Did Your Mom Repeatedly Cook a Dish You Despised?

[Perilagu Khan]

My mom--God rest her soul--was a marvelous cook, and I still prepare several of her greatest dishes. However, she also made a Sweet and Sour Pork that I dreaded like the Black Death. And she made it over and over again. Ghastly stuff.

[suzigirl]

Of all the ghastly things my mom made(she was dreadful in the kitchen) Friday nights were the worst!!! All of the weeks uncovered(mom didn't do Saran wrap) leftovers and add them to one pot with water and boil. Soup? I mean soup. That means if we had tuna noodle, beans and weenies, pork chops and fried okra it was all going in. Veg, starch and proteins of all kinds made it in that pot. It usually was the color of dishwater. Teriyaki chicken Kraft Mac and cheese and corn going in. It was dreadful stuff. I hated Fridays. I started cooking at eleven to avoid the friday night international heartburn night

[DuffyH]

O! M! F! G! That's it, kids, we can all go home. I mean, really, there's no more point in even trying. I bow to you, suzigirl, I'm not worthy! :))

[suzigirl]

All I can say is I lived... how I will never know.

[cayjohan]

My aunt does this still. She's a dear person to me, and I endure her hospitality out of love and respect, but: Oof. Sunday supper (which is when we get our invites) is always an amalgam of everything in the fridge. My uncles kisses her cheek and tells her she's the Best Cook Ever.I personally wouldn't share the sentiment, but I will say this: that fridge is clean as a whistle come Monday!

[suzigirl]

At least it is only the occasional invite. My mom still does it to this day. And she still doesn't use saran wrap. Blech

[AmyH]

Oh wow, that's nasty!

[suzigirl]

Wat makes it worse is she wasn't a good cook to start so making a soup didn't help matters

[Heatherb]

DING DING DING! You win. You unseated cayjohan. Seriously.

[cayjohan]

Ugh. *The Salad.* The only "fresh" salad (as opposed to macaroni+Miracle Whip+something canned) my father would permit on the table, as it was the only one he liked: chopped iceberg, with canned pineapple chunks and an overwhelmingly large amount of cubed Velveeta, heavily (!) dressed with Miracle Whip thinned down with the pineapple juice from the can. If it didn't get eaten at one meal, it went into the fridge in anticipation of an encore. Even worse on the second go-around in all its wilty, soggy glory.

[Heatherb]

Wow. You win.. That's beyond horrifying!

[pikawicca]

Now that sounds dreadful.

[cayjohan]

What's even worse is: I Have Made This Salad Numerous Times. (sigh) As a Dutiful Daughter, I have to keep some peace with the pater familias (who can be a bit of a turd-in-a-birdbath about how food *should* be) when he graces our table. Once years ago I made a desperate attempt to zhuzh The Salad a bit with fresh pineapple, good cheddar, more upscale greens, the like...you could have heard a pin drop at serving. De gustibus non est disputandum.

[DuffyH]

That's Danish for "Father Knows Best", isn't it? :))

[cayjohan]

In our case, it's code for Stubborn Pigheaded Finlander, so you're close geographically! ;)

I lived for an extended time in Finland as a student, and I was at first a bit terrified of the food simply because I associated it with my father's rather parochial views on flavors. Thankfully, I found that he was a statistical outlier!

[DuffyH]

No, seriously, cay? You just made that up, right? I don't know which is more shudder-worthy; the miracle whip/pineapple juice dressing, the day-old wilt, or the cubed Velveeta.

Don't get me wrong, I loves me some Velveeta, for stovetop Mac n' Cheese, grilled cheese and chili queso dip, but on a salad? Pull the other leg, cay. :))

[cayjohan]

Seriously. I wish it weren't so. I was that kid who, at a friend's house, would revel in the salad on the table, much to other parents' delight. My mom was a good solid cook (despite thwarted creativity due to my dad's proclivities), but she always capitulated on The Salad Issue. Ghastly.

Last Thanksgiving, my dad could not travel to be with us. We missed him, of course, but there was a toast at table to not having to make nice and serve The Salad!

[Cactus Wren]

Wow. That beats my mother's potato salad (two parts potato, one part cooked carrot, one part cooked onion, Thousand Island dressing). I am impressed.

[emu48]

All the time. The worst was lamb shanks. Mom loved to serve them for dinner. But she never quite got that you need to braise them for quite a while, like osso bucco, to make them tender. So we'd end up with this massive, gristly hunk of inedible caveman cuisine on our plates. It was horrible ..... too big to slip to the dog, too big to hide under the broccoli. I still have nightmares about it.

[Perilagu Khan]

Barbara Bach and Ringo Starr would have loved it.

[DuffyH]

So few people appreciate the films of Ringo Starr. :)

[Perilagu Khan]

They were the subject of my dissertation at Oxford. ;)

[flavrmeistr]

200 Motels. Best film featuring Ringo Starr ever.

[Heatherb]

My mother Princess Bubbles ('cause that's what I called her) knew that I liked cheese, broccoli and chicken as a child. I didn't eat many vegetables back then, and she was working on a master's degree, sooooo....

She made chicken divan. A lot. Like there were weeks where it was all she served me. So something I originally loved became my most dreaded meal. I had a mental block against eating chicken divan for well over a decade.

Her mother (my grandma) used to make lasagna. She was not Italian and had solid grasp of Italian cooking--and was never a very good cook to begin with. She made it ALL THE TIME. Oh god it was painful - raw garlic CHUNKS, pureed tomatoes instead of sauce, sometimes cottage cheese instead of ricotta. I would go to her house for dinner hoping for her legendary chicken paprikash, and 50% of the time it would be that godawful lasagna. *whimper* (It helped, I suppose, that it was served with a great deal of love.)

[DuffyH]

Heatherb - It's sweet that your Mom made what you'd eat. Love the story about Grandma, too. I don't think I ever had lasagna until I left home. Mom wasn't big on casseroles, Dad was a meat and potatoes man. Or so I thought.

Lots of times we'd ask for something we'd had at a friend's house or a restaurant, and Mom would say she couldn't make it because Dad didn't like it. It wasn't until they divorced and Dad took us out to his new favorite Mexican place that I learned it was code for "I don't like it/know what it is and I'm not about to cook it." She wasn't a very adventurous cook. It took me years to become open to new tastes.

But she's Mom, so she gets the Mom love. <3

[sandylc]

Yeah, I think I am figuring out that my poor departed Dad got the blame for Mom not making a lot of things.....sigh.

[hill food]

it was only in recent years I decoded "oh I think everybody likes 'X'" to mean: I like it and it's what I'm making.

[DuffyH]

We used to get "But you love ____." Protestations that no, we really didn't, were met with assurances that yes, we did love it, and would be eating it that very night. :)

[Cactus Wren]

Oh, yeah. Or, "You're just not *letting* yourself like it." My mom had a guilt trip she'd lay on me, to the effect that I was deliberately *refusing* to like food X (textured vegetable protein, a soy-based meat substitute which she cooked plain) or recipe Y (tuna salad made of one can of the cheapest grade of tuna, three or four cups of chopped celery, a cup of chopped onion, and half a bottle of Kraft Thousand Island dressing instead of mayonnaise) out of some indefinable combination of snobbery and spite.

[flavrmeistr]

Tuna and onions. Detestable.

[linguafood]

And yet - fabulous on pizza. Just add corn.

[Heatherb]

LOL. It was sweet until it became just pure torture.

Funny enough, my mother is a spectacular cook. The interesting thing is that my mother and father both became more adventurous in their tastes in food when they divorced. Weird.

[Perilagu Khan]

FWIW, my mom's lasagna used cottage cheese instead of ricotta, and I now prefer it. Italians would blanch, I'm sure, but oh well.

[flavrmeistr]

Topping the list has to be fried eggs. My mother made a great many wonderful dishes, but she could not fry an egg. She would always have the pan too hot and the butter would burn, making nasty, gray little hockey pucks. This was the daily occurrence known as "breakfast". I was in my twenties before I ever considered ordering eggs in a restaurant, even though I turned out thousands of omelettes as a line cook. She made other weird stuff that defied description, including what we refer to as her "dill period", when almost everything she made had dill in it. To this day, I will immediately flee any gathering where the presence of dill is detected.

[suzigirl]

Oh the dreaded "dill period". My mom used to do that. The most memorable would be the oregano and french onion soup mix phase. And i think she taught my mom to cook eggs

[DuffyH]

To this day Mom's eggs are over hard with VERY crispy edges. Yuck! But then, Mom likes literally EVERYTHING overcooked. When she came to stay with us it took months to get her to eat chicken that wasn't dried out, and she does examine it closely, poking and prodding before venturing the tiniest bite. She still doesn't think food is safe unless it's completely dry and chewy. <sigh>

[suzigirl]

Is it just chicken, pork and vegetables or does she kill beef too?

[DuffyH]

suzigirl, beef is the worst! She prefers her steak VERY, VERY well done. Dry and brown all over. Burgers are hockey pucks. So that's what we were served as children. As an adult I switched to well done, then moved to medium-well for a very long time, and now I'm good with medium to medium-well. But it took decades! Fortunately, Dude likes his medium-rare, so our son got to learn about steak and order his any way he wanted. He's a medium-rare guy like his dad.

For years Mom claimed she doesn't like Mexican food, except for the odd cheese enchilada. We're talking your basic border food dishes. Won't eat 'em. Last year I found out she doesn't trust the food, thinks the meat is undercooked. I tried to explain to her about chicken and beef sitting in a steam table for hours, but she's not buying it. Oddly enough, she loves my Mexican food, but she knows the beef/chicken/pork will be "almost" cooked, and she's seen us use our thermapen to make sure food is at safe temps. Mom's a riot, and I love her to pieces! :)

[suzigirl]

My mom was like that for years. Everything had to be cooked to death. Somehow my dad convinced her to try steak with some pink. She did ease up a bit. When i started seeing my bf he only ate steak well done because that is what he was raised on. We had to remedy that. He eats them Med rare now. I am glad. Its much easier to pull the steaks at the same time and eat them hot together.

[DuffyH]

It's an adjustment, to be sure, and it's more about texture than taste, at least for me.

[Perilagu Khan]

The Khantessa has a similar hang-up, although she's making progress; she'll now eat beef that shows the faintest suggestion of pink.

[Candy]

My mother would cook on weekends for the up coming week. There was pot roast every week followed by pot roast soup. I rarely make it.

Now to the tales of liver. None of us liked it. It was never cooked in our home, until she remarried and he was a liver lover. He decided he could trick us in to eating it and liking it.
He ground it up and made Bolognase sauce out of it. My niece who was about 4 took a bite and said (insert name) "what the hell is this?" I think we picked up something quick on our way home and liver was nnever served in that house again.

[AmyH]

My mother, of blessed memory, was a fairly good cook. She had some things she made quite well, although she really didn't like having to use more than 5 ingredients or one pot. But two things she really liked to make I really didn't like to eat: braised lamb shanks and baked bluefish. I just can't stomach the gelatinous texture and tendons in the lamb shanks. Somehow she thought I liked them, and one time when I was grown and visiting home she made them for me special. I tried to eat them and had to apologize profusely when I just couldn't force them down. I think the baked bluefish she overcooked or maybe I just don't like oily fish. I actually grew up thinking I hated fish but discovered the right kinds of fish, cooked right, is delicious.

[suzigirl]

I also thought I didn't like fish for years. Turns out I didn't like my moms fish. Love fish now

[DelishDi]

Liverwurst sandwiches with mayonnaise on white bread. Ugh.

[TulsaWife]

My mother used to make Sausage and Potatoes quite frequently for dinner. It really didn't taste bad, but having it so often made me feel like I would be ill.
Occasionally I would have ramen noodles instead of eat sausage and potatoes. I think what really did it for me was when she smothered it in ketchup. I didn't eat mine that way, but the visual of her doing that stuck in my head. I like ketchup, but probably not as much as normal people, lol.

Funny thing is...now that I am married I make sausage and potatoes sometimes. I just don't cook it once a week, lol.

[jpr54_1]

My mother let her rest in peace made at least once a month fried onions,beef liver and sweetbreads.

I eventually came to enjoy liver butnot sweetbreads.

[DuffyH]

I'm sorry for your loss. My own dear mother used to cook liver and onions, too. She would MAKE me eat a few bites, despite my insistence that it made me puke (it did). At least it wasn't more than 4-5x a year.

Now she's quite happy to have me do the cooking, and liver is NEVER on the menu. My #1 kitchen rule is - If I don't eat it, I don't cook it. :)

[Cheflambo]

At least once a week, it seemed, mom served up the early 60s version of Hamburger Helper. This was ground beef, cooked until grey, to which she added canned tomatoes (the slimy lumpy kind with the occasional pieces of skin) and cooked elbow macaroni. That's it. No seasoning, no cheese, no nothing. And although I turned up my nose at it most times, I could usually eat around the nasty tomatoes (and I LOVE tomatoes - did so even back then). Mom put together a family cookbook a few years ago and each of us got a beautifully illustrated, hand-written version. Yes, this recipe is in there. Turns out there were exact proportions she used, and she thought the reason none of us ever made it for our kids is only because we didn't have the recipe.

[DuffyH]

<Turns out there were exact proportions she used, and she thought the reason none of us ever made it for our kids is only because we didn't have the recipe.>

I LOVE that story, thanks for sharing. :)

Mine made the same dish, minus the beef. No kidding, tomatoes and overcooked macaroni. :)

[rccola]

Liver made like leather. No bacon with it, either.

[boagman]

Ugh. My mother would make Veal Parmesan, and it's honestly the only thing that my mother ever cooked that made me physically vomit.

I'm pretty sure I never had to eat it after I vomited...for the *second* episode. She didn't make it much, if ever, after that. Try as she might, try as I might...I just literally could not stomach that garbage.

And my mom was a great cook!

[DelishDi]

Not really. It was the food at school or at the latchkey sitter's house that I usually didn't like. Lima beans and mushy casseroles with unknown ingredients. Also, I really didn't (still don't) like the taste of milk plain.

[Bill Hunt]

Yes. Many had "Bird's Eye" on the package, and most of the rest were in a jar, like beets. Who knew that beets could taste good? Who knew that Brussels sprouts" could taste good? I could go on, and on, but think that I have made my point.

