What horrible foods did your parents subject you to as kids?

Inspired by the "summertime treats" thread.

Here are some Oldies But NOT Goodies from the kitchen of OktoberMom:

The Nameless Pink Hell: It involved mixing cold, cooked rice with still-liquid cherry Jello, then mixing in a tub of Cool Whip.
Pea Salad: Cold canned peas, globs of greasy mayonnaise, and huge chunks of raw white onion. The Awful, it BURNS.
Creamed Kidney Beans: Really, does this need a description? :puke:
Watermelon Salad: Chunks of PICKLED watermelon rind, mayonnaise, raisins, salt, and pepper. Seriously. WHAT THE FUCK??? :cry:
Beet, Radish, and Pickle Relish: We were expected to eat it on hot dogs. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!11111

How about you? Share the trauma.

The mustard was good though.

is slow cooked and then shredded, not cut.

Tongue tacos on corn tortillas, with lots of pico de gallo and cilantro....

ThinkBlue1966 had this comment to make when she read yours: "I have had tongue ONE time. They snuck it onto my sandwich at the Second Avenue Deli in NYC. I couldn't figure out why the ass-end of a cow wasn't kosher, but the tongue *was*. *shudder*

I credit my loss of innocence to the moment I realized a tongue sandwich is indeed made of tongue.

BTW, I think a cow's butt is kosher, but a pig's isn't.

sliced and covered with ketchup, then baked 'till the ketchup had that nice crunchy crust. Disgusting.

The Spam capital of the U.S. salutes you! You've actually found a way to make the stuff even more disgusting that it already is! :puke:

and that was the saturday night special, beans and franks. There was some other awful food as well and a lot of canned vegetables. When my mom cooked from scratch it was great but when she had to work at night it sucked, bad fud.

Cowboy food. Poor people's food. Poor cowboy people's food, all gloopy and gross. Plus, it leaves this film on the teeth...

Then again, I also spent a large portion of my life eating very little meat (not a strict vegetarian or vegan by a long shot, but just didn't really like red meat. Still don't, really.)

Red beans and rice.. yum.

Pot of lentils cooked with lots of garlic and spicy organic canned tomato... yum.

Black-eyed peas cooked in a slow cooker with ham and onions and seasonings... extra yum.

Baked beans, not so much yum, but definitely edible if any barbecue sauce in it is hickory-free. I'm horribly allergic to hickory. I think that's part of the reason I don't like a lot of meat -- I've been fed hickory-smoked meats so much that I associate most meat with being ill. I really like fish and that's about it. (The ham is a requirement for black-eyed peas tho.)

My man thinks I'm nuts because everytime we go to Dixie Cafe I get three sides to my light plate meal (usually their grilled cajun catfish) -- black-eyed peas, pinto beans, and okra.

...and the gross hunk of pig fat buried somewhere inside. The thought of it is making me shudder right now... euheuheuheuheuheuhhhhh....

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=236&topic_id=34479&mesg_id=34479

For one of the funniest C&B threads ever! :rofl:

My kid's idea of Culinary Terrorism is to be forced, FORCED, to consume something OTHER than meat, cheese, and eggs. Man, he has NO idea, lmao.

of course, with six kids, hunger is a major factor on the tast buds.


The cow brains were a little hard to take sometimes...

Satan's legume x(

Sauerkraut was a close second. I like it now, but as a kid: x(

But lima beans - never. x( x( x( x(

I remember the horror of big fat lima beans cooked with a mangled chunk of a hog's foot. *shudder*

discovered the Reuben and it all changed. Lima beans, pooey.

Not me.

:scared:

But when I was a kid, it was AWFUL. My Mom would dump a big can of sauerkraut into a saucepan and cut up hot dogs into it, and that (plus a slice of bread) was dinner.

I know my folks didn't have a lot of money or time, but damn.

Now I use fresh sauerkraut from the cold case to cook pork in (with some butter and herbs), and serve it with mashed potatoes and sweet apple slices.

seeds.

Just something about them... the smell and taste of them... makes me want to vomit. I don't know why. I don't like anise either, although it's not as strong a repulsion as it is with caraway.

The stuff I get has no caraway seeds in it. :hi:

I don't think I've had caraway seeds any other way.

If you don't like anise, by the way, can I assume you also don't like liquorice and ouzo and sambuca? That stuff is just a yuckfest. I can't -- I mean -- ugh...

