. We were going a day ahead of my dad to beat the weather coming. Driving up the mountain, my mom hit a turkey with her car. Like, what the heck? But I'm from central Pennsylvania and anyone there knows that clocking wildlife is a part of life.
It was dead, but large and in decent shape so were going to eat it. Growing up as my dad's little hunting cabin mascot, I knew how to clean it.
So I got it all cleaned up and my mom baked this meat into a casserole with broccoli, egg noodles and some weird gravy. And overcooked the heck out of it to ensure the meat was done. It was the worst meal of my life.
So be warned: roadkill casserole is not so good.

[alkapal]

alliegator, just to be fair, it was probably the overcooking -- not the fact that it was roadkill. LOL!

[Cactus Wren]

Not to say that my mother was one of the great non-cooks of all time, but ... well, she'd go on food binges and take me and Kid Bro along with her. You haven't lived until you've eaten a homemade, vegetarian, completely Western version egg drop soup for ten meals in the space of a week. It ran the gamut from very thin to watery scrambled eggs, and that was what we *ate* until Mom got tired of it.

Remember how Jeff Smith (Frugal Gourmet) used to deride his mother's "spaghetti with ketchup"? My mother had that beat. Roman Meal bread, buttered, spread with ketchup, topped with thick slices of Velveeta, stuck under the broiler until the cheese was barely starting to melt, and Wren why aren't you eating the *pizzas* I made for you? I made those because I know you love pizza so much!

[annietheking]

my mom used to (still sometimes does) saute iceberg lettuce to death, since it's not common for asian people to eat raw veggies. since she salted it during cooking, it would release lots and lots of grayish green juice, the scent of which did me in.

[alkapal]

this dish is one that i LOVE that my mom made-- and do not judge till you try it --SAVORY goodness for me:

Burger Bundles

Mix together:

1-1/2 lb Hamburger

1/2 C Evaporated Milk

Stuffing:

4 C Bread Crumbs

1/2 C Evaporated Milk

1/4 C melted Butter

2T chopped onion (optional)