Now, my father loved "steak," but had no clue about quality beef. He would burn cheap beef, and serve that as "steaks."

OTOH, my mother could deep fry mackerel, a very oily fish, and it was great. She knew some secret there. Not all was bad in my culinary life.

Hunt

[PegsterA]

Wow, what a hilarious thread!

My mom was and still is a great cook, but ... Our pediatrician told her children should have liver once a week. She made liver and onions, but also worked it into other dishes hoping we wouldn't notice so everything was suspect. The low point was finding liverwurst and raw onion sandwiches in my lunchbox.

[Bill Hunt]

Luckily for me, there was seldom any liver on the table. If there was, the kids got fish sticks! Other than foie gras, I still harbor that sentiment.

Hunt

[hill food]

oh, do I have you beat Pegster: liver and swiss cheese pizza.

'nuff said? good crust though.

[PegsterA]

Touché!

[nomnomnoms]

My mom didn't believe me when I told her that I was allergic to eggplants, and kept serving it all through high school. One day, I finally gave in and ate some, only to end up with lips that would put Angelina Jolie's to shame, and my tongue swelling to the point that I couldn't close my mouth.
Haven't seen eggplant on the table since, but then again I did move out when I was 18...

[jeanmarieok]

I thought of another. Once a year, my mom would make her mother's vegetable soup. It was a BFD, included making a greasy broth out of a beef shin, and it was important to grind all the vegetables to a uniform spec in a meat grinder. The vegetables were predominantly turnip, rutabega and carrot. Then she'd put some barley in there at the end. It was NASTY. I couldn't eat it.

I remember the greasy broth coating my mouth and everything tasted like turnip. UGH. We were talking about it the other day, and my mom joked that maybe my palate had evolved enough that I would like it now. I had to tell her, it had evolved past hers when I was six and refused to eat it. There was nothing good about it. And I was the only one smart enough to know.

[HillJ]

My MIL made hot dogs stuffed with mashed potatoes. When my husband and I first started dating I dreaded the day she would prepare one for me. Luckily my man kept that experience from ever happening.

[TX_Mommy]

Salmon croquettes. Like crab cakes, except she used canned salmon. I'll bet we had these for dinner twice a week. I still hate the smell. I think canned salmon was cheap or something. Nobody knew about Omega 3 back then.

[AmyH]

I'm starting to feel really awful that I made salmon croquettes for dinner last night! You and so many before you in the thread really dislike them. My kids and husband didn't complain, but maybe it's time for a discussion with them on what dishes I make that they despise.

[sandylc]

I don't care for the ones my mother makes, but I have made them with lovely crisp vegetables and fresh herbs, and then they are smashing....hers are canned salmon with eggs and saltine crumbs; very bland and fishy.

[AmyH]

Well, these had lovely crisp vegetables... and canned salmon. So they were halfway good! I enjoyed them anyway. And as I said above, sometimes I make what they like and sometimes I make what I like.

[DuffyH]

Amy, that was one thing Mom made that I loved. And at the time, the only other fish I would go near was canned tuna and fish sticks. And the fish sticks needed lots of help from catsup!

[AmyH]

Glad to hear it, DuffyH. My kids have never complained about the salmon croquettes, but I'd hate to think they're suffering in silence. This thread has made me decide to ask them if there's anything I should quit making. Better to tell me now than their psychotherapists later!

[sandylc]

Way to go....good mom! My son is in his twenties and I have asked myself many times what I might have assumed and what he didn't mention that maybe he should have......

[AmyH]

Well, I asked the only one home right now. He's 18. He said frittata, omelets and chicken curry. I really truly thought he liked those things! Well, he still may have to eat them on occasion but not as often.

[DuffyH]

Three isn't bad. It could have been worse, Amy. Tell your son he's not alone. I hate to admit that I've never developed a palate for Indian flavors, despite repeated attempts. And really, frittata? Egg pie, one of those foods that can't decide what it is. Wait, that's quiche. Frittata is it's Italian cousin, LOL

Of course, my Mom, Dorthy, being the well-bred midwestern housewife she was, made Salmon Patties. Croquette was what we played on the front lawn. She stopped doing most of the cooking a few years ago, and I thought she would cry when I told her I'd gone searching for a recipe for Salmon Patties and then adapted it to the taste I recalled from childhood. She was doubly thrilled when I stored it in Paprika as "Dorthy's Salmon Patties." And THAT made me very happy. My brother still won't eat them, though. :)

[AmyH]

Well, he actually does like Indian food, it's just the simmer sauce chicken he doesn't like too much. There is one Lorna Sass pressure cooker chicken curry that he does like, and told me that's the only one I can make. As for frittatas, he did like them at one time. I think the summer of the CSA killed them for him. I had so many vegetables to use up, plus a dozen fresh eggs each week, that I made a "frittata of the week", every week.

If you'd be willing to share your Dorthy's Salmon Patties recipe, I'd love to try them!

[sandylc]

So you raised him to be polite and he is OK with eating things that he doesn't prefer in order to be polite. Not bad at all.

[AmyH]

He is definitely polite, and a real sweetheart. Maybe being the youngest of 4 he's learned to just put up with things.

[flavrmeistr]

Yes. Canned salmon with the little bones in it, and dill. Blecch!

[DuffyH]

Fish vertebrae, yum! Those little crunchy rounds are the best part. :)

[flavrmeistr]

Even cat food doesn't have bones in it.

[DuffyH]

Cats aren't known for their well-developed palates. One of mine gets all excited over a can of Hormel Hot Chili. Not that *I* would ever have a can of that stuff in the pantry, no not me.

Hey, don't judge! It makes hellacious good chili nachos. Way better than homemade chili. Why, I've no idea, because other than nachos, it's not worth opening the can. Except Pris likes it. :)

[mwhitmore]

Not sure if this qualifies as cooking, but whenever a bag lunch was needed, Mom packed Oscar Mayer Balogna, French's Mustard on Wonder Bread. Told her I didn't like it, but she said 'There is nothing else'. So I just resigned myself to being hungry every afternoon, and have never eaten any of those three products again. For that matter, I pretty much avoid sandwiches. I was relieved when I got to Junior High and they had a cafeteria. Now most of us don't have fond memories of school cafeteria food, but at least I could say 'Thank Dog, it's not a baloney sandwich!' (paragraph) One thing I noted throughout this thread is that most of the despised dishes are blended. For example, the infamous tuna-noodle casserole, which I never had to eat. The older I get, the more I like foods separate--meat here, vegetable there,starch on the side, not a meat-veg-starch mix.

[Perilagu Khan]

Ever hear of the dyslexic, agnostic insomniac?

He stayed awake nights, wondering if there is a dog. ;)

[DuffyH]

I had those same bologna sandwiches. I added a hefty amount of black pepper and liked them. In my world, black pepper makes almost everything taste better. :0

<The older I get, the more I like foods separate...>

I'm with you there. I used to serve my dude and kid a LOT of hamburger helper, but now I really like things to be discrete components.

[Pwmfan]

The Good: The endless supply of pies and cakes (particularly chiffon cakes) turned out by my 1950s stay-at-home Mom, along with every cookie and bar published by Pillsbury and Betty Crocker at that time. My mom was very shy and didn't have any social life; instead, she baked. We shared a duplex with my fraternal grandparents. Grandma had been a pastry cook at a large Budapest hotel prior to coming to the US so the combination of her strudels, kieflies (please forgive my phonetic spellings of these Hungarian delicacies) and other pastries along with my mom's wonderful creations made for one chubby little chicklet.

The Bad: Not much, although I did share the "eat your liver" experiece described by so many in this thread.

The Ugly: It's a tossup between the pickled pigs feet (which caused my brother and I to flee the house screaming, although we were never forced to try them) and the odiferous Redwing pottery crock of salted cabage fermenting in the basement.

[wyogal]

Cream of Wheat.... until I puked it up in my bowl. I tried running to the bathroom, then to the sink, then, no, maybe I can make it to the bathroom. Nope. Puked it up right in the bowl.
Couldn't tell the difference between the puked up stuff and the stuff that was served.
Never had to eat it again.
Hate it still.
:)

[Puffin3]

Moose kidneys

[MiGab]

My mother made this botched version of Goulash. She dumped a bunch of ingredients in a pot and over cooked it. She would serve it over gelatinous egg noodles. I am sure if a Hungarian ate it they would be deeply offended. Her hash browns are grated potatoes that are burnt on the outside and raw in the middle.

[racer x]

roast beef -- so tough and bland, I still never prepare or order this; to make it even worse, add a baked potato (I don't ever eat them now either)

frozen peas, frozen peas with carrots, frozen peas with carrots & lima beans
frozen brussels sprouts -- one of these was invariably on the daily rotation

Kraft macaroni and cheese -- ok on the day it's cooked, but there were always leftovers that had to be endured (I shudder at the thought); it seemed we had mac & cheese at least once a week

I didn't care for mac & cheese casseroles made from scratch either, but fortunately, they were served much less often.

[Perilagu Khan]

Heh. I think I like Kraft Dinner straight outta the icebox as much as straight offa the fire.

[HappyHattiesburgr]

I used to hate hominy. My dad loved it. Last time I WANTED it as an adult I could not find it. (Funny that as a child I hated hominy but loved grits which are technically called "hominy grits." They of course taste nothing alike.)

[sarichardson]

My mom, grandparents, and all my aunts and uncles would eat at picnics this dish of long-stewed mushy green beans with ham on the bone (also flavorless since it had been cooked to death), then top it with raw tomatoes (which I hated), raw onion (ditto), and a GIANT spoon of mayonnaise. They insisted it was the best. I had to hurry up and serve myself just the beans lest I get stuck with a plateful of the full concoction.

[sandylc]

OMG, those cooked-forever-to-grey-mush green beans. Ugh.

[racer x]

IF they are seasoned right, mushy green beans can be delicous.
Never had them with mayonnaise on top though. The thought makes me queasy.

[JoannaNYC]

Seems that we all had the same type of Betty Crocker/Better Home & Gardens type recipes foisted on us during those "buy it and make it quick and easy from cans and frozen" years. I still cringe at the creamed tuna over noodles, slumgullion (some hamburger stew with instant mashed potatoes) and the leftover turkey made into "Chop Suey". I have to say that I cannot complain when a normal roast or something made, just that Monday - Thursday seemed to be hellish "easy" meals from dubious sources.

[PenskeFan]

I guess I should not blame my mom, she was a working single mother most of my growing up years. She made stuff like that and I hated it, stuff off the back of boxes and women's magazines.
But there were not a lot of cooking shows on easy to cook stuff (or dvrs or even VCRs) and of course no internet either.

Plus many of the Polish dishes she made when she was younger, at home, my dad didn't like and the ingredients were hard to find, so she got out of the habit of making them early on. And truthfully I didn't really like golumpki all that much anyhow back then lol.

[Starmom]

She used to make her own version of "SOS"- boiled hamburger, and then threw in flour. bleagh.

[KaimukiMan]

Mom was a good cook. I liked her tuna casserole, her broccoli was never overcooked, and she had a fairly decent repertoire of dishes she prepared. There was one that we called chicken Galvez because it was a friend of my dad who originally made it, and he was Mr. Galvez. It was not in any way an ethnic dish. As near as I can make out it was a cut up chicken simmered slowly and forever in a mixture of campbell's chicken with rice soup (maybe 2 cans) cambpbell's cream of mushroom soup (1 can) and some salt and pepper. It was invariably served over plain white rice (the edible part.) As a child I was never much of a sauce or gravy fan, and this stuff was awful. No flavor, just bleah chicken in bleah sauce. My parents and my brother loved the stuff. We had it at least once a month. I loathed it. Not being cruel people my folks pretty much let the sauce drain off my piece of chicken before putting it on the plate, and didn't put any sauce over the rice. But i still remember trying to scrape the sauce off the chicken before eating it, and i can hear my dad's voice still.... young man stop playing with your food. just eat it, it won't kill you, your mother made it. Oh really? I thought it was transported from the deck of the starship enterprise dad. It was the only dish I ever suggested should be mailed to those starving children half way around the world (really, I didn't have anything against those kids, just anything to get it off my plate.)

The funny thing was, mom also made a rice and sausage casserole with almost the same ingredients, and it was great. I think this was just too much sauce and not enough flavor. With the casserole the sauce dried up mostly, and the sausage added flavor.

[AsiaDish]

Bitter melon and bitter greens. Oh my gosh, I hated them as a kid. Now that I'm older and my palate has developed (or deteriorated? haha), I really enjoy them. When I introduced my husband to my mom's bitter melon with eggs, he couldn't take the bitterness and can't understand why we love them. I now crave them, who knew!

[lilpixy]

Not necessarily a "cooked by mom" dish but still relevant: Every year for my birthday my stepfather would go out and buy me a chocolate caramel "turtle" kind of cheesecake. EVERY SINGLE YEAR since I was pretty young. The funny part is that every year I despised the thing. I loathe caramel and even as a kid didn't care for sweets. I never had the heart to tell him so I would choke down a piece every year. He had the best of intentions so it would have killed me to tell him I dreaded my birthday every year until I moved out.

[team_cake]

Mom's pot roast. Bless my mother, she worked full-time, took care of my brother and me, and managed to make all of our meals as healthy and balanced as possible, preparing and cooking just about everything from scratch. But man -- that pot roast! Tough, stringy, chewy. To me, it smelled like baby diapers. I got the "You are not leaving the table until you try it," deal...and then my dad would expand that into "You have to finish what's on your plate." I remember chewing and chewing and chewing the same piece and just hating the stringy texture and weird smell (eau de cheap beef, overcooked???). Urgh! I'd sit there for an hour until I could smuggle enough into my napkin on my lap that they seemed satisfied I'd eaten some. My mom would also make "surprise" for dessert, which was homemade fruit salad (and no surprise since it was the only regular dessert in the house) -- usually cut up apples and bananas and grapes. Very healthy, but not a (most) kid's dream dessert. My brother and I still tease her about the non-surprise/surprise fruit salad desserts, especially now that years later she is an accomplished baker and is always trying to stuff us with cheesecakes and other calorie-laden foods when we go home to visit.