Just don't like the seeds themselves. Anise cookies: Do not like. Licorice: don't really like, but don't hate.

I can't eat rye bread with caraway seeds in it. For the longest time I thought it was the rye bread itself that made me want to throw up, but it wasn't. It was just the seeds.

and I hate it now. Love lima beans and butter beans!!!!!!!!

I love fresh or steamed spinach, but that crap in a can should be put on a list of poisons. x(

And liver? I STILL hate liver!! :puke: :puke: :puke:

no one would ever trade a lunch with me

Okra.

Creamed corn.



:puke:

which I like now ....

Half a pickled peach (or Pear Slice on a lettuce leag with mayonaise and a maraschino cherry on top

My bride still cannot believe it. :9

:P

Nameless Pink Hell is like someone described rice pudding
to a space alien.

My worst was canned peas boiled until they went from grey
green to grey. I had to sit at the table and finish them
cold hours after everyone else was watching television.

My dad was a dumb ass Brit so occasionally I saw but did
not eat cippers for breakfast. Cippers are dried herring
preserved in salt. They are fried in bacon fat and smell
like a bucket of rotten fish bait on a shrimp boat. Hell
they smell like a shrimp boat. Even cats walk away from the
leftovers.

I don't know how many times I gagged on peas. In fact, I still cannot eat them. I know it's mental but I will pick them out of my food if someone dares to put them in there!

I just assumed all fresh vegetables tasted they same
as canned. I mean, canned asparagus is even more disgusting
than canned peas. Small wonder kids brought up on canned
vegetables hate all vegetables.

I have eaten fresh asparagus and loved it but that's another one that was extremely overcooked at my house. My mother recently admitted that she overcooked vegetables because her mother always did and she didn't discover how they really should be cooked until after we were grown. It's still a struggle for me to eat enough veggies but I did my best with my kids and they all love them. I still tend toward salads. :)

in snacks. I would highly recommend fresh raw green
beans if you want a light crunchy snack. No dips though
or you might as well eat cheetos or doritos

I got into a nasty power struggle with my first grade teacher over refusing to eat the nasty-ass canned peas in the school cafeteria.

"Nameless Pink Hell is like someone described rice pudding to a space alien."

It was actually worse than that. And my younger sister swears that she LOOOVES it. Oh god, it was a nightmare. Seriously.

I once threw them on the floor for the dog and even he didn't eat them. Fucker got me in trouble.

Also, lentil soup. Every Wednesday my mother would serve lentil soup knowing I would refuse to eat it. Every Wednesday I sat at the dinner table until 9 p.m., at which time I would be sent to bed hungry.

One of my favorites.

Lima beans are the unripe version of the fava bean.

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

Should I? Can I trust you? :P

probably the stomach too.

So, trust me...


:evilgrin:

white bread. Pop'n'fresh biscuits and mushroom gravy. Tuna in cans. But the thing I learned, in my maturity, about my childhood, the bad secret--was "skinny" meat. 3/4 " pork chops, and veal cutlets--they never were meant to be served skinny. I always thought I hated these poor meats because they were dry--then my husband (who is a trained butcher) introduced me to thick, juicy, pan-seared chops. Bigger is better when it comes to cuts of meat--my adolescent vegetarianism makes sense as a revolt against pitiable cuts of chewy dead flesh. I still question, at times, if eating meat is ultimately an unsustainable ecological premise, but in the meantime, I have eaten good meat.

I have also eaten probably pounds of cole slaw with Miracle Whip.

in the early seventies.

There were several families there and they had to cook large amounts of food.

I remember "hungarian goulash" night the most. :puke:

Large elbow macaroni
Greasy hamburger meat
Canned corn
Canned green beans

And a ton of processed cheese all mixed together. :puke: Sometimes served with white day old bread.

I remember begging my mother for a piece of bread and not goulash....she made me eat "what everybody else was eating" uggggg...

Years later Mom tried to cook it when I came home from college for a visit... I almost barfed right there in the kitchen!

VERY thin tomato sauce, and a hint of hamburger. I think they call that particular swill "American Chop Suey" in other parts of the country.

Redstone

My teenage boys love it. It's quick and cheap! I personally dislike pasta of all kinds. Too many years of living off it. Cheapest meals when you are poor are Spagetti and Mac n cheese.