1/4 t salt

1 t Poultry Seasoning

Mix well

Form Hamburger into 6 " rounds

Put about 1/2 C dressing in each. Press hamburger around stuffing to form bundle

Place in baking dish

Blend 1 can Campbells Cream of Mushroom Soup

2 t Worcestershire

1 t Catsup

Pour over bundles

Bake 45-50 min @ 350 degrees

~~~~~~~~~~

honestly, this dish is really, really tasty! i'd always ask my mom to do this dish, along with her cobbler and her sauerkraut and meatballs ( which are both in my chow recipes). she passed away about a year ago, but her recipes really carry on the memories for me.

[buttertart]

You got all kinds of umami (ooh, Mommy) going on up in there, alka dear. Sounds so nice and homey. Same here with the recipes...

[Fruitgum]

My Grandad used to like a bowl of cold Heinz baked beans poured straight from the can with a doorstep of bread buttered pretty thick - must admit I miss him being around and me knicking a spoonful every now and again :)

The strangest thing was a friend who had the same meals every week - I don't have a prob with a Friday spaghetti night or a Sunday roast but this you could set like clockwork and I knew what day it was by what she had for dinner! I can't imagine the relief she must of had when she moved out of home and started to cook for herself - lets just hope that it didn't beat the need for variety out of her system ;)

[master815k]

My Grandpa used to make me white bread, spread with butter and topped with sugar. He also used to make me milkshakes with 2 raw eggs added. Miss him!

[cactusette]

I grew up in Quebec and mom loved food and cooking. But she was raising me alone and has always been a kind of "eyeballer" cook. So I have horrible memories of cheap boiled chicken thighs that had all sorts of dark veins in them and it used to gross me out so much. She also had this "vegetable pie" recipe made with eggplants, zucchini,cauliflower, cheese and a sort of thick béchamel. She would make me assemble the pies with her when obviously I wanted to go out and play. Then, as a reward, I would get to eat some for dinner. Not the type of food a child wants to eat at all.

My fondest memory is escargots à la provençale which she would randomly make as an appetizer, and Campbell's tomato soup (made with milk) with tuna sandwiches on saturdays for lunch.

I also remember her forcing me to down some disgusting glasses of a mixture filled with orange juice, milk, vanilla and raw egg. This was the "come here, you've been playing a lot and need some protein...if you don't drink it you're not going back to play" type of thing. She would not mix it very well so the egg white was kind of floating around in it and when you'd drink it would get in your mouth like a jellyfish. If she turned her head for a second I'd throw it out under the steps and pretend I drank it all.

[frannieface77]

That "protein drink" sounds truly awful. :(

[River19]

My friends mother used to cook Peanut Butter Pork Chops......needless to say, he ate over a lot growing up.

[Ariannda]

My mother likes to make rice (plain, white rice with perhaps a dab of butter) with sausage and cooked apples. My father, bless his heart, can only grill and even then normally my mother has prepared the food. I like to think im pretty decent around the kitchen. I like to make my own salsa and try to work with spaghetti sauce (while we dont have a set day we do eat it often) but my greatest accomplishment was the recipe cards ! We would make up a bunch of cards, each with a suggestion (ie pancakes, beef stew, spaghetti, "chicken stuff") and pick out 2 weeks worth of food. We would list ALL necessary ingredients and then determine what needed to be bought every 2 weeks for those exact recipes ! I let the kids, or one of the kids, pick the next nights meal out ahead of time. We posted everything on the left side of the cabinet, and when it was cooked we'd move it to the right side of the cabinet. Sometimes the kids would compete to see which of "their" dinners we'd have next ! These were only entrees, i'd always make a salad, and a veggie to go along with the meal as i saw fit. The kids were always entertained. Also having never gorwn up on "canned foods" i refuse to eat them myself and therefore refuse to buy them. I know the kids want a can of chef boyardee on occasion but *gag*

[freia]

Mom's Fettucine Alfredo. Ingredients:
1 lb cooked spaghetti
1 tin Campbell's Cream of Asparagus Soup
1 red pepper
1/2 white onion
Sautee the onion, add the red pepper, tin of soup and 1/2 tin milk. Bring to boil. Stir in cooked spaghetti. Garnish with Kraft Grated Cheese in that green tin you get on the shelf not in the refrigeration case, we used to call this "sprinkle cheese" while growing up.
Enjoy!

Cheese Fondue
1 lb Velveeta
Milk as needed
1/2 loaf wonderbread
Melt cheese and milk over a double boiler. Ladle over slices of white bread in a bowl.
Enjoy!

Fried Cottage Cheese
1 tub whole milk large curd cottage cheese
oil
Heat oil in a pan. Add cottage cheese. Fry until cheese softens then reclumps together as one gloopy mess. This only works with traditional cottage cheese, today's cottage cheese for whatever reason won't do this.
Serve in a bowl with a spoon. Maybe with a side of toast if you're feeling adventurous.
Enjoy!

As an aside, ham was always out of a tin. Always. And the gelatinous goop around it had to be served with the ham, because it looked festive that way. Apparently. Salad always consisted of iceberg lettuce, cucumber and sliced tomato slathered with Kraft French Dressing. Always. To this day I have a tough time with ham and salad...

On the other hand, her cupcakes, chocolate chiffon cake, perogies and cabbage rolls were SPECTACULAR and she was doing the best that she could given her rather impoverished upbringing. I love her.

[JerryMe]

The. Fried. Cottage. Cheese. Just wow! Thank you Freia - And do love your Mom - she's the only one you got!

[pikawicca]

So happy to see this thread keep toodling along -- it's one of my favorites.

[JaclynM]

It pains me to write this, because I love my mom and she is/was a good mom, but not a good cook. Not that her food tasted bad, but it was all pre-packaged.

Growing up in the 80s, spaghetti was made with jarred sauce and frozen meatballs, having fish for dinner meant a frozen breaded fish heated in the toaster oven, and we had lots of hamburger helper. The only vegetables we had were frozen vegetables boiled on the stove. With one exception - she would sometimes make glazed carrots, using butter and brown sugar, which is one of the recipes I picked up from her.

One thing she made that I really like/liked is stuffed peppers. It was something she got out of a cookbook, involving ground beef, rice and tomatoes, and it is scrumptious. I keep asking her for the recipe, but she keeps putting it off, saying that if she gives me her recipes then I won't have a reason to come and visit for dinner. (Huh?)

[goodhealthgourmet]

I keep asking her for the recipe, but she keeps putting it off, saying that if she gives me her recipes then I won't have a reason to come and visit for dinner. (Huh?)
~~~~~~~~
aw, that's sweet - she obviously just wants to spend time with you! maybe ask her if you can come over and make some of them *with* her?

for what it's worth, "ground beef, rice and tomatoes" is the standard base for pretty much all traditional stuffed bell pepper recipes. whatever *additional* ingredients she uses are the keys to making them so tasty. most recipes also call for onion and/or garlic, and often shredded or grated cheese (usually cheddar, mozz or jack). and some other common additions: dried herbs (usually oregano or basil), spices (cumin, taco seasoning, chili powder), hot sauce, worcestershire sauce, condensed tomato soup, ketchup or tomato paste, other meat (bacon or sausage)...

if you can identify any of those flavors in Mom's recipe it might help you create a close approximation until she's willing to share her secrets.