[celesul]

My mom is lovely, but she should be banned from the kitchen. She overcooks all meat and most vegetables, creates disasters when she tries to substitute an ingredient in a recipe, and cannot make anything remotely edible unless she follows the recipe quite strictly. I don't understand how she is such a mess in the kitchen, because she's really quite fond of good food. She loves eating out and eating pre-prepared food from the grocery store (we have several wonderful grocery stores nearby). Regardless, she doesn't understand why anything in the kitchen happens the way it does. She still doesn't understand why boiling meat can result in such a dry, chewy meal. It's cooked in liquid, right? (She understands math, science, history... but never cooking).

I dreaded her asparagus when I was little, but I wasn't exactly fond of anything else she cooked. Meatloaf was always kind of inedible. Salmon was beyond overcooked, and broccoli was kind of mushy. She also bought most vegetables frozen.

If she made something good, it was generally something easily prepared (she made gefilte fish by going to the butchers shop and purchasing a frozen log, which she brought home and boiled. It's absolutely delicious-not like the junk from the jars, but also pretty hard to screw up...)

I never really got into cooking when I was little (my siblings and I were convinced that cooking must be impossibly difficult, because mom struggled with it so badly), but I finally started getting interested in it right around when I started college. I did start cooking all of the breakfast type food (eggs, pancakes, etc) when I was in middle school though. I'd make omelets, poached eggs, fried eggs, deviled eggs.. anything but scrambled eggs, which all of mom's omelet attempts resulted in.

My dad took over most of the cooking in the house when I was about 14, which wasn't without drawbacks. He's actually a very good cook, generally. He can be a bit clueless, because he's entirely self-taught (until he became the primary cook in the family, he tended to cook up some meat, heat up a can of soup, nuke some vegetables, and serve us the resulting mixture, if he was asked to provide dinner. Admittedly, it was pretty tasty, particularly compared to mom's cooking...)

The main irritation with him is simply that he's health obsessed, so he refuses to cook with any fat (so, nothing sauteed, let alone fried or complemented with butter) and he is obsessed with perfecting his dishes. So, he tends to make the exact same dinner for a year. It can be a wonderful venison stew, with juicy, delicious chunks of meat, or salmon with the ideal amount of salt and spice, cooked to perfection. But it's still the same dish every time he cooks, sometimes for a year, and we eat the leftovers on the days he doesn't cook... I think he served salmon, broccoli, and brown rice every meal for a year, every other meal for the next year, and once a month after that... Naturally, the leftover salmon got eaten quite quickly, so we were generally left with broccoli and brown rice for the rest of the meals until he cooked again. I was always so excited to have something else whenever I ate away from home, but I'd start craving his signature meal if I was away from home for too long.

When I was growing up, the dishes I thought I liked were generally those my parents never tried to cook, like meals from Turkish or Chinese restaurants. Over time, I've found that I will eat almost anything (although never for a year straight) as long as my mother wasn't the one to prepare it (with the exception of black walnuts, which send me on a desperate spree to get the flavor out of my mouth, and a few other rarely encountered foods).

[Sally LaRhette]

proof of actual difficulty, Hubert Keller makes many fabulous foods, like a hamburger . Just look at the many steps taken to get that fabulous hamburger! And of course, many other dishes, like chicken, salads, ordinary dishes made by home cooks.

[Sally LaRhette]

My son in law's mom made terrible croquettes, he remembers. I was able to tell him that hey actually are incredibly difficult to make.As a chef I had learned many things and come to the conclusion cooking is not easy and a lot of brave homemakers try their bet and do not accomplish
the original dish by a very skilled cook....

[Sally LaRhette]

she was pretty fierce to east what she had cooked....did not cook food you wanted...like a great BLT. She actually was good at mashed potatoes and salad. Come to think of it. We were very poor, living on a war veterans stipend.Close to poverty, in newton that i not easy. lots of envy happens.I became a chef of French Cooking and Amazing flavors were my fortune.

At Newton High, lunch envy was of those who brought BLT'S for lunch...me, peanut butter and grape jelly.

[truman]

The absolute worst was her meatloaf - she made it with farfel (broken-up matza) instead of breadcrumbs, and "baked" it in the microwave so it was completely dry. It took a lot of ketchup to make it edible. The funny thing is that she now makes my (DH's) meatloaf recipe!

Runners-up:
City chicken - always dry, and the skewers freaked me out.
Stuffed cabbage - the sweet and sour plus cabbage stink made me gag.

[marymanchester]

My mom's meatloaf was great. Her meals weren't remarkable but the leftovers were somehow better than the original meal. She was so concerned about our health that she made liver once a month even tho' she hated it. I'd heard so many awful things about liver that the first time we had it I was ready to drown out the taste with milk. (we alway had milk at dinner). I took a bite of liver, a big swallow of milk and it was worse than I thought possible. Turned out the milk I was drinking had gone sour. Without sour milk, I actually loved liver. I don't think my mom ever really enjoyed cooking and she let me take over and be creative whenever I wanted. We never had to eat things we didn't like if we at least "took a bite" My mom bought that gum, "Chicklets" and we were only allowed to have one at a time. When the little boxes that contained 2 pieces came out my mom said, "one for now, one for later." My mom made Minute Rice and served it plain - no salt, butter, gravy - pretty yucky. My dad was always "on a diet" so we had pretty plain food, always boiled, broiled or baked. My mom used the pressure cooker a lot and I remember she wouldn't let us run around when it was in use because it might explode. I was terrified of it. I don't remember going to friends' homes and being impressed with their mom's cooking. But once when I went to a neighbor's house to babysit the mother told me if I was hungry there was a nice tongue in the refrigerator. I was very grateful the only thing I had to put up with was bland rice.

[hill food]

one has to ask... was Dad on a diet maybe because he was stopping off in diners on the way to and from home?

[marymanchester]

Dad took the LIRR from NYC to Long Island but I think in those days there was a bar car!

[hill food]

it did indeed instead of the BYOB now. that has always amazed me how accepted/expected open container is on both the LIRR and also the SEPTA in Philly.

[marymanchester]

As long as it's only the passengers and not the engineers I guess

[Nyleve]

After following this thread for the past few months, I'm starting to get this queasy feeling that I need to ask my kids what I cooked for them at home that they despised. Sounds to me like I might be in for some bad news. They're both in their twenties now and out of the house so the subject is reasonably safe to broach.

[hill food]

nah don't beat yourself up. they survived. we all make things sometimes we think are pretty good but everyone else politely declines seconds.

[Nyleve]

Just thinking I don't want my sweet and sour meatballs to show up on a thread like this in 20 years.

[hill food]

HA! Too Late! oh they'll just tweet or post pictures to FB. so if they start snapping photos at the dinner table be wary.

[Nyleve]

I've emailed them. Will report results.

[hill food]

DO! and I must say you're a brave and selfless one.

[Nyleve]

#1 son claims couscous. COUSCOUS?!?! Seriously? I mean, is there a more benign and innocent food? #2 son says there wasn't anything he dreaded. But COUSCOUS? I'm shocked, really.

[small h]

I'm with #1 son on this one. Couscous tastes like sand (I feel the same way about kasha). Plus, people like to put raisins in it. Bleah.

[Nyleve]

Wow. No idea.

[small h]

Note that my father has a deep and (in my view) bizarre hatred of barley. So I may have inherited my dislike of tiny pasta and some seemingly benign grains.

[melpy]

I like raisins in it!
My fiancé would prefer I don't make regular couscous. I fin I prefer Israeli couscous so when we do have it that is what I use.

[Perilagu Khan]

My dad wasn't crazy about couscous. I love it, but he just didn't dig it.

[hill food]

while I'm not a huge fan of couscous, unless one is doing a tajine, fruit has little or no place within.

that pales in comparison to some of what's been posted here.

if that is the best (worst?) they can come up with you can sleep all smug and snug and enjoy the dreams of the content.

[Nyleve]

I think you're right. I mean couscous? That's not even a whole dish! It's, like, a component of something more complex. I am not worrying about this.

[Perilagu Khan]

Mrs. Khan makes a chicken couscous with lots of harissa that is so special she makes it for my birthday.

[pdxgastro]

It may be a texture thing. Just one guess.

[hill food]

pdx - yeah that's a good call as the flavor certainly doesn't bother me, it would be like finding rice too flavorful or something

[marymanchester]

Maybe it's one of those things that are "in-grained" in each of us (sorry)

[hill food]

oh there's a "germ" of truth in what you say (sorry right back)

[tseptember]

How do I go about signing up my wife for the Worst Cook in America show??? I so dearly love her, but her "cooking" would make a great nutritional supplement..... in a prison. All that needs to be said......

[hill food]

gee, take over cooking a few meals a week and keep it quiet on the others?

[MelMM]

My mom was an excellent cook (still is, but she's in a retirement home so doesn't cook much anymore), and as my parents were avid gardeners, the food I ate growing up was very high quality compared to what a lot of people were getting at that time (seventies). Almost all our vegetables came from the garden, and they grew plenty extra to put up for the winter. My mother is from southwestern Mississippi, so the cooking was mostly classic southern stuff with a strong cajun and creole influence.

The thing about my mother is that she ruled the house with an iron fist, and as the primary cook, made whatever she wanted without regard for anyone's likes or dislikes (and that included my father). She made what she wanted and we were expected to eat it. No ifs, ands or buts.

My dad did not care for rice, of all things. In my mother's cooking, rice was a staple. Dirty rice, jambalaya, gumbo over rice - you get the idea. Dad obediently ate what he was served - maybe just a small serving of the rice, but he always took some and always ate it with never a word of complaint.

I was not as saintly as my father. Now, the rice dishes, I loved. Where Mom and I crossed swords was over English peas. I liked peas. I would go out to the garden and steal them and eat them raw. And I could eat them cooked if they were just barely cooked. But Mom cooked them until soft, and I just couldn't take that texture. Many a battle was fought over English peas, and I always lost.

Mayo was another thing. Her coleslaw, tuna salad - anything with mayo in it - she used more than I could take, and it just made the stuff unpalatable to me. After I left home, it took about 20 years before I could eat anything with a mayo-based dressing.

[sandylc]

Oh, boy, I really get the mayo thing. To this day, my mom is probably trying to resist taking a spoon and a giant jar of mayo and going to town on it. Gross. It also took me years to accept small amounts of good-quality mayo used well.

[eclecticsynergy]

Makes me think of a brief exchange between two roommates in the movie Notting Hill...

(Spike is eating from a take-out cup with a spoon.)
Spike (pensively): There's something wrong with this yoghurt.
William: That's not yoghurt, it's mayonnaise.
Spike: Oh. Right. (goes back to eating as he turns away.)

[sandylc]

Ugh.

[kubasd]

Just watched Notting Hill the other night... that scene makes me shudder every time.... and I love mayo!

[melpy]

Love this scene. Usually have to pause the movie from the fit of giggles that ensues. Spike is fabulous.

[masha bousha]

Swedish meatballs. Beyond gross. The smell still sickens me.

[ctfoodguy]

My mom was a terrific cook. I'd learn to deal with her liver and onions and her tuna noodle casserole, but what disgusted me (even to this day) is chicken and dumplings. UGH!!!

[Perilagu Khan]

What was wrong with 'em?

My mom's chicks and dumps was probably her greatest dish.

[hill food]

PK - oh it can be screwed up and in a most royal way esp. the dumplings. oh yes.

[sandylc]

I am the only person in my family who asked my grandmother for her dumpling recipe/lessons. They are amazing. One of the most amazing things about it is that it contains only chicken, water, salt, pepper, and flour. Not one thing else.

[hill food]

technique counts for so much. I'd love to make my own tortilla but I have this enormous hunch there's something that I don't know.

[sandylc]

What kind of tortillas? I make both kinds fairly well...not great, but better than old bought ones.

[hill food]

either one. I know it's not rocket science, but I can't help but feel it's one of those things a grandmother has to teach you. y'know a "work the dough but not too much, sprinkle just enough water but not too much" situation. I can cook on the fly just fine, but maybe I need to just suck it up and give it a shot.

[Perilagu Khan]

I feel the same way about gnocchi and spaetzel. I actually tried making gnocchi once and it was a borderline disaster.

But I can make my mom's chicken and dumplings like a pro.

[sandylc]

I've had good luck so far with both gnocchi and spaetzle. I think that many of these things are made easy by getting just the right info phrased in just the right way by the right person. Mario Batali's old show was great for this - he has a great way of boiling it down to the basics and then explaining them.

[eclecticsynergy]

"I think that many of these things are made easy by getting just the right info phrased in just the right way by the right person."

Exactly right, particularly when it comes to the traditional recipes/techniques that are simple & basic but somehow also subtle & method-sensitive.

[tseptember]

Tuna Croquettes.. The worst thing I ever tasted or had the displeasure of swallowing. No matter how much catchup, horseradish or tarter sauce you put on it, it never covered up the taste or the smell. But she was so happy to make them for us. Excuse me... I need to go burn off my tastebuds.

[Perilagu Khan]

Tuna's comin' in for a real drubbin'.

[eclecticsynergy]

For me it was steak and kidney pie, a favorite of my stepfather's. Mother would spend the whole day on it. The house smelled like a urinal all afternoon, and then we had to eat the stuff.

Also an early vegetarian offering, spaghetti and nutballs with awfully bland sauce. Although I think most of my problem with that dish was the gritty 1970s whole wheat pasta. She made it once with an artichoke flour pasta and it was only half bad.

[sandylc]

I admire the determination of the whole foods pioneers - there is a reason why real food still has a bad reputation to this day!

[Wankel]

Brown sugar pie. Ooof....

[kubasd]

care to share more? this sounds delicious to me...

[Perilagu Khan]

Yeah. Brown sugar and pie--what's not to love?

[Wankel]

Its the only kind of pie she ever made, and she made them often.

[kubasd]

Do you have any idea what was in it?

[NurseMom17]

My mom is really a good cook, with the following exceptions: The two things she made for us that I couldn't stand growing up were corned beef, cabbage, and potatoes boiled in a pot on top of the stove, with the corned beef fat glistening at the top. Tasted worse than it smelled, if that's possible. The other thing she'd do, and I would dread, was when she'd cook steaks in the broiler. Shoe leather with salt and pepper is what resulted. But my dad was a meat and potatoes man, and he loved it. I'm 53 now and still can't stand corned beef, and if I eat a steak, it's in a restaurant. I leave that to the experts!