NO macaroni
NO greasy hamburger
NO canned corn
NO green beans

Please tell me she at least used paprika in it. That would make it at least quasi-Hungarian.

oh and the casserole made of cabbage mustard and sliced hot dogs. I'm kind of feeling nauseated thinking about it all

:puke:

And steaks.

Now, I cook my beef to slightly bloody and no further.

I happen to love Lima Beans. :9

I will never eat white meat chicken breast again unless it's somehow masked, like in chicken salad. Even then, we always buy the thighs. Mmmm, moist dark meat.

on my grill. You just have to stop cooking it soon enough. And roast chicken too.

oyster stew, pickled beets.

:puke:

Fresh okra right from the garden, chopped, breaded, and fried. I love me some good okra.

Imagine mint jello with the blandest raw vegetables sliced up & floating in it.

Orange jello with grated carrots in.

Green jello with canned fruit cocktail, walnuts, and sour cream.

Every frickin' Thanksgiving the latter showed up. Gor-mette, I'm telling ya.

Ketchup mixed with sugar and chili powder. Then she'd slather it on poor, defenseless pieces of chicken and cook them until they begged for dehydrated mercy.

holidays 'cause they knew we'd all be morbidly curious enough to have a piece or two. :P

Most of the really bad food was my mom's attempt to cook something normal that she'd manage to make really nasty somehow.

Her stir-fries were the ones that really stuck on me. This was why I developed a fear of tofu. Her stir-fries were that bad.

my mom once made me sit at the table until i finished a peanut butter, mayo and banana sandwich...but that is the only time i think i was ever subjected to any type of culinary terrorism

My parents were both pretty good cooks otherwise.

Liver, fish cooked with the head still on it, raw clams, beet salad to name a few.
:puke:

I think you had the worst food choices as a kid.
Did you need therapy to recover from this experience? Or was Pepto-Bismal enough?

to be made, WE do the cooking. I don't trust my mother anywhere near a jar of mayonnaise, lol.

I'm sorry, but :puke: My husband who had never been out of NY had never even heard of it when I met him. If I even say the words he starts to make this weird face and his eyes start to twitch.

but the hands-down worst had to be liver, as it kept appearing in all its stinking glory. I can't begin to count the wasted hours I spent as it cooled on my plate and I tried to out-wait the will of the parents.

Tongue--not as frequent, but still detestable. Like it's friend, Mr. Liver, I hated the texture of the stuff.

Partially cooked "roast" chicken. My mom had a problem getting roast chicken to stay in the pan long enough to cook all the way through.

Most vegetables--the top of the list was Brussels sprouts--they lied and told us there were cherries inside them.
As I recall, the only vegetables I liked were lettuce (iceberg, of course. I don't recall even seeing leaf lettuce as a child), tomatoes, cucumbers, canned spinach, corn, and potatoes. That's it. Other vegetables came out of cans and they had stomach-churning odors.

There were also concoctions prepared by my dad that I have never tried to recreate. One notable was "Swiss steak." I'm also not a fan of lamb cooked with okra (that is part of our ethnic culinary heritage--not something he kind of came up with while envisioning himself as a sure winner on Iron Chef.

Oh--I need to add this: I have NEVER made a child eat something he or she doesn't like. It is simply not worth it. Nor do I do these martyrdom presentations about how "X" is good for you and you have to have it every so often. I do not buy the hated foods because the mealtime terrorism did leave me with emotional scars. On the positive side, though, once I was on my own, I discovered the taste of many of the hated vegetables when prepared fresh rather than dumped out of a can. I can now honestly say that I like most vegetables--although B. sprouts not so much--, but I cannot imagine any way that I will ever accept organ meats.

correctly. My daughter requests it often. Real simple, real homey, really good

of Swiss steak--it was some kind of flat piece of beef, the kind that is prone to becoming dry, grey and leathery, smothered in stewed tomatoes with cans of green beans thrown in.

moist and full of flavor. I coat the tenderized round steak w/well seasoned flour mix, brown it then add the tomatoes. Bell pepper, celery and extra garlic are also included. Simmer in crock pot, or bake in oven.

The green beans go on the side, not in the steak

Smashed potatoes are required for all the good gravy.

sauteed in butter with a ton of onions. or broiled with a ton of onions.

The French really know how to cook that stuff too. Best liver I ever had was in France.

Whatever that tough cut is, pounded to shit with a spiky mallet so it had holes all through it + pan fried for WAY too long = eating shoe leather. No seasoning, either.

