Back in the olden days when I was a kid, my mom used to make some dishes that seemed to be peculiar to our family. As I think back on it now, it was probably her way of stretching her grocery budget by being “creative” - but we didn’t care - it was good stuff.
There are 3 in particular that I remember.
Long before Beenie Weenie showed up on the grocery store shelves, we’d take care of cookout leftover thusly: Slice and fry up some onions. Cut up leftover grilled hotdogs into rings and dump in with the onions. Dump in the leftover baked beans. Mix, heat thoroughly, eat. I even made it a few times in college, not with leftover but as a meal itself. Fortunately I lived alone so the beans didn’t bother anyone else.
Slop - we kids named this, and I’m sure we thought we were oh so clever. It was spaghetti sauce over white rice. I’m guessing it became supper when Mom ran out of pasta. We used to ask her to make it, but I guess the idea of spaghetti sauce on something other than spaghetti was not to be the norm.
The third is something my dad did on the rare occasions when we had leftover spaghetti sans sauce. He’d melt butter in a frying pan, then dump in the spaghetti, fry it till it was crisp, then flip it over and fry the other side.
None of this was ever served to company and I never encountered it anywhere else (even beenie weenie didn’t have the sliced onions.) I wouldn’t be surprised now to find that other people ate similar dishes, but in my world in those days, these were family specialties.
Did your family have creative leftovers? Or did you come up with unique dishes when you were living on a shoestring budget?
For flank steak we always marinated it for at least 24 hours in Wishbone French Dressing. We all still do it to this day (my husband found it strange but he’s become a convert.)
My grandpa would take leftover spaghetti and do something kind of similar - he’d make up a white sauce, the spaghetti, and a ton of cheddar cheese and bake it. I have not been able to duplicate it though (and I’ve tried!!)
The only other thing I can think of is this rice thing my husband likes me to make sometimes. It involves cooked rice, chopped onions, cream of mushroom soup, a lot of cheddar cheese, a bowl and an oven. It’s kinda like comfort food I guess. Being from the midwest, just about anything and everything that involves cream of mushroom soup is comfort food. Hmmm - wonder if the spaghetti thing my grandpa made involved cream of mushroom soup? Hmmmmmmm.
Ah, cream of mushroom soup. One of our winter “I’m tired and hungry” specials is cream of mushroom soup over rotisserie chicken. My husband and son like to tear up a piece of bread and put the soup “gravy” over that, too.
Whoa whoa whoa, Miss Fancypants! You put onions in yours? Well laaaaa-teeee-daaaaa! We ate it regularly, I now feed it to my husband sometimes but not too often because the results are alarming.
Sounds like a kugel. There’s a recipe for kugel in every Jewish grandmother’s head, and they’re all the best one.
Ground pork, chopped onions, peas, shredded romaine lettuce and a couple of packs of Ramen noodles make a dish almost, but not entirely, unlike lo mein. It was one of my go-to dishes when cash was tight.
Carb Overload: One box generic stuffing mix, one package mac-n-cheese, coupla hot dogs, some frozen peas. Throw it in a pot with enough water to cook the pasta and hydrate the stuffing mix. Add cheese powder and butter. (I think I actually found this on a box of StoveTop as a legit recipe once.)
And yes, cream of mushroom soup with some sliced potatoes can be added to any cheap ass cut of meat you can find, and it’s actually pretty tasty, in a pale Midwestern kind of way. Bonus points if you have a splash of sherry or white wine left in the bottom of the box to add while it simmers.
When I was a kid we had Mom’s Muck - leftover potatoes sliced and fried up with leftover sausages, green pepper and onion. Awesomeness!
I don’t think I make anything weird for my kids. There is a chicken recipe involving three different kinds of prepackaged soup that could be considered strange.
We used to have soup over bread…a ladleful of Campbell’s Chunky Soup over a slice of white bread. Mom was surprised some prosperous years later when I asked her why we never had it anymore.