[alkapal]

>>>aw, that's sweet - she obviously just wants to spend time with you! maybe ask her if you can come over and make some of them *with* her?<<

amen, ghg. great thought. it is always good to spend time with our loved ones, for as long as we are able. i just posted this on another forum:

[kai55]

One of my grandmothers poured slightly thinned out Campbell's Tomato Soup over noodles and called it spaghetti. Makes me glad my mom learned how to cook from her French grandma and not the Irish one.

My mom didn't have too many oddities, she's a really excellent cook. The only thing she made that I couldn't stand was bisquick biscuits dropped into a can of diced tomatoes and boiled. Sometimes I could eat it... mostly it was disgusting.

Then on Christmas Eve she still serves us our meat pies (tourtiere), ham, rolls.... and lasagna. The typical French-Canadian holiday meal.

[patmatw]

I have a French Canadian friend from Nova Scotia, Lousiville,(or Louisdale?) if I'm not mistaken, that introduced me to her meat pies for Christmas time. She had to have special pastry dough, I believe it had lard for the shortening, and instead of making it when she grew older, she was able to purchase if from a friend who had a doughnut shop, he would make her pastry dough special for her every holiday. Then she'd cut up a roast beef, I am guessing top or bottom round, and cook it with onions and water and salt pork. What a delicious family tradition those meat pies were. I remember one year getting one from her for Christmas for my own, in an eight inch square pyrex dish. Probably one of my most favorite Christmas presents ever. She had eight kids, and befriended me in my early adulthood, and treated me like one of her own. She is now 83 years old, her kids are all around my age, and I still keep in touch and visit when I am able to go "home" for a visit. Thanks for bringing her to my mind tonight, she is a special and dear friend to me, and I'm craving a meat pie. I have made a fascimile using Pillsbury rollup pie crust in the box, but my family wasn't fond of it, so I haven't made it often. I'm looking forward to my next meat pie. I have never had the one they call "roppie pie, made from chicken and I believe mashed potatoes. Was that a French Canadian thing or just Canada?
I love this thread, it makes me remember fondly our family suppers, and all the things I would eat of my sister's IF she would promise me her chocolate pudding dessert too. I devoured all the fried smelts and the fried breakfast sausages every time they were served for supper. My favorite birthday dinner was my mother's meat loaf, accompanied by canned green beans and whatever potato she wished to serve, usually baked or mashed. How I miss my mom!

[kai55]

It seems that every family has their own recipe for meat pie - and they're completely different. My mom always adds potatoes to hers and skips the pork - but a friend of mine's relatives growing up made them with pork. I was so excited to see them as part of the new years dinner this one year - and her step father was so pleased to see I knew what they were! I'm pretty sure they're delicious no matter how you make them. Such good memories!

I'm not familiar with roppie pie - but I did find a "rappie pie" article on wikipedia that says it's an Acadian (maritime) thing. Which would account for me not knowing what it is - I'm in SW Ontario and my French ancestors (that I know about) either came here directly from France or moved to Quebec initially and then migrated to the Windsor area.

... And I might have to give roppie pie a shot since I have a mountain of turkey in my freezer. I'm off to find some sample recipes!

[Aislyn]

The "Rappie Pie" that you are referring to is an Acadien dish made in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick primarily. It can be made with chicken, beef, clams, pork - any type of protein that you like. It is typically made in large proportions so most recipes call for 8 to 10 lbs of potato and a 5 to 6 lb chicken. The potato are peeled and grated and then the water and starch is squeezed out with cheese cloth and the amount of this liquid is measured. If using chicken, the chicken is boiled and the stock retained to replace the water/starch from the grated potatoes. The chicken is deboned/deskinned and cut in small pieces. The measured stock is added to the grated pototoes, salt and pepper added as required. The Rappie pie is assembled in a large baking pan with potato mixture as first layer, dollops of butter, then protein, then potato, butter, etc. until you end up with the top as potato. Many lay strips of bacon on top or more butter before putting it into the oven to bake. It is baked to a cripsy, yummy brown and voila!!! Tasty, tasty, tasty. It is so popular in the Maritimes that most grocery stores sell the pre-grated potato in frozen squares for those who don't have the time or energy to grate them. A lot of people will re-heat the leftovers by frying it in butter the next day. Anyway you eat it, it sure is delicious.