Tied for first place in food hell was canned spinach. Again, no seasoning--just dumped in a pot and heated. I cannot tell you how many times I gagged on that seaweedy stringy stuff. OMG I feel a gag coming on right now.
:puke:

Also canned peas--the gray ones. But put enough butter on those and they're fairly tolerable.

My mom used canned vegetables for decades, till I discovered fresh veggies in high school and nagged her till she caved and visited the produce department for more than iceberg lettuce and potatoes.

I'm sure your mom is a nice lady, but MY GOD who taught her to "cook"?!?!?!?!?!

I thought my high school friend's mom was a bad cook (her peach pie consisted of a frozen pie shell, a can of cling peaches, and a can of reddi-whip), but I think you outdo that!
I will happily mail you my mom's potroast!

Whereas my Mom was the kind of cook that all children fear, I seem to have a natural knack for cooking. My kid is spoiled--I pity his future wife/husband.

But thank you for the offer! :hug:

liver for dinner, I went to be hungry, and GLADLY.

Redstone

and something called "head cheese" which is pigs head meat suspended in jelly. Also olive loaf. :puke:

The first time I saw it being made, all I could think was, "Oh my god, there's pig snot and boogers in it. And earwax."

:puke:

I distinctly remember the taste of earwax. :P

Liver is yummy. Especially chicken liver. Fried chicken liver. Mmmmmmm.

Head cheese is something I lost my innocence just by learning of its existence. (Which was right here at DU, in fact.)

made me gag. the only way i could eat them was to swallow them with water like aspirin. :puke:

That has to top the list. Boiled spam and cabbage runs a close second, though.

I still shudder at the memory. My mom was determined to find some way we'd eat liver without gagging on it, though.

She failed.

Miserably.

and wrong!

Then, when we complained about it showing up on the dinner table, she always said, "But I have to use it up!"

:puke: :puke: :puke: my mom was anemic.

Doesn't matter what the food was, serving that unhealthy chemical-laden shit to kids is child abuse.

:puke:

One time -- just ONE time -- my Mom did something I found disgusting. Tripe. When she saw my reaction she quickly ceased ever considering making that again. After all, I ate nearly anything else. Imagine that, refraining from foisting revolting food on your child to "build character." Wow.

The unholy concoctions I'm reading here are meking my stomach turn into Calabi-Yao shapes.

But thank goodness my mom was otherwise a superb cook. Can't remember why she would occasionally cook these up -- she didn't care much for it either.

pheasant, wild turkey, Cheese Whiz and pickled pigs feet to name a few..

I like them all except the pigs feet.

My dad was in charge of cooking the wild game and I must say I thought it was pretty good back then. Now I don't care for any of it, I guess it is just not prepared right or maybe we were just happy to have meat. Pickled pigs feet and Cheese Wiz are still disgusting.

I like Cheese Wiz but pigs feet are....can't think of a word for them.

I love corned beef. I love corned beef hash. I love beets. But mixed together it does seem to taste like an old red flannel union suit might taste. x( Waste of good beets.

I was convinced that my mother had simply cooked into a mush some locusts she found on the tree in our front yard. Just looking at it made me want to vomit... :puke:

This was grandma's Mississippi junk.

Okra.

Greens of any kind, boiled to death. I think she just didn't know about iceberg lettuce. I never ever had broccoli when I was a kid. The only veggies I ate were corn, white potatoes and sweet potatoes. Now I like broccoli.

Black eyed peas boiled to mush with a metallic taste.

Watermelon with salt on it (still hate watermelon).

Bad quality meat -- too much bone, skin, cartilage and not enough meat. I got glared at, nagged, picked on, and generally given a hard time during meals at grandma's house. I was not forced to sit there and stare at it though. I was told I would starve to death if I didn't eat that shit. And all the females were forced to go in the too-small kitchen and march around three times a day, either preparing food or cleaning up the dishes and putting up the leftovers. The purpose of that was to reinforce that we were subordinate and our job in life was to be galley slaves. Meantime the men all went in the den and watched football on the TV. I was expected to know how to prepare food and peel veggies just because I was female. I asked mom why the men (my dad, grandpa and uncle) never lifted a finger and the answer I got was, "But they're too old". :grr:

Eventually I ran into the den when there were already four or five females in the small kitchen putting up leftovers, and watched football, while my mom shrieked at me from the kitchen to come help.

Mom learned to do the opposite of what Grandma did. Grandma was an Extension Agent and a home economist. We asked her once, while she lectured us about vitamins, "Where are the vitamins? You boiled them to death!". She was pissed.

