I still make meatballs this way ( Mom’s way):
1 lb ground 80/20 ground beef
1 cup Italian bread crumbs
2 eggs
brown in frying pan. simmer in jarred spaghetti sauce.
I like my meatballs and haver really been impressed with any restaurant meatballs.
OTOH, Mom also loved Lipton onion soup mix for a wide variety of dishes. I’ve never used that stuff.
I used to love my mom’s potato salad. It’s the taste of summer as a kid.
Whenever I do make potato salad it’s the same super-simple recipe she used: boiled potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, chopped celery and onion, Mayo, salt and pepper. Sometimes I add a little mustard too, not sure if she did or not.
I still make liver the way my mother did: dredge in breadcrumbs and fry in butter, leaving it slightly pink in the middle.
I still butcher whole chickens the way my parents taught me, and not the more common splits you see in restaurants etc where the thighs and/or the wings are attached to larger pieces, or the back isn’t split in half horizontally. Two wings, Two long legs (aka “drumsticks” although I’ve also heard “drumsticks” used for the largest of the wing bones), two thighs or short legs, wishbone, two breasts (left and right), two backs (top and bottom), neck (if included and if not saved out for flavoring rice etc), giblets (likewise).
Baked Chicken & rice with cut up chicken and 2 boxes of chicken flavored rice-a-roni. Just a super basic, easy recipe my mom made that’s still one of our favorite meals in the fall/winter.
Funny - my mother was a pretty good cook for her era, and with a few exceptions (the hideous lime jello salad with lumps of onion, cream cheese and walnut, barf) I enjoyed her food when I was young.
But times change. Beyond sugar, salt and flour, my mother circa 1971 wouldn’t know how to use and might not even recognize most of what I consider pantry staples today. She herself evolved - by the time she died at age 78 she was familiar with lots of foods and techniques she didn’t use while I was growing up.
I was a bit ahead of her on the culinary development front though. I still remember her nearly fainting with horror the first time I came home from grad school and cooked a meal using fresh garlic. She was convinced that one measly clove finely chopped was going to render the final dish inedibly intensely garlicky. But in later years, she could fling spoonfuls of garlic with the best of them.
My mom’s round steak. It was damn near shoe leather the way she cooked it, but that’s still the way I like it. If it’s too tender, it’s just not what I want.
Lasagna. Mom made it with no ricotta, and no bechamel, just layers of lasagna noodles, tomato sauce, ground beef, and mozzarella. I “fancy it up” with basil leaves and sausage myself, but otherwise mine is still just that basic.
Mama plant noticed that as a child, I like her Mother’s oyster dressing. It had a can of oysters in it.
Preparing it for me as an adult, she added six cans.
We took it home. The cats wouldn’t eat it.
I make Stove Top ™ stuffing, adding mushrooms, chicken meat and onions.
My father’s matzoh ball soup.
Simmer a whole cut up chicken for 8 hours (although I’ll normally use a slow cooker for this rather than a stovetop stimmer) - along with a chopped onion, and 2 coarse chopped carrots. Remove chicken and veggies, setting the chicken aside for other uses later. Take the strained soup/stock and add half the flavor packet from the Manischewitz mix (increasing the chickeny flavor, as well as adding a ton of salt and dill), and another tablespoon of dried dill. Matzoh balls made exactly per the on-the-box instructions which results in floaters (sinkers begone!). No additional vegetation or materials in the soup, so just the very flavorful broth and the floaters, with zero effort made to skim the schmaltz off.
It was perfect as a kid, and it’s perfect for me now. 
Although I occasionally have been known to add a garnish of chopped chives or garlic chips if I want to fancy it up.
My sister and I always talk about the round steak we had as kids. My mom just fried it in an electric frying pan with basic seasonings. I don’t remember it being tough but it had a grainy/dry texture. We loved it. I think I would still love it. We were talking about it with my mom one day and told her how we loved her round steak that was dry and grainy! She said - gee, thanks a lot. We told her we were serious. I also remember how for a while she would serve it cut into strips. We called them Space Sticks!
When I cut school in seventies I went to my grandma often. She was terrible cook so she usually just fried eggs and served them on slabs of bread. I still fry my eggs the same way when I eat egg sandwiches.
My mother, the medical doctor, realized as a child that if she learned to cook, people would want her to cook.