[BecaC]

Remembering my stepmother's cooking is enough to give me nightmares. Most meals were packaged, processed foods, out of a box or can from the pantry or a package from the freezer. When she did cook, things were atrocious.

We didn't have "spaghetti", we had pasta with red sauce. This was elbow macaroni with a can of tomato juice (yes, juice) and seasoned with sugar. Seriously.

But the worst was when my father, who used to dive for abalone before I was born, actually acquired one from a fellow diver. He cut thin slices, pounded them thin, dredged them lightly, and pan-fried them. Sooo Good!
When stepmom heard me waxing poetic about that abalone, she surprised me one day with a platter of something that slightly resembled what I remembered, but tasted absolutely horrid. Turned out to be chicken breast, pounded thin, soaked in bottled clam juice, and fried.
She called it "phony abalone".
WORST THING EVER!

[jeanmarieok]

She was creative, wasn't she? I can't imagine what chicken soaked in clam juice would taste like!!

[alkapal]

i thought it was sweet that she remembered and "tried."

[miss787]

Some of the post on here have made me laugh or get watery eyed but thank goodness I was spared from these food disasters! My mother is an okay cook, her dinner repertoire consisted of maybe 8 dishes made simply, and never deviated from those. Like most of you, my food adventures began after I left home. For example, I discovered how awesome tasting real vegetables are; the only vegetables I knew before were canned mixed, canned beets, canned green beans, and plain iceberg with tomato, never dressing. I don't remember eating frozen meals but heck yea we ate some of that Chef Boyardee and Lipton chicken soup from a packet (MSG galore). She never baked either and perhaps that is why I'm so fascinated by it now. One thing I hated eating though: rice & milk soup, mom's lunch dish, totally unappetizing and salty.

[CarlyJayne]

Oh mom! She still doesn't ever use salt and likes everything very bland and VERY well cooked (but she does use butter and cream!).

One of her more notable childhood dishes that she taught me to make in elementary school: Pizza Hotdogs.

Microwave one hotdog until hot.
Place in bun with a strip of string cheese.
Mix Ketchup with Italian Seasoning.
Add to hot dog
Enjoy your pizza hot dog. Which you will, because you are 10.

She also loved making lasagna as a soup-type dish. I think it had spaghetti sauce, ground beef, broken pieces of lasagna pasta and lots of cottage cheese. I am not sure when I learned how real lasagna was supposed to be made-but I did get a "pearls of wisdom" lecture about how people were silly to put all that work into making a layered dish when it tasted so much better served from a pot. I always hated that one. I reminded me of vomit. I couldn't eat it.

When I was 13 my mom had enough of cooking, Costco opened and from then on out it was frozen meals every night except Christmas and Easter.

[coll]

That hot dog doesn't sound all bad!

[CarlyJayne]

I loved it! But I would never feed that to my kid! My mom was not a *horrible* cook. She just hated it.

All these recipes makes me feel for moms of another generation-especially now that I am the family chef. I have the internet, wonderful cookbooks and I live in a foodie town with pretty grocery stores and a husband that makes a decent living so I can afford good ingredients and not worry too much about blowing our grocery budget if something doesn't turn out. Even still- nightly dinner is sometimes a joy, and sometimes a tedious task. I got stuck with dinner duty because I'm a mom, but luckily I sort of like it. It must be horrible to hate cooking and eating and then have to make food for the family day in and day out.

[overthinkit]

My grandmother (otherwise an excellent cook) insisted on making her "shrimp bisque" every Christmas eve.
The recipe? Equal parts Campbell's Tomato Soup and Campbell's Split pea soup (and the recommended amounts of milk), mixed with pre-cooked baby shrimp. Get it? It's Christmas-y because it's GREEN and RED ... only of course once they're mixed together you get a nasty orange. She always served that with these bright red/green pear halves that came out of a can, with a dollop of cream cheese in the center of the pear.
Revolting. Thinking about it makes me miss her, though.