Mom bought good quality tender meat. From her I learned how to saute onions and mushrooms in butter. And to put a bit of baking powder in the scrambled eggs to make them fluffy.

Except that mom tried to get me to eat stuff she liked that I was allergic to or else it was too hot for me -- tomatoes, raw onions, bell peppers, stuff with too much black pepper on it.

I don't remember too many foods I didn't like on our table growing up, but I remember the horror of being forced to drink Tab when everyone else was chugging plain old Coke.

Blech.

x(

I had a sweet tooth. I still do but it's somewhat under control.

I had low blood sugar problems as a kid, and still have to remember to eat protein frequently.

Back then (in the 60s) nobody knew about low blood sugar. That was why I craved sugar. It made me feel better fast. I was told to use saccharin in my tea.
(I grew up in the South where we drink it year round)

I was told, "It tastes just like sugar". This was back when all they had was the clear liquid stuff in bottles. I think it was called "Sweet-22" or something.
I would put it in my tea and gag. I said, "No it doesn't! No it doesn't!".

My parents also yelled at me when I reached for the sugar bowl. It took me a couple of decades to get that sound out of my head, after I was grown.

It fucked with my head when they were telling me my reality was not real.

Some years later I read that there is a gene for tasting artificial sweeteners. Some people can tell the difference between sugar and artificial sweeteners and some people cannot.

I can very obviously tell the difference. But the parental units and grandparents INSISTED saccharin was the same taste as sugar!!!!

The only artificial sweetener that tastes anything like sugar to me is Equal.

:banghead: :banghead: :puke: :puke:

Some of them work for me, like Splenda works fine. But saccharin... ugh. Just that aftertaste alone... let alone the taste the first time around... :scared:

both of which work better as cat food... :puke:

actually she eventually just made it for my Dad (he was of Polish decent, his mother immigrated from Poland) who loved it and didn't make us eat it.

But she made this egg and spaghetti soup, not sure what the name of it, if it had one, it also had zucchinis in it and I hated it.

Instead of browning the meat for flavour and then adding the other ingredients gradually, my mom would take a couple of pounds of chuck, throw it into a big pot with a bunch of potatoes, peas, carrots, and onions and not much seasoning, cover it with way too much water, and boil the shit out of it for four hours until it became a grey glop. And then she'd add the secret ingredient, turnips, which would make everything taste really awful and bitter. To this day, I cannot eat stew, even if made properly, if it's called "stew". If you call it "ragout" or "potage", I may eat it, but if you call it "stew", I wouldn't even touch it with George Bush's dick.

Brussels sprouts was another thing. Little green balls of galvanized evil. Fortunately, I wasn't the only one in our family who hated them, so we only had them a couple of times during my childhood.

And she'd also fry beef liver until it turned into powdery shoe leather -- with fried onions. To this day, I refuse to eat fried liver.

Mom was at best an indifferent and uninspired cook. When I wouldn't eat something, she'd say, "If you don't like it, don't eat." And I wouldn't. My dad was the good cook in the family -- his profession was baker. When he died, leaving my mother as the sole cook, I learned how to cook food largely in self-defence.

But no, that wasn't good enough -- I was forced to EAT it too. (this was my biological father's idea, he left us when I was 4, probably a good thing!)

Then my mom tortured me when my stepfather was on a diet: made me eat blue cheese hamburgers, and these disgusting whole white potatoes in a can.

And peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I hated them.

:puke: :puke: complete gag material.

My parents, too, insisted it was good for you. I had to choke down
3 bites before I could leave the table and it really was torture. I still can't abide the stuff, or anything
that tastes "liver-y". Ridiculous to turn the dinner table into a torture station for kids!

Which probably explains my aversion to seafood.

Cream dried beef. She made it with pancakes, and the rule was that you had to have your first pancake slathered in it, before you could have one with syrup.

but I hate lima beans...and spinach by itself...

canned potato soup. My Dad was really strict and sometimes downright mean, we had to sit there until our food was eaten. There's a lot more involved that I won't go into but suffice it to say I was so traumatized over the potato soup incident that I never fixed it once for my kids or DH until just this past year, some 45 yrs later..and it wasn't canned potato soup.