She did eventually get married and have kids (which she did not regret), and did the cooking, but her personal preferences were set in Korea, so it was all blah to her anyway. Her attitude was, she cooked it, you ate it. I was one of the few people in college who thought the dining room food was better than what I got at home …
I still cook some food the way she cooked it: simple elements, prepared in the easiest way possible, with the minimum effort. It makes a pleasant change from my normal diet, but nobody else in my family will eat it.
My mom’s spaghetti sauce was pretty basic - ground beef, tomato sauce and paste, oregano, garlic powder, onion salt. That’s what I start with, but I use diced tomatoes, fresh mushrooms, chopped onions, and a splash of burgundy, plus basil. I find my variant to be superior.
For the most part, her cooking way back then was fairly bland and benign, probably because one of my sisters is really fussy. After we all moved on, she started a catering business and became much more adventurous. No more bland and benign for her!
Mine fried cube steak in oil and served it. (I think cube steak started out as round steak.). Dry, grainy, chewy, disgusting. Bonus: streaks of extra-chewy gristle!..Revolting. I can’t bring myself to use it even today in the crock pot, I will use sirloin or chuck.
One of my ultimate comfort food we just call cabbage soup. Properly, it is rischert, and the oldest form was found in a dig in a salt mine [no idea if the poor workman forgot and left his lunch sitting around for like 5000 years or if he set it down and went off somewhere and got killed.] The original base recipe is cabbage, beans, barley, onion, turnip, greens and herbs. Historically the herb was summer savory, and protein was whatever didn’t get away. One can sort of trace invasions and food innovations historically [if you are into historic food research like me =) ] to the final version my Mom used where she added celery, carrot, garlic, her preferred green was mustard and beet greens, and a more typical black pepper, parsley, summer savory and rosemary. Her preferred protein was garlic sausage/keilbasa.
I tweaked the recipe to be more food pyramid for diabetics, and was in the habit of starting it on the woodstove and just sort of noshing on a single person batch all day, and I serve it with a boule of homemade bread with butter, and usually a piece of fruit is my dessert but we have some traditional stuff that got used as a rare dessert.
1 bag shredded cabbage for cole slaw mix [hey I am lazy =)] or 4 cups
1 tennis ball sized onion, shredded or chopped
1 cup chopped potato/turnip/rutabaga/parsnip/root veggie of choice
.5 cup canned northern beans if lazy/.5 cup northern beans soaked overnight in 2 changes water
.5 cup barley
.5 cup chopped carrot
.5 cup chopped celery
4 cloves garlic sliced not minced or crushed but you can use the crushed/minced
1 bag washed baby spinach
2 teaspoons italian herbs, again I am lazy
black pepper to taste, salt to taste if needed
half pound protein of choice*
I have used pretty much everything at one time or another based on my finances - game [squirrel, venison, boar, salmon] and regular [pork, beef, chicken, keilbasa, italian sausage] My preferred is either boneless country style rib or italian sausage [loose not cased] and I really REALLY did not like salmon.
If using fake rib, nice dice on it, just chuck it in the pot with everything all at once, add water or my preferred homemade defatted chicken broth. If using the caseless sausage, I put about a cup of water in the pot, and muddle the sausage in until it is all these tiny little crumbles because I like a little in each bite. But ultimately, everything in the pot and simmer however long but at least until the beans and barley are cooked and tender because generally everything will end up cooked. You can have it thin like soup or thick like stew [someone extra shows up for food, add water =) Ultimate in Depression era stretch the food to feed enough people!] I find that obviously if I use the sausage it changes how you need to season to taste.
And of course, you can make a 1 person all day batch, or use this for 3 people, or tweak the amount to serve however many people you need to feed - I have done this in a 5 gallon pot for a rather large bunch of people at an SCA camping event that was cold and drizzly and it went over rather well [that time was a vegan version with no dead critter in it at all made with water instead of broth]
Pancakes. My mom’s pancake/waffle recipe is about the only thing I can think of that I haven’t improved on.
And my dad’s sausage and peppers (one of the few things he cooked).
I had a very similar conversation with my mom about her (relatively) dry turkey and how I find other people’s turkey kind of soggy or slimy.
I don’t cook fish much anymore. Can’t stand the smell that lingers in the house for days. But on the very rare occasion that I do, I still cook only the boneless white fillets like Cod or Haddock. Like my dear old mom, the method is to cook them dredged in egg and flour and with fried onions. It’s done when the fillet flakes are rigid. None of this soft and moist on the inside bullshit. I want it dead. I want its family dead. I want everybody it ever knew dead.
Christmas cookies and pie crust. I’ve pretty much improved on everything else she made. I have her cookbooks, but rarely look at them.