[hill food]

if I'm around and steak is on the agenda, I just hijack it and grill under the pretense of 'helping'. even if it's 32 degrees Fahrenheit. raining? I'll do it in the garage with the door open. I cringe when I see steak made into shoe leather. you want it that way? I'll hold my tongue and do it, but not on my plate bub. and it's not just her Dad is equally guilty, both have said they like it medium rare, yet no matter who is doing it, it comes out tough and grey.

[KaimukiMan]

It is possible to do steaks very nicely under the broiler. I think i was 12 before I knew you could cook them any other way. Put the oven rack as close to the elements/flame as possible. Get the elements good and hot (when using electric range). Keep a close eye on the steak, as with all things close to the broiler it will go from raw to burnt in a matter of nano-seconds. Turn once, just like on a bbq. No, you won't get any smoke flavor, but you can get nicely seared but still pink and juicy steaks this way.

[Perilagu Khan]

If for some reason I'm unable to grill my steak, under the broiler is the way I prepare it and it turns out fine. The only thing lacking is the kiss of smoke.

[racer x]

Absolutely. Throw some sliced onions on them as they're being broiled. Even some garlic salt instead of plain salt, maybe. Mmmm.

Part of the key to success is choosing the right cuts in the first place, though. That may have been a large part of NurseMom17's mother's problem.

[hill food]

broiler can indeed work fine. I guess I was posting under the umbrella of ideals. (I did live for about 6 years with no outdoor space)

[msgenie516]

My Mom was never the greatest cook but I can't remember anything I disliked as much as "Rouladen". Even her stuffed peppers made with UNCOOKED rice were better, although a bit crunchy! I don't think she made the Rouladen wrong but they are thin pieces of pounded steak that are rolled up with a filling of bacon, onions, mustard, and pickles. And I never liked mustard or pickles (could tolerate the pickles by themselves but never with meat, pick them off hamburgers to this day). I also don't like bacon with any other meat. She thought they were the greatest thing, so I never said anything and suffered in silence.

[hill food]

what's even better is the day one learns to translate "Oh I think everyone likes this" into its real meaning: "I like it and that's what I'm making"

[Perilagu Khan]

" Even her stuffed peppers made with UNCOOKED rice were better, although a bit crunchy! "

I imagine so! lol

[therosenthalpottery]

She was a fine cook but the liver and onions and the lima beans in the frozen mixed vegetables really sucked.

[tcamp]

My dad taught my mom to make rouladen and I loved it! Sounds alot like your mom's recipe but I do not recall the bacon. May have been there but the overwhelming tastes were mustard and pickle, both of which I love.

[hawkeyeui93]

My mother is a great cook, but once a month she made beef liver and onions. The only way I could choke it down was to drown it in Heinz 57 Sauce ....

[limegimlet]

My mom is a lovely cook and baker. However, she made this god-awful smoked turkey salad wrap with huge, wet chunks of smoked turkey, dried fruits (like cranberries, raisins, and prunes), and celery, and so much mayonnaise it would ooze out of the flavorless tortilla it was served in. I have nightmares about this dish.

[onigiri]

My Mom was and still isn't too good at cooking. Growing up I would cringe when I saw the soup pot out, which was almost once a week. Her version of fish chower: frozen fish, frozen corn, onions, powdered milk and enough water to make "chowder". It was always curdled and she never used salt in her cooking. When I finally tasted a proper chowder I was speechless!

[elmwoodchica]

i'm having so much fun reading this thread - i'm seriously laughing out loud! what great therapy. my mom wasn't an awful cook, but she was a "eat everything on your plate/no substitutes" immigrant (from south india - i know, some of you are probably thinking, so lucky! but... it's not so simple) mom type - so the more i reminisce, the more i'm remembering.

also, she would complain about having to do all the cooking, but the truth is that the kitchen was her domain, one which she didn't want to relinquish control of, and that she got her self-esteem from. this meant that: she never wanted to eat out, even though it would save her from having to cook; we had to eat what she made, because if we suggested eating something else, she'd take it personally and get angry; and that she hated it when i started getting into cooking as a teenager and got compliments - she'd try and come up with all sorts of reasons why i couldn't cook, and why she had to (so twisted!). the truth is, in her old age she has started letting me into her kitchen a little more. i actually made the stuffing for thanksgiving, and she even complimented me on it. though she still complains to me about 1) how much work she does in the kitchen, and 2) how much my dad likes eating out. ha!

ANYway. with that as a preface, and also, with the given that i love her very much, and know that she was doing the best she could given her situation - some things that she cooked on a regular basis that i didn't enjoy:

- vegetable soup made with water (oh how i longed for her to buy/use chicken broth!), containing chunks of long-simmered green pepper, and also kidney beans - ugh! the former were so bitter and mushy; the latter, the one bean i didn't like. she'd douse the soup with dried "italian seasoning" for flavor. for a long time i didn't like the taste of oregano as a result. this trio would also appear in her "spaghetti sauce" but at least there, it was somewhat masked by the tomato sauce.

- "ratatouille" - also with the aforementioned italian seasoning. eggplant was one of her favorite veggies, and she thought she was being very gourmet, making this, but she would use overripe/overgrown eggplant, which had the most awful bitter taste that she didn't notice. i really had to force that stuff down.

- when we got older, she seemed to become an even worse cook - i think she was getting bored/tired of it (though she wouldn't give it up). in my teens, her favorite way of flavoring things was to singe a pile of garlic cloves - i.e. blacken them - and add them to stuff. she LOVED the flavor. i can't even remember how many possibly ok dishes she ruined with those cloves. one of her favorite ways to use them was to add them to tomato juice heated up with very minimal spices - a sort of quick south indian rasam - and then add a can of beans - garbanzo, pinto, sometimes kidney (ack). this was heated through and served over white rice. the overriding flavor was of burnt garlic. need i say more?

- worst for me is that she would make food very hot (as in chili-heat - aromatic spices i loved). she'd often leave big hunks of green chili and dried red chilis in the pot. i often found her cooking too hot (i now know i'm a super-taster), and every so often i'd bite into the chili - oh how i dreaded that. if i said anything, she'd suggest i was making it up/take it personally/etc. the only remedy offered was to add yogurt or drink more water/milk.

what's really interesting to me is, reading of other people's most despised dishes, so many are things that i DREAMED of my mom making! i longed for bland food of the sort others have described. i remember one of the first foods i attempted to make, probably around the age of 10, was - i kid you not - white sauce. it took me several tries to get it smooth. i think i ate it with toast. meatloaf? i remember craving it (she actually made meatloaf a couple of times when i was young, and it was really good! but probably too time-consuming). when she made american style meats - baked chicken breasts, pork chops, fish fillets - it was usually dried out, but i didn't mind, i was just excited to have something "american". the nights she'd let me and my sister make boxed mac and cheese, i was in heaven. i longed for these things called "casseroles" that i read of, made with a "cream of" soup and topped with potato chips. and also pot roast, hot dogs, swiss steak. i still remember the first time i had tuna noodle casserole - my college friend made it for dinner, i LOVED it, got the recipe from her, and subsisted on it almost all summer, to my roommates' horror. vienna sausages and underwood deviled ham? i yearned to try them, and finally one year i got my chance: they were on the list of required items for our school's required earthquake emergency kit. at the end of the year, i brought the kit home and happily devoured both (the vienna sausages were a letdown, but i loved the deviled ham).

to my mother's credit, there were several things she did well. i liked most of her dal dishes, the backbone of any indian household's cuisine; her indian chicken curry was a reliable once-a-few-weeks, hard-to-ruin treat; and especially her indian-style sauteed veggies, i really enjoyed, when she made them well (not with too much chili or burnt garlic! :-). broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage - i loved these as a kid, and still do, because of how she cooked them - sauteed and lightly spiced. i'm very thankful that she in general attempted to feed us balanced, healthy meals with lots of veggies; but the whole "clean your whole plate" philosophy is one that i think goes too far, and one i intend not to continue, if i ever have kids.

[hill food]

I may be related to you as well. a bad cook with kitchen control issues - oh yeah I know that scene. just 'cause i make it different isn't a critique of yours (ahem) but I would snarf the last paragraph of your Mom's food.

[elmwoodchica]

probably so. i will admit, i remember eating veggies "american"-style and being fairly horrified and thankful for the way my mom usually made them. (mind you, she reminded us of this CONSTANTLY - telling us about the horrific meals she would see her colleagues eat at work, how they'd marvel over her lunches, etc.) but the truth is, having grown up eating not only my mother's home-cooked indian food, but also many other "aunties'" versions of the same and other dishes, at parties/special occasions/etc, i know that there are a lot better indian home cooks out there than my mom! she's fairly middle of the pack. maybe even towards the bottom. (kind of hard to say, but it's true!) i'm of the opinion that when it comes to food, home-cooked is really where it's at.

[Perilagu Khan]

That's a very interesting post.

[elmwoodchica]

thank you!

[Berheenia]

Deviled ham is way underrated these days. I used to love making a deviled ham sandwich on the beach or in a canoe and combined with some savory breadcrumbs it makes a mean stuffed mushroom!

[Perilagu Khan]

I wholeheartedly agree! In fact, tonight's dinner will be toasted English muffins with deviled ham and melted American cheese.

[Pia]

The burnt garlic sounds terrible! I too am Indian and grew up wishing for meatloaf and tuna noodle casserole. My mom to this day makes me eat bitter melon, saying, "Try it, you'll like it!" as if I haven't tried it literally hundreds of time before and, nope, still don't like it.

I wonder what my kids will say about my cooking...

[MoxieLouise]

My mom was a wonderful cook but there were a few things we used to butt heads on...beets (ugh), coleslaw (ugh), and she would fix liver and onions for herself at times but never made the rest of us eat that. I don't know why she gave us a reprieve on that, but made us eat other stuff...it always smelled so yucky. But the tuna casserole I'm OK with, although I burned my husband out on it the first year we were married. I was 17 and it's all I knew how to cook!

[Luna2372]

Funny...I remember not liking coleslaw...but slaw happens almost every night here in some form or another.

[MysticYoYo]

Pasta fazool (pasta e fagioli). Ugh. My older brother and I loathed it, but my father and younger brother and sister loved it, so we were out voted.

[Luna2372]

MYY,

would that be white beans and pasta in the same dish? I

[Munkipawse]

My mom was not a good cook growing up and has become even less so as I've gotten older. Its ok though cause she has strengths in other areas of homemaking that i learned and i was able to learn all my cooking skills from various relatives, friends and friends mothers. One dish that stands out in particular was her making a pan fried dish such as salmon cakes (salmon from a can) or sirlion and adding a can of stewed tomatos. For some reason in my mom's mind adding a stewed can of tomatos with meat in a pan automatically elevated the taste, for myself and my sister it just made everything too mushy and odd tasting. To this day i'm not fond of any meat heated with or covered in stewed tomatoes. :(

[sandylc]

Previous generations really were serious about their gender role assignments. I wonder how many of our fathers may have been more interested and maybe very good at cooking had it not been strictly prohibited. Some people like to cook and are good at it, and others less so - it is now accepted that male/female isn't a factor. My mom actually complained to me several times that the husband of a couple she knew was being "starved to death" by his wife because she "refused to cook for him" anymore. I asked my mom if the husband knew where the grocery store and kitchen were, and Mom didn't understand my point!!!

[Perilagu Khan]

I'm with you on that one. Swiss steak was one of my least favorite mommy dishes. And I was, and still am, a hardcore carnivore.

[woodleyparkhound]

Me too! I hated Swiss steak! Forgot all about it, mercifully, until your post!

[EWSflash]

Oh absolutely- I don't like anythign that has perfectly good beef stewed in perfectly good tomatoes. That goes for any seafood done in the veracruz style.

[Perilagu Khan]

We can make an exception for Bolognese sauce.

[EWSflash]

You are welcome to my bolognese too. I don't like beef in my Italian tomato sauce. Unless they're meatballs. Almost forgot about that.

[DuffyH]

Mmmm, bolognese. I'll take it, if it's smooth. I'm not a fan of chunky cooked tomatoes in anything, so tend to use whatever tomatoes are specified and puree 'em before adding them to what I'm cooking.

I think it goes back to childhood. When money was tight, Mom would pour a can of some kind of tomatoes over macaroni and call it dinner. It was cheap and kept us fed, but it put me off canned tomatoes for life.

[Perilagu Khan]

I'm the same with cooked chunks of maters. Whenever I make pasta sauce, I process to a texture slightly chunkier than a puree.

[DuffyH]

I've only recently learned that our preference isn't the rarity I once thought it was. There are lots like us!

[RedNailz]

Worse than my mom's tuna casserole was something called Hurry Tuna Curry and served it on noodles. It was a horrific shade of yellow and I hated it! I held my breath and choked it down because, of course, there was no other option. It took about 30 years before I could try real curry.

As an adult I tried joking with my mother about Hurry Tuna Curry. She said it was the 70's and tuna was what they could afford. I then realized my parents never let us know just how tight money was during those days, so I enjoyed a carefree childhood.

[PenskeFan]

Yeah I know that was behind many of the bad "yuck" worthy meals my mom made. I wonder if I could handle it so gracefully. Of course as long as my youngest has his Kraft M&C he is fine.

[Alwayscookin]

Yes, every Saturday my mother would cook something she called Farmer's soup, a kind of vegetable soup with turnips which, to this day, makes me want to cry out of sheer frustration. I will eat anything, from sea urchin and calamari to meat tartar, but I will never eat that soup again. I believe she did this out of some kind spite, always telling me that I was being narrow of mind. Really, it was just sadism, pure and simple! It's funny, because she is actually a good cook...just has a mean steak, I guess.

[socky]

Lima beans, apple sauce, and pork chops so dry and tough that my brother and I would choke on the splinters. All unseasoned, with 'gravy' that tasted like floury water, complete with flour lumps.

Ah, but I'd eat it every day for 5 more minutes with her!