After DH and I were married, my MIL attempted to get me to try some of her concoctions. Her cooking was excellent..but some of her ideas for what to drink were downright disgusting. She got on a save money kick, of which she had no reason to do, it was just something she wanted to try. I remember being pregnant with my first child, sick all of the time, and she offered me a glass of milk. At first I thought it was skim milk but it was extremely watered down. Then she began talking about how you can freeze milk and you could stretch it by adding water. She had given me frozen bottled milk "stretched" with 50% water. Another time she gave me what she called a chocolate drink..chocolate extract flavoring mixed with water. After that, I refused to try anything else.

To this day, I've never put canned baked beans in my mouth.

Even seeing that "Bush's Baked Bean" commercial makes me gag (doubly so, since it contains the word "Bush".

no complaints here
I ate well :)

The colrabbi from the garden or the raddish sandwiches might have grossed some kids out, but I loved it.

:puke:

yuck. Organ meat.

I don't mind sprouts so much now. Luckily my mom was otherwise a great cook.

The worst you can say was that some of her dishes, like stir fry or turkey cutlets, were a little boring in comparison to some of her more exciting dishes, but not bad in the least.

She made some traditional Ukrainian dishes that some other people might flinch at, like borscht, but I liked it from the get-go.

Fried liver, cooked spinach, powered eggs and milk, hominey, swiss steak with fat. Liver, liver, liver every Wednesday for dinner.

that for us for lunch. By the time you got to the cafeteria, the bread had thawed and turned to white mush, and the pickle loaf slid out, lubricated by the margarine. :puke:

My mom would make pretty decent spaghetti sauce. But the next day she always felt compelled to toss the leftover corn, peas and carrots from dinner into the sauce. I like corn and carrots and I even like peas in some instances (raw or in soup), but I *loathe* them in spaghetti sauce.

My mother hated to cook - and it showed!

Now that I am a vegetarian, I wonder how I ever could have eaten that stuff.

I think she believed it was a battle that needed to be won.

Largely because of that, I did learn to pick my battles carefully when raising kids. There are some things that are better let go.

So whenever I had beets, I'd ask for them on a separate dish.

I didn't like how my mom prepared them. She believed that all beets must be pickled beets and they just tasted like vinegar, and I hated them. It wasn't till I got older that I discovered what beets really taste like, especially when they're roasted. But I still put them on their own plate.

She also hates liver, so we never had that either.

with the carrots and that :puke:

I defy you to find anything worse.

where every vegetable tastes the same. I used to pick out the lima beans because the texture disgusts me.

served because my dad liked it.

fried spam sammich w/ mayo. both of these wonderful concoctions were my father's doing. he left when I was 10, so I never had them after that. although, every now and then I'll get a craving for the fried egg one....what's wrong w/ me?
oh, and cooked carrots. still can't eat those.

Harvard Beets
Creamed corn
Scalloped potatoes
Tapioca pudding

Made with hamburger and cream of mushroom soup. Blech!

:wtf:


creamed eggs on toast - must have been a WWII/ depression-era thing...

bologna fried in a pan...I have no idea
pork n beans....they are o.k, but I haven't had them in years
everything else was o.k. that she made.....

Half a pound of ground beef, one can of cream of mushroom soup, a quarter of a bag of frozen peas, and noodles. No amount of pepper could save it. Not what my folks called it, but what I named it in undergrad. I live in fear of being in a situation where I have to eat it again. Especially for several days in a row. :puke:

Shit on a shingle. 'nuff said.

Tuna-noodle casserole (poverty casserole, but with one can of tuna for four people, hold the peas). Mass noodles. For several days. No seasoning (have I mentioned my mom was not that good of a cook?).

I don't think this has a name other than :puke: Once my mom figured out that what I call blue-collar cooking was causing some health problems, we went healthy. "Healthy" consisted of chicken breasts in the microwave for ten minutes, augmented with some Kitchen Bouquet to make it look like it had actually been cooked.

Celery as filler. In fucking anything and EVERYTHING. I'm a supertaster. I HATE celery. I was about 30 when my mom admitted she didn't like it either. Hey, you gotta do what you gotta do.

Looking back, it's no wonder I have fond memories of government cheese. :rofl:

My father's family is Swedish, so I got the gamut of Scandinavian delights. I still shudder.

My mother's family is Irish, and I am the only half-Irish woman in the universe that does not care for corned beef and cabbage, specifically the cabbage.

Julie

It really made me miss ground beef! :(

My dad also used to cook a lot of garbanzo beans, which I hated back then but :loveya: now!