My mother used to make taco salad, but it was unlike anything of the same name that I’ve had anywhere else. It was romaine lettuce, ground beef, and beans, topped with Fritos and french dressing.
We also have something called kringle every December. I’ve had something by that name, but it was not what we make in my family. It’s a really sticky dough, unsweetened, with a lot of sour cream, rolled out and shaped into a figure 8, then baked. I can’t imagine Christmas morning without it. I don’t know how many generations back it goes, but my mother always made it. Years ago my sister learned, and last year my niece tried her hand at it. The results were… interesting.
Something my family did was eat leftover popcorn as breakfast cereal. As in, pouring yourself a bowl of popcorn and eating it with milk and sugar on top, like you would a bowl of cheerios.
I grew up thinking this was normal but when I’ve mentioned it to other people, nobody else seems to have done this.
Mom’s recipe for “sludge”: Open can of soup. Add 1/2 can of water. Heat to boiling. Add mashed potato flakes while stirring until it looks like sludge. Add cheese or butter if desired. Eat.
Our traditional post Thanksgiving meal is fried mush. Mashed potatoes, carrots, stuffing, sweet potates, turkey and gravy fried together until warm and mushy and served topped with chilled cranberry sauce.
Dad was famous for hobo stew. Whatever leftovers he could find in the fridge with a can of vegetables added and usually seasoned with worstershire sauce or steak sauce. It almost always turned out surpisingly tasty.
I grew up eating “Ham and Egg Pie”, which other people seem to find weird. It’s cubed ham and sliced boiled eggs in a white sauce, covered with either pie crust or a layer of croissants. This is how we always used up our leftover holiday ham.
My mother used to grate up an apple and add it to a box of cake mix, with everything else the mix called for. Apparently, it stretched the mix.
I’ve been known to throw about a quarter cup of lentils or brown rice in with a can of vegetable beef soup and a can of water. My husband doesn’t care for this, but I like it when I’m not feeling up to cooking anything more ambitious.
My dad also loved fried spaghetti leftovers. Instead of heating up the sauce and noodle mixture (because the leftovers were always sauce-and-noodles-together, never just sauce) in the microwave, he’d butter a pan and dump the spaghetti in. So, so, so good.
I also used to eat pink mashed potatoes when I was a kid. Add a couple of tablespoons of ketchup to instant mashed potatoes, and they become about 400% more palatable to a picky 6-year-old, evidently.
Fried clams! ahhhhh, memories. It was my stepdad’s budget specialty. It wasn’t fried, so I don’t know why we called it that. The recipe was: boil cheap noodles, drain, add a can of clam bits, toss with olive oil and some kind of green spice (sage? cilantro? oregano? idk). Then consume. It was so tasty! We had to feed 5 people on one and a half salaries, so clams were a good way to fill up. He also had a really good, hearty, extraordinarily fatty and salty chicken and noodles recipe that took ALL DAY to crock (oh the hours spent smelling chicken but being unable to eat it yet!). But damn, it was freakin’ good.
He wasn’t a fabulous cook, in retrospect; however, unlike my mother, he actually *liked *cooking. And he was ok at it. So his relatively-simple dishes were some serious gourmet shit to us.
6 Large yellow onions, saute for ~ 5 minutes in 2 tbl’s salted butter, then add ~ 1/2 cup water, cover and simmer for 20 mins. Pour off water, S&P to taste and then serve over mashed potatoes.
So good.
Served with Oscar Mayer Smoky Links, boiled, of course.
Must have been a Polish thing from Indiana where she grew up.
Back in the day, it probably cost what?..$1 to feed the entire family.
My kids 21 and 24 grew up with me about a 1/4 of the time. Their whole life I have been a chef, baker and general manager. My oldest liked escargot and med rare tuna at 11…but their all time FAVORITE meal was/is Mac and cheese with frozen peas and canned tuna.
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WhyNot** We also did the hotdog thing but I never thought to add stuffing mix…sounds, umm, interesting!