[hill food]

yeah I think that is the undertow of these "gripe about childhood food" threads.

we understand we are lucky if we still have them around to grouse about and also know we'll be sorry when they're gone. vent 'em while you got 'em (but with respect of course).

[sandylc]

Our floury, lumpy, water was flavored with burnt grease! Yum! You, know, from the dry, overcooked pot roast!

[vienta]

Tacos with hard shells, ground beef, and 'taco sauce' made out a mixture of ketchup, mustard, and a little mayo *shudder*. Until I was about 22 I thought i HATED mexican, turns out I love mexican and just hated my mom's version of it. I also was forced to sit at the table until my milk was gone, long after it at turned warm and sour. I've only recently been able to stomach it again, and even then, only in latte form. :)

[PotatoPuff]

yes! All sorts of things I thought I hated, but when I got older I realized I only hated my parents versions! I might have to start a thread about this....

[jbsiegel]

Pistachio pudding and some sort of awful spice cake thing in a 9x13 pan.

[PenskeFan]

Leftover casserole - with canned peas added. I hated those.

But looking back, since we were really poor, I should have been thankful we had dinner almost every night, enough to eat and a roof over our head.

Still, I dont like peas mixed into any food I eat, especially canned ones.

[silverlakebodhisattva]

My Mom tried to be adventurous for her time ( for 3years we lived 3 blocks from Sunset Magazine); my mother-in-law, when I met my wife, however, thought it was a great "time-saver" to pre-cook pasta and freeze it in plastic bags. Oh yes, and my step-grandmother made a Jello-sour-cream-and-frozen-blueberries thing which she brought to Thanksgivings and which became infamous as " Martha's Blue Mold".

[roxlet]

It is funny reading these posts since the things that I hated as a child are foods that any foodie would pay good money to eat now. Things like escarole soup, steak pizzaiola, stuffed cabbage and basically any vegetable that wasn't salad, string beans or artichokes were things I despised. I would dread the dinner hour since I knew that I'd be doing my homework in front of a congealing bowl of something I had refused at dinner. Eventually, I'd have to leave the table to go to bed, but it was a never-ending war. Things were made worse by the fact that my sister would eat anything, and she was rosy-cheeked and plump while I was skinny and sallow. "Look at how your sister eats her minestra," my grandmother would say. This would cause me to dig my heels in even further. She loved cream of wheat or farina for breakfast -- things that would make me want to barf. And forget the "chocolate egg nog," which was just milk, a raw egg and chocolate syrup whirred in a blender -- but not quite enough, so there would be a string of albumen to gag on. And the smell of the bacala soaking in the cold pantry was enough to send me over the edge. I often wonder how it would be if I could go back in time and eat some of the meals that I steadfastly refused to consume. I was a stubborn child, and must have been a real pleasure sitting at dinner and gagging at the latest atrocity that constituted dinner for me!

[AnnaBaptist]

"Chicken fricassee". I put that in quotes because it resembled no chicken fricassee recipe that I have ever read. It was just boiled chicken with some celery and a bay leaf thrown into the stew pot. I think of that nasty, white, gooseflesh-covered skin on the chicken and I want to hurl. It was one of my dad's favorite dishes, though, so we had it often.

[Perilagu Khan]

After reading your post, I want to hurl too. Thanks a lot! ;)

[tcamp]

Oh, god, that reminds me of my mom's version of chicken fricassee. As bad as you suggest, plus canned asparagus which added nothing positive to the dish.

[Berheenia]

I hated it too! We had chicken every other Sunday and every other chicken was chicken fricassee on Minute Rice -...

[bitchincook]

My mom was married at age 21 in the early 1950's, and she fully accepted the food industry's line that processed foods were superior to the way her mother had cooked. That would have been okay, but she had a quirk about wasting electricity in the refrigerator, so she set it to the warmest possible temperature. The whole family regularly got sick with "bugs" that were really food poisoning. I didn't realize it at the time, though when I went off to college I noticed I stopped getting sick. Thought I grew out of it! I love my mom dearly, and I'm relieved that she is moving into an assisted living facility where the cooking, and refrigeration, will be done for her.

[Perilagu Khan]

Wow. Your mom was the original "Frugal Gourmet." ;)

[sandylc]

Wow, also. And none of you died? Whew.

[jeanmarieok]

I was thinking the same thing - just WOW.

[EWSflash]

They're probably extremely immune to food poisoning at this point.

[iL Divo]

"I love my mom dearly" < very sweet.
I agree she didn't know better [that was back in the day] things were different.
just ask my mom Nanc and her best girlfriend George everyday religously watching Jack La Lanne

[biscuit]

Something disgusting called Diamond Jim (spinach, eggs, mushrooms, and ???).

It always tasted like throw up to me.

[iL Divo]

we were very good children and didn't complain much at the table (or weren't allowed to < I know it was one or the other :) anyway.......nothing creeping me out either about constants mom made. but...
I didn't like:
1. that she used kidney beans and celery in her chili con carne
2. she thought for some reason we were supposed to eat and like rutabagas
3. liver and onions (even bacon wrapped liver) was detested

[iL Divo]

Peril, if I begged could you post even just one of your moms dishes that you loved?

[mokafeinomane]

I learned to like meatloaf quite recently, as I was stigmatized with an idea of it as being greasy, weirdly sweet, compact yet crumbly as it kept falling apart : well, unappetizing. The sauce made by mixing cream of tomato, ketchup and brown sugar and poured atop of it was the worst bit, it burnt as it cooked.

Sadly, both my brother and my father-in-law LOVED the stuff so it was a regular at the family table. Furthermore, it was convenient to my mom who apprehends cooking as a chore rather than a pleasure.

I now make mine by mixing different minced meats, adding a whole lot of grated veggies and apple to the mix, an egg and some panko. Sauce is on the side, could be tomato-basil, could be beer gravy ou a kinda sauce Robert. But it certainely looks and tastes better than the original version.

[pdxgastro]

What you're making is one big delicious meatball! With different sauces too. Yum.

[Perilagu Khan]

I'm all about big, delicious meatballs with manifold sauces.

[Sushiqueen36]

This is such a fun thread.
My mother was/is a very good cook but 2 things came to mind for me:
Beer Cheese Soup- it was cheddar based, I think. A little bit of a gritty texture and bitter flavor - blech. Maybe she was trying to keep me from trying beer as a teen.

Brussels Sprouts - boiled and served with mayo. That was the side that left me sitting at the table in tears while she did the dishes and the thought still makes me gag. Just had Brussels Sprouts (roasted in bacon fat) for dinner last night and licked the plate.

However, no one makes better chocolate chip cookies or berry pie than my mother. No one.

[freia]

Beer Cheese Soup? Sorry, but WOW.....LOLOL...

[Sushiqueen36]

Apparently there are folks who like it - I haven't tried it in years. I love cheese, like beer but not heated and mixed thanks.

[melpy]

My college roommate and her boyfriend at the time made beer cheese soup once. I thought it was delicious. Have yet to attempt making it at home now because I can't find anything to justify the lack of nutritional value.

[rccola]

If you really like it, the value is in the comfort factor. Emotional nutrition is good for you from time to time.

[Perilagu Khan]

Kinda like seshul healin'.

[rccola]

Only if you both bathe in it.

[tracylee]

I see it on menus around here from time to time - seems to be a popular combination, but I don't like beer so I avoid it.

Dad used to make beer pancakes when we were kids - I didn't like those either.

[freia]

Not really cooked, but once a week we'd have:
Ham out of a tin
Mashed potatoes
"Western Salad"
I could never stand the ham, sliding out of the triangular tin, glistening with gelatinous goop that was never scraped off. It would sit, a sickly pink triangle slightly sliding around on a plate, knife at the ready to hack off a cold quivering piece through the gelatin protective layer. Followed by a healthy scoop of iceberg lettuce, sliced tomatoes and sliced cucumbers slathered with Kraft French dressing.
On the other hand, the mashed potatoes were good...
I love my mom, she doesn't come from a cooking tradition, growing up on a farm with 15 siblings at the poverty line. I just hated that meal, that's all. And every week it would be the same..."what's for dinner" "HAM, potatoes, salad" "I HATE Ham" 'Really? Since when?" "Since ALWAYS" "Oh well..." For years. Sigh.

[julesrules4food]

This is way too funny of a thread. Reading all your horror stories made me so thankful that my mother only cooked a few meals, over and over. None of them good, just decent and we didn't know any better. And I do remember her saying to eat something because there were starving children in Africa. My response, I remember so clearly even though it's 40+ years ago was, "give me an envelope and I'll mail it to them".
She made some gross meatloaf, to this day I won't eat anyone's meatloaf because of it. She made steak in the broiler, lamb chops in a frying pan, spaghetti with home made meat sauce she could do really well with a family recipe for the meat sauce from my father's Italian side of the family. Hamburgers in a frying pan, Hebrew National hot dogs boiled with gross Heinz vegetarian beans and that's pretty much alll I remember eating. I know she made liver for my dad but not for us.
And the best thing she ever made was when she broiled the frozen pizza by accident?

[alliegator]

My dad was the cook of the house, but on the rare occasion my mom gave it a go, the salmon cakes she churned out were the worst. I can only describe them as fishy, salty, paper mache-like patties with very large chunks of celery.
As an adult, I'm fanatical about good quality seafood, I think maybe it stems from this.

[analysisparalysis]

There was a period growing up where my family didn't eat meat for health and financial reasons (I guess). Instead of having nice vegetarian meals like pastas or curries, we would always have dishes where the meat was substituted with something else:

lentil burgers
nut burgers
lentil loaf (instead of meat loaf)
bean tacos
pasta with textured vegetable protein
the list goes on...

When I would go to my friend's house for supper and have the meatloaf he despised, it was like I had died and gone to heaven.

[dratlover]

What saved me many nasty bites was that we had a table that expanded to place leafs in. Under the table was a small ledge that held a few bites of food. The dog was put out at meal time since my parents were on to the feeding under the table trick. After dinner he was allowed in to clean up the nasty bits.

Even he wouldn't touch the peas though. I had to sneak back later to clean those out.
If we mixed the leftover peas with leftover mashed potatoes, he could empty his dish, leaving a nice neat little pile of peas in the bottom of the dish. A very talented dog!

Raffles, I miss you.

[jamieeats]

both of my parents are excellent cooks (my mother especially), but there was a period of my childhood when they started to panic about saving money for college, and tried to cut costs as much as possible to get a jump start on their savings.

during this time, they discovered how cheap it was to serve cream of wheat...for dinner. ugh! no texture, no flavor, and while my parents claim we only had it a few times over the course of a few months, my sister and i remember forcing it down ALL THE TIME.

i still can't eat it, and don't really even like oatmeal since then either.

[SimplyMarie]

Liver..and I could not leave the table until I had eaten every bite. There's not enough ketchup in the world to make it palatable.

[woodleyparkhound]

I discovered a trick to deal with liver, which I hated too. If I held my nose I couldn't taste a thing. So I'd hold my nose while chewing and swallowing liver and would continue to hold it while chewing and swallowing something else I liked afterward. Then I'd drink something. When I released my nose, I couldn't taste the liver. I didn't have to eat the whole thing though - only three bites, which, as an adult, I think is appropriate.

[GraceW]

The Brisket that has Diet Coke in the sauce...

And beef stroganoff and once a week tuna-pasta crap=tuna+pasta+peas+MAYO

YUCK TO ALL THREE

[EM23]

Ah, many. And this thread brings back great memories of both my lovely Mom and my awesome German Shepherd who saved me from eating most of the crappy stuff.
Note: dogs love toast covered with tuna in Campbell's Cream of Celery soup.

[sandylc]

Ha. Reminds me of my son learning to feed himself - he hated having food on his hands, so he would dangle them for the dog to clean off. I would just close my eyes and think: 1. symbiotic relationships are good; 2. the kid's building his immune system; 3. they crawl around around on the same carpet anyway.

Still wondered if I was a terrible mom!

[EM23]

Nah - so funny! You and my Mom must be related as you both operated on the same child rearing plan. Dogs really are the best handi-wipes - esp when your mom feeds you horror food.

[sandylc]

I think my food was generally pretty good - the kid was inspired to do some pretty good cooking in college and now beyond. We still like to collaborate on cooking projects, so he must think I'm at least semi-ok at at it!

[hill food]

not a bad Mom at all, despite the morphography in which dogs linguistically roam, their mouths are still generally cleaner than ours.

[tracylee]

My Mom was never allowed in the kitchen growing up, and she lived at home (even in college) until she married Dad. They met in his hometown and carried on a long-distance romance and he never asked or realized that she couldn't cook (or had a terrible driving record) until they got married.

She really tried, but for Christmas and Easter breakfast, she always made "The Rock" - a yeast dough ring with raisins, cut then baked - hard as a rock. She followed directions from cans, boxes, Joy of Cooking. I remember taking Coconut Cream Soup (that was supposed to be pie) to a Girl Scout event. Her cooking is legendary for not being good, but she's getting much better!

When Dad started working from home more often, he took over the cooking, but meat and fish have to be baked or barbecued until dry and tough. I still don't like cooked fish, but he knows that when I'm over and they're serving ahi tuna to just leave mine raw - I bring my own wasabi powder.

And I was one who was forced to sit at the table and finish everything on my plate. I grew up to be one of those very picky eaters. The dog would only eat so much!

[Peg]

Most of what my mother cooked was great - I even liked the liver and spinach.

But her baked fish dish was inedible - as far as I can determine she'd put sliced raw onion, canned tomatoes and thick pieces of white fish in a casserole - and bake it. The fish would be overcooked and chewy, the onion raw and the tomatoes watery. I can only think that - as she only made this for me and my brother as an after-school meal and the adults never ate it - she had no idea it was so awful.
We were never forced to eat individual foods we genuinely hated (green peppers, cooked carrots, honey...) so it never occurred to us to complain about the baked fish, as all of the ingredients were individually liked.

[mattwarner]

Tri-bean burger bake. A casserole, and frequent potluck dish, that was beloved by my brother and hated by me, included canned kidney beans, green beans, and pork and beans, ground beef, in a sauce that included ketchup, mustard, Worcestershire, and brown sugar.

[Perilagu Khan]

Sounds pretty foul.

