Gaaah. My in-laws torture salad in such a way, too. No canned carrots, but. . .well, my MIL lost a bunch of weight, years ago, with Weight Watchers. She has since put it back on, but some really repulsive habits have stuck with her, including this low-calorie cheese-looking kind of cheese substitute stuff that, oh, hell, there are no words for it. It’s pure evil, with orange food coloring, in a plastic wrapper.
Anyway, my FIL, who was raised vegetarian, insists on a raw veggie being served with every dinner. Often, this is a “salad”, including: iceberg lettuce, wedges of hothouse tomatoes, this evil demon cheese substance, canned peas, and french dressing. :eek:
I love, love, love fresh raw peas in a green salad. But canned? Canned??
(Correct term for the likes o’ me is “pescatarian” but I have found that people immediately understand my made-up word, whereas I almost always have to explain pescatarian.)
Actually, I rather liked my parents cooking, the only issues I had was with hamloaf [grind picknic ham, and make meatloaf out of it,. Something my mom found in some magazine :smack: ] and they like raw oysters and clams which I am allergic to but they never made me eat those.
On the other hand, I will eat stuff they think is disgusting. I have a killer recipe for a ragout of chicken hearts that is scrumptious =)
In college, someone in my dorm drew a cartoon flow chart of the life cycle of a roasted chicken in our dorm cafeteria. Day 1: roast chicken. Day 2: chicken sandwiches. Day 3: chicken salad OR diced chicken in pasta. Day 4: chicken soup with pasta. Things went downhill quickly after that.
My dad loves cow blood stew and chicken anuses. I’ve tried the latter and they’re not too bad, as long as you can forget what they actually are (they’re a lot like giblets, I guess). As for the cow blood stew, it’s disgusting. Congealed globs of blood with bits of cow intestine floating in a hot greasy soup… ew.
My aunt once decided to make lambs brain curry. Oh dear god. I can still see the brains in the bowl of water she put them in to clean them. Eurgh shudder. :eek: Now I’ve made myself feel nauseous.
This sounds sort of like “hobo stew,” which is something that I would not touch as a young person. It was a project that was insisted upon by our church youth group when we went on the annual hayride to a local state forest:
Everybody was to bring a can of soup of some sort, and they would all be mixed together to feed everybody from the same big kettle of slop. Flavors/varieties were a matter of randomness.
Bleurg.
However, the original concept of “throwing everything into the stockpot” is something that’s happened for centuries. “Leftover Soup” isn’t that unusual in circumstances where food cannot afford to be wasted. People still do that to some degree:
For example, I freeze all cleaned vegetable trimmings in a giant ziploc bag, and then use the contents (however random) to flavor stock when I make it. At least you get something out of all that stuff.
Hm. We called it “Girl Scout Stew.” I was a Girl Scout when I was growing up in Atlanta (three years as a Junior, I think it was) and Girl Scout Stew was where everyone brought their favorite Campbell soup and we threw it all into a huge pot for dinner. This was only on camping trips. By the time the stew was done, we would all be ravenous, and that stew would be the best thing we ever tasted in our lives. I’d rather treasure the memory than try making that stew again, though.
I too, grew up with a German mother and ate many things that a lot of people would find repulsivie. For instance, I happen to like sauerkraut. It does stink up the house, though. I can tolerate braunschweiger, liverwurst, gelbwurst, and various other wursts. I’m not a fan of blutwurst (sp) though. Ugh. My mother also ate pickled herring and sardines. To this day, the smell just gags me.
I was not, however, overly fond of liver and onions. I would eat them, but only because food just did not go to waste in house! Even worse, was SOUR liver and onions, somehow prepared with vinegar. It wasn’t a recipe I cared to learn.
We too, ate the goose drippings spread on german sourdough or rye bread, with salt sprinkled on top. Another favorite of mine, anyway, was german sourdough or rye bread spread with butter, sliced tomatoes, and chopped chives.
My mother also ate pickled pigs feet and I shudder to this day when I think of it.
It took 4 pages for someone to mention my other childhood treat? Were yours homemade? I’ve only had them from a jar, Hormel, I think. (Is there a part of the pig they didn’t use?) The best parts were the chewy rind and the lean part, the ham. I never developed a taste for the fat layer, probably because of the consistency.