[Vetter]

Beef stew. She is a good cook, but this was really, really boring, bland, root vegetable-y stew. I'm sure the meat wasn't browned. The onion sure wasn't. I bet there was no garlic. No wine. Not enough salt. The meat was murdered and she used those godforsaken veggies called RUTABAGAS. Mooshy potatoes, rutabagas, meat. Maybe some frozen peas and carrots tossed in. In a Wondra based gravy. Oh, god. How a woman who made such ethereal Swedish pancakes, krumkake and cinnamon rolls...well...

I've never been the least bit skinny, cough cough, but I would just happily refuse to eat dinner on stew nights.

[Terrieltr]

What a bummer. Stew should be one of the great meals in a person's life.

[Perilagu Khan]

True. But it does no good to stew over it.

[kubasd23]

Oh Khan, you are so punny!!

[JerryMe]

Liver and onions and beans w/ fried onions. Those were on a weekly rotation. Yuck! HOWEVER, homemade bread and butter was on a weekly rotation and YUM!

[linguafood]

Holy cow. After reading all these horror stories, I should probably consider myself lucky for being "forced" to have the occasional sweet pancake dinner '-D

[Terrieltr]

Creamed salmon. My parents loved it. I hated it. Canned salmon, canned or frozen peas, some sort of "cream" sauce, all served on boiled potatoes. BLECH.

[pitterpatter]

My mother's dish for celebrating in the 60's was a crab/shrimp concoction that had a souffle-like base. She must have paid dearly for this dish. I always hated it, and believed into my thirties that I hated shrimp and crap. Then I realized that what I really hated were the cooked green peppers, which overwhelmed everything else. I HATE cooked green peppers. And now I am like most humans, who can't get enough of crab and shrimp.

[Perilagu Khan]

I like cooked Bell peppers, but only when diced. Big soft chunks of them...no good. No good at all.

[pinkpoodle]

I hated peppers as a kid too. My mom would sometimes make stuffed peppers and it was awful. She was a great cook and now I like her stuffed peppers but until I acquired a taste for peppers in general that was the worst meal ever.

[Perilagu Khan]

The "stuff" was delish--the peppers, not so much.

[AmyH]

Agreed. Stuffed peppers are just nasty. I like peppers, and I like stuffed cabbage, but there's no way even today that I could stomach a stuffed pepper.

[nikkihwood]

After watching the three of us pick out the 'stuff,' and leave the pepper behind for a couple of years, my mother just started baking the stuffing in a pyrex pan - complete with Campbell's Tomato soup. I love green peppers, but **not** stuffed.

[Nyleve]

Cold jellied carp. Every freaking Friday night. The absolute rock-bottom of Hungarian Jewish cookery.

[monavano]

We have a winner!
I find it inspiring that many of you have had to endure horrible gustatory assaults and yet here you are, a CH'er!

[Perilagu Khan]

Well if it wasn't rock-bottom, I'm sure you could easily see the floor from there.

[Nyleve]

Oh yeah. God it was horrible.

[tcamp]

Yep, that sounds bad. Never had that at home but when I lived on a kibbutz, a friday delicacy was translated as "congealed leg." Not really sure what it is was and I avoided though I did enjoy the gigantic fish heads pulled out of the soup pot and served to those of us who'd helped cook.

[Nyleve]

Congealed leg. Oh that brings back a memory. Probably a very garlicky jellied veal concoction made from feet. I'm sure my mother made it a few times (I can almost smell it in my mind) but it wasn't in regular rotation. Gaaaah. Just the thought of it gives me the willies.

[tcamp]

Yes, I'm fairly sure there was a boiled hoof in that jelly mess somewhere.

[small h]

Ptcha. Terrifying Jewish children for centuries.

[Nyleve]

YES!!!! Gaaaaa!!!!! The food of nightmares!

[MRS]

Much of the" jewish" food my grandparents, elder relatives and parents ate when I was a child literally made me hide under the table. I can recall them all eating away saying to me, " Oy! You don't know what's good!". I cannot sit near anyone eating gefilte fish or chopped liver to this day b/c of my childhood memories. People would eat it and then try to hug and kiss me- puke!!!

[Nyleve]

I can do chopped liver; I can do gefilte fish. Heck - I've even made gefilte fish. But until you've been faced with a slice of corpse-cold, jelly-enveloped boiled carp - with no seasoning other than carrots and celery (also boiled - but who cares - no seasoning could save that dish) - you haven't lived. Or died. In my case, the latter, almost.

[Vetter]

This may be the funniest thing I've read on Chowhound in several years. You poor thing. And I thought my mom's stew was bad.

[Nyleve]

And the thing is that my mother was actually a good cook - in that Transylvanian sort of way. But the carp. Bleh bleh bleh bleh. Did I say bleh?

My father loved it.

[Perilagu Khan]

Funny? I'm trembling to my very soul! ;)

[sandylc]

Oh, boy, I remember going to the family farm in the summer, and everyone would be boisterously eating disgusting things. The worst thing I remember is how everyone would chomp happily on slabs of raw onions, then want to talk closely and hug and kiss me. Puke!

[Perilagu Khan]

My mom would occasionally chomp down on a bit of raw onion. And you'll occasionally see raw onion as a garnish-cum-side with Texas BBQ. In small portions, I don't object to raw onion.

[sandylc]

Yeah, I now can take the raw onion with cilantro on carnitas tacos, for example. But just chowing down on big chunks of it naked (the onion, not me) - what's up with that?

[Perilagu Khan]

It may be a bubble or two off of level.

[MRS]

I'm tellin' ya!!! The relatives going after the small kids for hugs and kisses after what they ate!!! Oh man!! And the men w/ mustaches??! Whoo, bad news!!

[benbenberi]

I learned to love chopped liver eventually.

But it was a day of revelation for me when I realized I could refuse a plate of gefilte fish and the sky wouldn't fall. (Though it's been 20 years since I've eaten any, and the family still looks surprised when I turn it away.)

[smartie]

my grandpa ate that - Shabbos lunch - how do I make retching sounds come alive on the computer?

[small h]

I've only eaten ptcha once, and that was by mistake. I saw it on a buffet table at a cousin's bar mitzvah and thought it was some weird kind of gefilte fish (note to self: lay off the Mogen David and/or get eyes checked before ingesting mysterious gelatinous substances).

[hill food]

HA!

[logburner]

Cold jellied capr (gefilte fish "GAG") is right up there with lutefisk that for some insane reason I felt I had to sample. To say that I heaved everything but my butthole would be an understatement.

[kubasd23]

Now that is some fantastic imagery!! haha The funny part is I know exactly what you mean!! I had that reaction to ham aspic when I was about 14. It was at a dinner in France, and I had no idea what it was, I thought it was just regular jello. I ate a big forkful, expecting a fruity flavor (like maybe pineapple or something because it was with ham) and instead got a mouthful of cold ham flavored gelatin.... I had to run to the bathroom. I think if I had it now the reaction wouldn't have been so visceral, but it was more the shock of what it tasted like vs. what I expected.

[Perilagu Khan]

Taste shock is a powerful thing, is it not? Several times I've taken a mighty drought of Coke while expecting iced tea--or vice versa--and it is literally startling. They eyes bulge, the eyebrows skyrocket and it's all you can do to swallow.

[EWSflash]

Ha! Once at a family picnic (I was eight or nine) I grabbed a thermos and took a big swig of martini thinking it was water.

[Perilagu Khan]

Now that's a PLEASANT taste shock! ;)

[EWSflash]

It would be now, but like I said, I was eight or nine...

[Perilagu Khan]

Like I said, pleasant. ;)

[Terrieltr]

I simply can't get behind the concept of aspic. We have a family friend who LOVES the stuff, and does very pretty arrangements of cuts of salmon, veggies and such in aspic. Lovely to look at. In fact, let's just leave it as is, so as not to disturb the image...

[QueenDairy]

When I was a small child, I took a long swig of apple cider vinegar, thinking it was apple juice. I don't remember much except for the violent retching. There will always be stories about it, told at family get-togethers.

[Perilagu Khan]

A mild version of this phenomenon happened to me today at lunch. I had two sandwiches, one peanut butter, and the other turkey and pastrami with mustard. I hawed into the former somehow expecting it to be the latter, and it was a strangely disconcerting experience.

[Perilagu Khan]

Two more dishes have sprung to mind.

First, Swiss steak. It was always tougher than a boot and covered in stewed tomatoes, which I loathed.

Second was fried chicken. Now I'd wager there are few people who love fried yardbird as much as I, but my mom's was inevitably dry and tasteless. I ate it, but with very little relish.

[mcel215]

We had these two dishes also, but were "Swanson" TV dinners........ blech.

[mels]

Pork chops cooked in a pan until they were as dry as sawdust, then smothered in Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup. Ugh. To this day i despise any dish where I can detect that gelatinous sodium bomb known as condensed Cream of Mushroom.

[katcancook]

My mom is an excellent home cook, but for some reason I never liked her beef stew. Something about the texture of the meat when it was cooked. Our family now calls it "oh boy stew", because whenever I came home from school (or later on, from work) and asked what was for dinner, the response was "oh boy (insert rolling eyes here), stew". Gotta love a family joke!

[free sample addict aka Tracy L]

She was an amazing cook, but she had a few dishes I hated. A runny egg sauce w/capers that she would put on fish, undercooked eggplant and croquettes. The croquettes never worked out for her, but she kept trying - I must take after dad because I would have given up. To this day I have a slight gag reflex when I see them on a menu.

[sandylc]

Pork loin and canned crushed pineapple cooked to death in the crockpot. Pot Roast cooked to a dry, tough, blob and then moistened with a burnt grease and undercooked flour gravy. Tasteless meatloaf.

[AntarcticWidow]

That would be 3 minute eggs, cooked for 2-1/2 minutes. The whites were always runny and the yolks were barely warm - major ick factor. I'd ask if she would cook them for 10 minutes so they would be hard. Not a chance. Put me off soft-cooked eggs for decades but I learned to like them a couple of years ago. My DH loves them with buttered toast fingers and Marmite.

[goodhealthgourmet]

nope. i was an easy kid to please, and Mom wasn't a very adventurous cook but she had a solid repertoire of simple, relatively tasty recipes. she'd occasionally try something new, and the rule was that we had to have at least a couple of bites the first time. if we hated it, we didn't have to finish it and she wouldn't make it for us again.

[breadchick]

My mother was a young widow with four daughters and she really had to watch her pennies, and we never knew we were in bad shape because she did well with food. EXCEPT - she though frozen salisbury steaks with gravy were the bomb. Pretty gross, but I never complained.

[rasputina]

tuna patties with pineapple on top. Hideous.

[kayandallie]

Almost every Friday night: baked: frozen fish sticks, frozen mixed vegetables from the bag, frozen french fries.
I hated Friday night dinners.
My mother was not a good cook, was not inspired by it, and didn't like to do it.
Ugh.
Ask me what she made that I did like and the list would be extremely short, if there would even be a list. I was thin (skinny) as a kid.

[escondido123]

I hated fish but loved fish sticks, but I was in it for the tartar sauce.

[Perilagu Khan]

Yeah, I dug fish sticks, too. Mrs. Paul's. And Van de Kamp's fish fillets.

[smartie]

2 things in our house, the first were large meatballs cooked in a brown gravy called Klops. They were totally horrible and my siblings and I renamed them Plops, they looked and tasted like poop!

The second was sweet and sour stuffed cabbage, the smell was enough to have us crying when we got in from school, we had to eat it and none of us liked it. My coworker eats sweet and sour cabbage a couple times a month and immediately I am 8 or 9 years old feeling nauseous.

My dad tells us that when he was small Friday night was boiled fish. His mom was a terrible cook, very plain and the fish was just boiled in water with no taste at all. He remembers being chased around the kitchen table by his mom holding a rolling pin until he sat back down to eat it.

[MRS]

Ewww...my mom made salmon croquettes and i thought ( and still do) that they were so nasty! I really hated those nights.

[Heidi cooks and bakes]

When my divorced mom was working full-time, raising my sister and hosting me on weekends, she would make spaghetti in the crock pot. That meant pouring canned tomato sauce into the crock, and nestling (i'm using that word lightly!) the spaghetti noodles into the sauce. Then she'd turn it on low for about 10 hours, until we came home! What a mess!

Somehow we finally got the nerve to ask her to stop making that dish. My sister and I still laugh about it today!

[monavano]

How did the pasta stay intact? I'd think it would fall apart.

[siki2]

Spaghetti with chicken liver instead of meatballs. Chicken boiled without any seasoning for hours in the crockpot. Fish cooked in canned mushroom soup. Still gives me nightmares.

[JEN10]

All of that sounds horrific!!!

[tcamp]

Oh, yeah. She had a rotation of about 15 meals and each of us had a couple we didn't love. Me, it was the tuna casserole and frankfurters paprika, a charming dish featuring hot dogs cut on the diagonal and cooked in a spicy-ish red sauce.

[Perilagu Khan]

Damn! That sounds purdy good. Got the recipe for the Paprika Dawgs?

[lawhound05]

We had a dish called "barbecued hot dogs" which was not barbecue at all, but diagonally cut hot dogs in a red sauce, served over rice.

[jlhinwa]

Pot roast, boiled potatoes, and some kind of vegetable medley. Sadly, these were foods that my farmer-boy father absolutely loved and he preferred the vegetables cooked to almost mush and the meat cooked to almost leather. This was a frequent meal and I cannot even begin to guess how many hours I sat at the table trying to avoid eating it.

[bitchincook]

Boiled frozen vegetables, especially green beans. I don't think I tasted a fresh vegetable until I got my own apartment after college.

Chicken breast quarters marinated and baked to death with "low-cal Italian salad dressing." I can still recall the pungent chemical odor and taste.

Instant mashed potatoes.

Bacon-wrapped chicken livers.

Canned ham.

[Perilagu Khan]

I'm guilty of loving instant mashed pertatas, even to this day. Always loved Colonel Sanders' taters and gravy.

[small h]

Birds Eye vegetable medleys. Bleah. Most of them are contaminated with carrots, and carrots ruin everything. Also, I don't think you should call something a stir-fry when it's really a
cook/freeze/stir-fry.

[iL Divo]

small h, I went to elementary school wit Richard Birdseye and his sister. he was a great guy back then. I remember feeling somewhat fortunate looking in the freezer and seeing his family name on our vegetables. I'd mention having broc or peas or green beans to him and he'd just smile.
your story made me think of Richard Birdseye :) thanks for reminder

[small h]

I'm glad to have brought up a happy memory for you. I wonder if the Birdseye kids ever complained about having to eat their vegetables, and if their parents countered with something like "if not for these vegetables, you wouldn't have a roof over your head."

[iL Divo]

""if not for these vegetables, you wouldn't have a roof over your head."
......or horses in the barn or fields and fields of acreage. hahahahah

[WhatsEatingYou]

I remember growing up my friend hated when her mother made Pork and Beans...she would take and donate all the cans that went into it when our school had a food drive!

[biscottifan]

When I was young cowboy movies and TV were big. My dad got us to eat pork and beans by telling us it was cowboy food.

[Perilagu Khan]

My mom tried the same thing with Sweet and Sour Pork. Shrewd boy that I was, I saw right through the lie.

[mcel215]

My mother didn't care for cooking much. She did do the big Sunday dinner pretty well, Roast beef, gravy, mashed and a canned vegetable. But during the week? Not so much. Rosted chicken was pretty good, so was the meatloaf. However, those gross Friday night fish sticks were horrid. And she thought they were good for us. Blech. And we had them every Friday night until I was 18 yrs old I think.

[Breezychow]

Both of my parents are excellent cooks, and I'm an adventurous diner, but one of dad's favorite meals is Calves Liver with Onions, which I've NEVER been able to stomach to this day. But dad loved it, so what're you gonna do?

[aynrandgirl]

Oh yes!

Cabbage rolls
Brussels sprouts
liver

I haven't touched any of them since I left home.

[Perilagu Khan]

Love cabbage rolls. You can keep the sprouts and liver.

[Terrieltr]

My mom used to make sprouts by boiling the frozen kind. Yuck. The first time I had fresh sprouts roasted was a revelation.

[sandylc]

Oh, geez, boiled forever frozen brussels sprouts. The smell!!!!!!

[kubasd23]

Yes! The boiled til soggy/messy frozen brussels sprouts!! It made the WHOLE house reek!! Now they're my favorite vegetable, who knew!

[biondanonima]

Frozen Brussels sprouts are just wrong. I once served a sprouts dish to a friend and she loved it and asked for the recipe. A couple of weeks later she called, asking for the REAL recipe since she had just tried the one I gave her and the sprouts were bitter and awful. Turns out she thought subbing frozen sprouts would be fine, and that they should be heated first so they didn't start as frozen rocks. Um, ICK.

[sandylc]

Ugh. Hate it when that happens.

[escondido123]

My father loved brussels sprouts--no one else did in our family--so he would cook up a lot of them in the pressure cooker for wayyyy too long and then eat them cold out of the frig for days. Periodically he would burn them and then the house stank for days.

[AmyH]

That sounds like when my mom would cook broccoli in the pressure cooker until it was mush. The house stunk so she'd open the jar of airwick (it was actually a glass jar and you'd pull up the wick) which then got the house stinking of a mixture of broccoli and pine. Nasty!

[msgenie516]

Love all of them, but the liver MUST BE rare!

[Sooeygun]

Mostly I liked what my mom cooked (and her baking is award winning) other than certain veggie sides. But there was one dish called Monday Meat Pie. Probably from one of those Better Homes and Gardens cookbooks (I swear there must be 1000 of them in the series). It used the Sunday roast cubed up with veggies and this dry cornbread topping. Turned by off cornbread for the longest time. What a waste of leftover roast.

[monavano]

Yeah, I don't think I'd be feeling cornbread with beef roast either.

[monfrancisco]

Like many other posters, my mom was a well-above average cook (nothing too fancy, but generally pretty damn good food) but her pork chops-- man. Thrown into a cast-iron skillet and left to mind their own business for some unspecified amount of time until served bone-dry. I was well into my twenties before I discovered how tasty they can be. I used to be just incredulous that people would order them in a restaurant.

[monavano]

I grew up in a house where every meat was well done. It's amazing how bloody I like my steak now. And pork? Pink, please.
Mom's eye of round roast was unswallowable without gravy. I too was in my 20-s or even 30-s before I stopped going for the eye roast cut if I wanted a roast.

[hill food]

I too was much older when I finally discovered pork and beef do not have to require flossing between bites. and gravy doesn't always come out of a packet.

but to keep it nice she makes a killer pie crust.

[JerryMe]

Ah! - I have to give my mom credit - her pie crust was incredible and has never been duplicated!

[laliz]

where to begin????
I first thought of liver & onions, which I was forced to eat and hated.
Then there was salmon "loaf" (**note** I loved meatloaf, but not salmon loaf or patties)
My uncle would fish and bring her fresh fish, which she didn't know how to cook except fried in cornmeal and I grew up hating both fish and cornmeal.

[Disneyfreak]

My mom is and was an excellent cook. But there was one dish she used to make when I was growing up that I never liked. It was fish fillets cooked in tomato soup with pasta alphabet letters. I hate tomato soup. When this cooked the fish absorbed some of the soup and when it was served there were little pasta letters stuck to the fish. I used to think they were sending me messages telling me to not eat them! LOL I didn't tell my mother I didn't like the dish until a few years ago.

[Perilagu Khan]

How did you tell her? By making the dish and spelling out "I hate this dish" on her fillet?

[Disneyfreak]

LOL! I would never waste perfectly good fish in that manner. The truth finally came out during a discussion about childhood foods that we had during some holiday dinner.

[escondido123]

Speaking of tomato soup, my babysitter used to "cool it down" with milk, which I found disgusting. Why wouldn't she just add an ice cube or two?

[Phoebe]

My mother would do the same. I believe it used to be on the back of the can.

[Luna2372]

Ahhh...My love for Campbell's tomato soup "cooled down' with a splash of cream and pepper knows no bounds.

[escondido123]

Cream might have been fine, but skim milk was awful.

[Luna2372]

Fat make the world go round. Pun intended!

[shygirl]

I add gin. :)

[Perilagu Khan]

A gin martini with a strip of bacon fat in it is now all the rage on the Left Bank.

[arktos]

Fish on Fridays, never seasoned, no sauces. Just usually squishy thick swordfish, pan fried in butter with only s&p to sprinkle on top. **shudders**

[fara]

this was the dish I remember most hating as a child- unseasoned fish. In my mom's rendition it was flounder baked in the oven, perhaps with a little water, and covered with bread crumbs. it tasted terrible and bland.

[berkleybabe]

My mother made the worst gravy I've ever had. Until I was almost 30, I never asked for or ate gravy -- ever, anywhere --- as I thought it was just greasy water and flour and over-peppered. First time I ate Thanksgiving at my soon-to-be in-laws, they passed this stuff around and I tried and asked.. "What is this" Gravy was the answer. Wait... WHAAAT? Total revelation.

That and the pork chops buried under canned sauerkraut with a whole bunch of whole peppercorns, and cooked in a large Dutch oven till everything was totally dead and gray.
Honorable mention: the horrible New England Boiled Dinner, where the fat cap on the corned beef was never removed so you had to pick out gobs of jiggly boiled fat.

[Perilagu Khan]

Gobs of jiggly boiled fat--how could any little girl fail to relish that?

[JerryMe]

The only gravy I've ever eaten but have never had since is the red-eye ham gravy my mom used to make. It was delicious!

[RGC1982]

My mom (RIP) was a classic "60"s cook" -- meaning, if the recipe was on the back of a can of cream of whatever, it was added to the regular meal rotation. The worst was something mysteriously labeled "Firehouse Pot Roast". It was nothing like pot roast at all, which I loved. Instead, it was a broiled beef roast -- usually a round cut called "London Broil" that was overccoked past well done. Then, she split the roast down the middle almost all the way through, poured a can of cream of mushroom soup (undiluted, and I think it was mushroom), wrapped the poor roast in foil and put it back in the oven for another 20 minutes. She used to rave about how juicy the roast was. It looked absolutely hideous. Tasted horrid, but looked even worse.

[lbs]

My mom is great special occassion cook but was a horrible everyday cook. There are four of us kids and when she was in grad school, she relied heavily on the crockpot. But she'd just throw things in and turn it on. The worst was pork chops and applesauce in which pork chops (the cheap mass produced bland kind) and a jar of Motts applesauce were "cooked" for 8 hours on low. It still makes me cringe. And I still can't eat casseroles because she would put pillsbury biscuits on top of them and they never cooked all the way through so it would be half burnt on top and raw dough mixing in with the cream of mushroom stuff. We all learned to cook real quick after a while!

[Perilagu Khan]

**shudder**

I feel your pain!

[monavano]

My mom cooked food in the crockpot until it was dead twice. But, I didn't detest it and it filled the void.

[lbs]

I did detest it and I still loved and appreciated my mom.

[EWSflash]

My very petite non-foodie friend recently told me (I've known her since high school) that her mom used to make ONE box of Kraft mac & cheese for all six kids for dinner- nothing else! I know they're smaller than they used to be, but cripes.
I guess that's why they were all small kids, too.

[Perilagu Khan]

Bloody hell. I regularly scarf an entire box by myself, with a heaping side of Uncle Ben's Wild Rice.

[DuffyH]

Dinner from McD's was one hamburger each (2 for Dad), one fries each and drinks all around. Of course, they only made one burger (with or without cheese) then, the small one, fries were small, and drinks were 12oz. We were all well-satisfied when done, having eaten what is now a Happy Meal.

Which says a lot about the portions we're now accustomed to eating, doesn't it?

[Perilagu Khan]

It's amazing what disposable wealth does to one's eating habits.

[gardencook]

My mother was never a good cook. She is still with us, but is an invalid and hasn't cooked for herself for almost 7years and hasn't cooked for me for nearly 30 years. She is happy to leave the cooking to me. Most of what she made when I was a child was not appetizing, but the one I remember the most was Sauerkraut and Weenies. Just the smell makes me gag. We use to live in Germany and it took me a long time to bravely try *true* sauerkraut. What a revelation! Who knew that sauerkraut was delicious? ;-)

[Perilagu Khan]

Strangely enough, I've never had franks n' kraut. I'd think this could be good if the two constituent parts are of high quality.

[Phoebe]

As a kid, my mom used to fix a dish called Maxie's Franks out of the 1960 edition of Peg Bracken's "The I Hate To Cook Book". It consisted of sauerkraut, hot dogs, brown sugar and ketchup. It was baked in a large 13x9 dish. Loved it !!! Haven't had it in years, but I still cook some of my all-time favorite dishes from this book some 40 years later.

[jeanmarieok]

http://www.recipelink.com/mf/0/61493

I would eat that!!

[Phoebe]

That's the exact same recipe. Only difference is I remember my mom used sauerkraut that came in a bag, never a can.Guess I'm gonna have to make it now with all of this nostalgic talk. It was tasty!!!

[EWSflash]

My mother-in-law raised her kids on "hallupsie" which consisted of Minute rice, hamburger, sauerkraut, salt, pepper, and some water for the rice, stirred up in a casserole and baked. It sounds so horrible, but it's one of those things that you can't stop eating once you start. I'd like to recreate it with something other than Minute Rice, although maybe that's part of its charm. All native raw juices were thrown in with the ingredients and the burger meat was raw.Too weird. My mom would have at least browned the ground beef!

[hill food]

sounds like an Americanized shortcut of the Russian golubtsy (sp?) cabbage stuffed with beef and rice.

which when done correctly is such a good winter dish.

[kubasd23]

I grew up on golabki! It's one of my best memories of my grandpa. He would make a huge dish of golabki, pumpernickel bread with butter, blueberry pie (from scratch) and chocolate milk (the ONLY time I had that growing up). My sisters ate the filling out of the cabbage and gave their extra cabbage to me. But yes, that does sound like a bastardized/americanized version. You have the rice, hamburger, and cabbage of some kind.

[Perilagu Khan]

Yes it is.

I do most of the cooking in my house, but my wife makes the golubtsi and she makes them well.

[EWSflash]

I bet you're right a bout that- it makes a lot of sense, except for the Russian part, they're all hard-core germans, but it's not so far away.

[jeanmarieok]

We had haluski, which is different, and I really like - sauteed cabbage and onions mixed with egg noodles and (cooked and drained) ground beef. I like it a lot - I need to make it, haven't had it in years and years.

[EWSflash]

We made it once recently, with leftover steamed rice (not instant), a pound of ground beef sauteed and partially defatted, and some good kraut. Lots of pepper. It was really, really good.

No egg noodles ever crossed MIL's mind regarding that recipe, I may bring it up to DH for consideration, because I love egg noodles. Thanks, jeanmarieok, for the variation!

[Sushiqueen36]

I bought that book but have never tried any recipes from it. I just liked the cover and the sentiment (even though I LOVE to cook). I think I bought it at the same time I purchased "The Queen is in the Kitchen". Maybe I need to crack into those and try a few dishes!

[Isolda]

My mom believed in making us eat everything on our plates. It's a miracle none of us are overweight or suffering from an eating disorder. She frequently made this ghastly, gag-inducing concoction of rice, green peppers, ground beef and soy sauce. It took me years to discover that both soy sauce and green peppers are edible. On the days when she worked late, she'd "make" Van de Kamp's shiny frozen fish filets (nasty batter!), steamed broccoli, and instant grits. That meal was truly hell on a plate, and she'd make us all wash it down with a 16 oz glass of milk, a drink I detest to this day. One great thing she did was to serve dessert every day, a habit I continue in my own home, even if it's just a cut-up mango or fuyu persimmon. And my eating rule is: well, if you don't like the main meal, surely you'll like the dessert.

[juli5122]

Clam Casserole aka." barf in a bowl"
Chicken a la Orange super sweet
Chicken Mole
The only one she still makes is the clam casserole because my sister loves it. Just the thought makes me gag. It is a texture thing :)

[escondido123]

Creamed tuna on crispy chow mein noodles from the can. Loved tuna in sandwiches, hated this dish. And when my parents went out for the evening, my sister would make this dish because it was her favorite!

[Phoebe]

A creamy Spam casserole with noodles. Just the smell of it.....Ughh!!! The sight of a can of Spam still brings it all back some 40+ years. Fortunately, I wasn't made to eat it. Gotta still love my Mom for that !!!!

[PaulF]

The funny thing about SPAM is that I never, ever ate it as a child. Ever. My parents were repulsed by the idea of it. (We weren't the least bit kosher, but my parents had a few vestiges of their kosher upbringing still inside them. SPAM fell into the category of stuff they wouldn't eat. I think they also felt that things like SPAM and Underwood Deviled Ham were for poor people and even though we were poor, they didn't want to act like we were poor.)

Anyway, I met and married a Japanese American woman who grew up in a community where there were an abundance of Japanese Hawaiians. Needless to say, SPAM was part of her diet and I've since grown to enjoy SPAM musubi or SPAM and eggs and frequently order it for myself.

I'm not sure I'd like a creamy SPAM casserole, but I do eat SPAM on rice once in a while.

Why I feel the need to capitalize SPAM -- that I don't know.

[Phoebe]

I'm well aware of Spam's popularity in Hawaii. I first learned about this after seeing Sam Choy on a cooking show about 10 years ago. I was puzzled that this product was being prepared in such a "fine" manner. Crazy thing is the casserole dish my Mom used to fix actually tasted decent. I just could never get pass the "look" of Spam....or the smell of it !!! (I did enjoy many Underwood Deviled Ham sandwiches in my youth, though !!!) Go figure????

[hamboney]

You feel the need to capitalize because it's an acronym Shoulder Pork (H)AM. I had it once after coming home from my honemoon in Hawaii in 1988 and hearing about how popular it was there. Haven't had it since, not a hater, just not a fan, but I drive past the plant in Austin a couple times a year and think aboot it.

[Luna2372]

OMG-the Spam wars at our were terrible. At one dark point in the '70s Spam was the "go to" chic item for suburbans housewives. It showed up everywhere! My brother and I hated it. We would just sit and cry...it was so bad to us. And we weren't fussy kids...But spam did me in.

I still might cry just thinking of it

[tcamp]

No Spam in our 70's household but plenty of vienna sausages and canned Underwood liverwurst. I actually miss the latter.

[escondido123]

My sister and I were talking about spam recently. In the 50s we would make spam and American cheese "grilled" in the waffle iron. She also reminded me that we used to love Underwood Deviled Ham in the little can with the white paper wrapper.

[Perilagu Khan]

I still love Deviled Ham. The Deviled Roast Beef is, I think, less successful.

[Phoebe]

Sorry for even mentioning the word SPAM. I certainly didn't want to make you cry!!! (Maybe they're tears of joy, because as an adult....you never have to eat it again.) ;O

[Luna2372]

LOL...My mom and brother were here for Christmas and I mentioned the "Spam" wars'

Holy Moly...my mother can make like denial an art form...." I never ever made you kids eat anything you didn't want"...then my brother fake a vomit attack to re-enact the scene...

HILarious!

[hill food]

Luna - we might be related.

[TheHuntress]

I think we have the same mother. She has conveniently forgotten all meal time traumas and now maintains that my brother and I make stories up that just happen to correlate.

[Luna2372]

Perhaps like Tom and I, you and your brother share a mutant brain link so that all food you eat becomes his memory too...and visey-versey!

[EWSflash]

Yeah, if my parents were alive they would have said the same thing. Or my dad would, and smack me upside the head. My mother would have marched off to her room and slammed the door. Oh- and sobbing loudly at the outrageous attack on her person.

[sandylc]

My mother has been rewriting history for my entire life! She still does it now on a daily basis? What's up with that?????? Is reality just not good enough?

[Luna2372]

I want to know when I'll be old enough to use that super power! Then I can re-write it myself and only ever have eat KD and Wagon Wheels and Pop Tart!

[Cactus Wren]

Gad. For one thing, my mom was one of the great non-cooks of all time, but she *thought* she could cook. She'd go on these strange food binges, like the time she bought several big canisters (the size of a three-pound coffee can) of TVP, textured vegetable protein, at the Mormon storable-food store. TVP, for those fortunate enough not to be familiar with it, is an alleged "meat substitute"; little rock-hard cubes to be reconstituted with water and cooked with a dish. It has a strange spongy texture, and none of the flavors taste *anything* like what they're labeled as: the "beef" flavor is almost but not quite entirely unlike beef, the chicken flavor tastes like nothing that's ever been near any kind of poultry, the pork flavor tastes primarily of salt.

As I say, these are intended to be cooked *into* entire dishes such as soups or stews or casseroles. But since Mom was a non-cook, half the time her idea was to reconstitute the stuff, simmer it for a few minutes, and just serve it up in a bowl. And my rejection of it had nothing to do with the substance itself: I must be lying if I said I didn't like it, or just *refusing* to like it *as I certainly would* if I'd only *allow* myself to. After all, I liked chicken, and it was labeled "chicken flavor", right?

[Perilagu Khan]

Wow. That sounds unusually terrible. Like something out of a Stephen King novel.

[Terrieltr]

Yikes. I like TVP in spaghetti sauce occasionally, but it's the non-flavored stuff and I use it for texture, mainly. Eating it plain would be awful. Like trying to eat Miracle Whip plain with a spoon.

[PaulF]

Yep.

My mom is a good cook. Was a good cook I should say. She's still alive, but doesn't cook anymore.

But my dad for some reason liked everything well done, burnt.

Anything with a sauce or gravy, from pasta to brisket, was okay. But anything like hamburgers or meat or lamb chops or anything like that ... burnt and dry. But my dad loved it. I think his mom burned everything, too.

[RC51Mike]

Liver and canned spinach. The liver, as if that wasn't bad enough, was cooked to shoe leather. I had to finish it all, cold congealed, sitting at the kitchen table for hours in what seemed days, tears streaming down my face.

Thanks for bringing up the subject.

[monavano]

Wow, that's horrid. Sorry you had to go through that.

[Perilagu Khan]

Don't mention it. ;)

[bagelman01]

Once a year mom forced us to eat liver served with lumpy mashed potatoes and LeSeuer peas from the can. The liver was always dry and tough as dad liked meat well done. I'd try to hide the peas in the potatoes, as I don't eat canned peas to this day.

Now, liver is a favorite of mine, but I like it medium rare. I still won't eat LeSeuer Peas and potatoes are my least favorite starch.

Like you, we were kept at the table until the entire portion of liver was consumed, all the time hearing that we could not waste food as children were starving in Europe (baby boom post war guilt). As if my finishing the liver would fill the belly of a child in a DP camp in Europe.

[EWSflash]

Yes! When she served something awful or we weren't hungry she took great offense. She was mostly a great cook, but she was neurotic and defensive.

[sandylc]

Child abuse.

[monavano]

Well, you went there, didn't you?!
I agree but didn't want to come out and say it for fear of offending.

[RC51Mike]

None taken. My therapist said the same thing.

In another bit of food related psychodrama, when I was around 7 or 8, my mother thought it would be fun to have a contest to see who could eat the most food between my cousin and me. It was mostly candy and at one point my mother sent my sister to the store to get more candy since we were running out. I ended up on the bathroom floor throwing up. Ah, memories.

[EWSflash]

Wow. Glad my mom never thought of that, it wouldn't have been beneath her.

[EWSflash]

Yes, it definitely is.

[ChrisOC]

I was not allowed to leave the table until my liver was gone. Luckily, my place at the table was next to the window, so when I was the last one left, out the window went the liver. I bet the neighborhood cats loved it when we had liver!

[Perilagu Khan]

After last night, my liver is now officially gone.

[Monica]

My mom is a good cook and I don't remember eating anything bad growing up but my husband has quite a few. Teriyaki sauce was a big thing once when he was growing up so his mom would put teriyaki sauce into everything she cooked and lots and lots of it..soo much so that they had to ask their dad to ask their mom to stop using so much of it.

[Rheta]

Liver and onions! Needed that iron! My mom was a wonderful cook, but the liver made me gag.

[monavano]

I guess I'm lucky in that my mother never expected me to eat something I detested. I think that's a bit cruel, really.
About once a month, Mom would make liver for her and Dad. My brother and I were not expected to eat it and she'd just open a can of franks and beans for us. We loved it. It was like getting to eat junk food!

[gaffk]

Yes, mom loved us too much. Dad got liver and onions or, on Saturday afternoons, liverwurst and onions. On those days we got grilled cheese and tomato soup or chicken noodle soup and saltines.

[Jeri L]

My parents made me eat a "bite" of liver, which was about the size of a pencil eraser and always washed down with a glass of milk. I got boxed mac and cheese, which I loved. I think the message was really, "It's not all about you. Sometimes we'll have things we like because WE like them." Most things I didn't like they were secretly happy about because they were luxury items, like crab, fried smelt (for breakfast--I'd leave the room!) and avocados.

[AmyH]

I say something similar to my kids. "Sometimes I cook what you like for dinner, and sometimes I cook what I like." Luckily my kids are not picky eaters, so usually it's something everybody likes.

[RUK]

Swedish meatballs, because she added Capers to the sauce. I loathed Capers, they looked and tasted like squishy bugs to me as a kid. To this day I have never added Capers to a dish, although I do eat them nowadays if I have to.

[Perilagu Khan]

Funny--I really like capers, but an English pea will never pass my lips. They look a bit the same, but I suppose I like the sourness and firmness of capers, while the soft blandness of peas puts me on edge.

[arktos]

Vinegared capers in a bottle are abhorrent. Switch to the salted ones that come in a bag, this will be a taste revelation, and will make one understand why capers are so popular.

[Perilagu Khan]

If I see 'em, I'll grab 'em. Don't recall seeing bagged, salted capers before.

[EWSflash]

In a bag?

[Perilagu Khan]

Yeah.

[EWSflash]

Can you tell me the brand, or store. I've never ever seen bagged capers.

[QueenDairy]

http://www.amazon.com/Capers-in-Sea-S... I am not sure of a store in your vicinity, but amazon sells them :) Make sure to rinse them under running water before using!

[EWSflash]

So two days later i'm at a local veresion of Whole foods, Sunflower Market, and damned if there wasn't a jar of nonbrined salted capers. Haven"t used them yet, I want to wait till DH goes out of town and make some really raunchy putanesca sauce with them.

[hill food]

"raunchy putanesca "

I trust that redundant pun was intended...

[Perilagu Khan]

I prepared some iconoclastic strozzapretti last night.

[hill food]

I'd choke that down...

[EWSflash]

Didn't you know that I work for the Department of Redundancy Department?

[linguafood]

That is so funny! I was trying to think of something my mom made that I *despised* and couldn't really come up with anything I'd felt that strongly about.

My mom used to make Kroneberger Klopten with capers, of course. While I liked the whole meatballs & cream sauce & rice combo, I would pick out all the capers.

Needless to say, I'm a caper lover now, with piccata being one of my favorite applications for them.

One of the -- let's say -- less appreciated dishes she made was pancakes for dinner. Yeah, I know. Any other kid's dream dinner, I guess. Thin, German-style pancakes (Eierkuchen) with sugar, cinnamon & apple sauce.

I had much more of sweet tooth as a kid, like most of us, but a sweet meal was just not my idea of "dinner".

But despising? Nope. She was too much of a good cook.

[goodhealthgourmet]

@RUK, try fried capers - they might change your mind.

[RUK]

I am considering it!! :-)

[Jeebs]

My mom's a fabulous cook (and her mom was too), and I can stomach most foods, but I absolutely hated tuna casserole. Maybe that's an obvious choice, but it was the only dish that I could not stand as a kid. They had 6 kids to feed, so it seemed like a necessary evil at least once every couple months.

[jeanmarieok]

Tuna noodle casserole with potato chips on top - I hated it. She switched, at some point, to a new tuna casserole, without noodles, but with sliced hard boiled eggs in it, that was served over popovers. This was OK. But still kind of gross.

[lawhound05]

Oh yeah, I couldn't stand the tuna casserole either. It wasn't the noodle/potato chip kind, but rather had canned biscuits on top. The tops of the biscuits would brown, but the underside was always gummy and nasty.

[jeanmarieok]

I suspect there are many of us children of the 70's, scarred by tuna noodle casserole. Thank heavens it's fallen out of favor.

[woodleyparkhound]

It was one of my favorite meals! I never met a noodle I didn't like. My mom made it with crushed saltine crackers on top. When I found out that a friend's mom made it with crushed potato chips on top, I was very jealous!

[tcamp]

Then you would have positively turned green with envy about my mom's tuna casserole with crushed *BBQ* potato chips on top! Lord knows where she found that gem.

[monavano]

That is, ah, unique!
And now this thread has me making tuna noodle casserole for dinner tonight.

[Meann]

My MIL made tuna goo every Friday, all the time my husband was growing up. Then the Pope said you didn't have to give up meat on Fridays, and she never made it again.

My husband was crushed.

Now about once a month he makes tuna goo for us ... good tuna, shrimp, crab meat, gruyere, No potato chips, no peas, no celery. Just yum.

[jeanmarieok]

Still have Lent to be meatless on Fridays - and I know for a fact, my mom still makes tuna casserole during Lent....

[The 1st and only KSyrahSyrah]

Would this be creamed tuna on toast. I hated it on Fridays, but now, I make it everyonce in a while as an emergency dinner, and the troops love it.

[mamachef]

Oy vay. That was mom's go-to dinner. At the time, we absolutely haaaaaaaated it, and spent large amounts of time trying how to get rid of the dreaded peas in it. (A planter, placed strategically near the table, was the end receptacle.) But now? If I need my mom, I don't call her (because she drives me nuts.) but I make creamed tuna, with mushroom soup and frozen peas. And I serve it over toast.

[Perilagu Khan]

Let me guess: pea plants sprang up in the planter, your mom harvested the peas and used them to fuel an ever-expanding immensity of creamed tuna on toast. I think a Hammer horror film used this as a plot.

[lilpixy]

, I don't call her (because she drives me nuts.)~~

I'm sorry for laughing at this mamachef....but I had to since it reminds me so much of my mother...I try to avoid inviting her into my house as well. Though I love her dearly.
I can only tolerate so much of her hypercritical diatribes....

[pikawicca]

My mom put sherry and mushrooms in her tuna noddle casserole, with sliced almonds on top. I still make it, and still love it.