My family was so White Bread that......

[WhyNot]

@zelie zelerton

OK what’s the deal with Jell-o and carrot? Jell-o is the same thing us Brits call jelly yes? Sweet, wobbly dessert food? Where do the carrots come in? And for the love of Gord **why ** do they come in???

One upon a time, as I understand it, gelatin was actually an expensive and labor intensive food to make. All that time boiling down bones and gently skimming the crud off the top to reduce the liquid for the gelatin! Then powdered gelatin came out, and with it, cookbooks and fancy molds. What could you possibly cook with gelatin, you ask? Why, Jell-O (brand name) salads, appetizers and entrees of course. Wholesome, with vegetables and fruits and even meats (no, I’m not making this up.)

Check out The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization as seen through the medium of Jello for more (nauseating) details.

[levdrakon]

@zelie zelerton

OK what’s the deal with Jell-o and carrot? Jell-o is the same thing us Brits call jelly yes? Sweet, wobbly dessert food? Where do the carrots come in? And for the love of Gord **why ** do they come in???

Jell-o gelatin, yes. Some rocket-scientist mom somewhere figured if you mix shredded carrot into it kids would actually enjoy eating shredded carrot.

Her children promptly killed her and burned the body. Unfortunately, not before she managed to get a copy of the recipe to her fellow evil mothers who immediately began tormenting innocent children with it all over America, and probably Canada. Hell, it may have been a Canadian mom who invented it.

I’m proud to say it never worked on me. I learned I could in fact say “no” to Jell-o if it had something in it I didn’t like.

[Rebecca_DiMwitter]

@AuntiePam

For special occasions, homemade pizza – from Chef BoyArdee, in a box. If we felt especially adventurous, we’d put little globs of ground beef on it, or canned mushrooms.

Wow, I’d forgotten about canned mushrooms, the small button variety. No taste to them at all! Mom used them in every recipe she possibly could.

I don’t believe I ever saw many non-canned vegetables on our dinner table as a child—we ate canned green beans, canned wax beans, canned corn, canned limas, canned pork n’ beans, canned asparagus, etc., as a side dish most of my young life. Exception was potatoes. No one liked broccoli or cauliflower, and once in a great while we might have had to gag down brussels sprouts (no cheese, no butter, just a little salt was all you needed, felt my stepfather).

I know I was an adult in my own rented kitchen before I bought fresh veggies and learned that many vegetables actually had unique tastes. I am sure I never soaked real dried beans and boiled them into softness until I was all grown up as well. I recall being shocked at how long they took to prepare.

We ate a lot of Rice-A-Roni as a side dish too, if we wanted to be really exotic. Big, bloated, bland chicken-stock-flavored vermicelli. Every now and then I still crave it.

–Beck

[OneCentStamp]

@Rebecca DiMwitter

We ate a lot of Rice-A-Roni as a side dish too, if we wanted to be really exotic. Big, bloated, bland chicken-stock-flavored vermicelli. Every now and then I still crave it.

I think if I ate Rice-A-Roni right now, I’d be magically transported back to my college days. That, and I’d heave violently.

Rice-A-Roni, The San Francisco Treat[sup]TM[/sup] was for those college days when we weren’t too poor (AKA the Top Ramen days) nor too rich (AKA the Hamburger Helper days).

[BiblioCat]

@levdrakon

Jell-o gelatin, yes. Some rocket-scientist mom somewhere figured if you mix shredded carrot into it kids would actually enjoy eating shredded carrot.

Probably the same mom who thought up the idea of sneaking shredded carrots into perfectly good meatloaf, as a way to sneak veggies into the kid’s tummies. Meatloaf can be good, but when you add shredded carrots, it completely ruins it.

I never understood the idea of carrots and raisins added to Jell-O (yuck!), but fruit is good. I was always partial to bananas in red Jell-O. That’s what my mommy always made!

[Musicat]

This thread is making me sick. But I must contribute.

My mom didn’t seem to get the hang of salads. Her idea was to strip off the outside, limp, flat lettuce leaves from an iceberg head and carefully layer a few in a dish, then top it off with a dollop of mayo. I could never eat it. But years later I discovered how to really make salads and they’re a frequent item on my menu now. The lettuce she used I throw away, for starters.

Mom also would put hard dots of butter on the toast (white, of course), then jam. The chunks of butter would never melt, and besides, why does jam need butter? Ick.

[Kalhoun]

@levdrakon

Jell-o gelatin, yes. Some rocket-scientist mom somewhere figured if you mix shredded carrot into it kids would actually enjoy eating shredded carrot.

Her children promptly killed her and burned the body. Unfortunately, not before she managed to get a copy of the recipe to her fellow evil mothers who immediately began tormenting innocent children with it all over America, and probably Canada. Hell, it may have been a Canadian mom who invented it.

I’m proud to say it never worked on me. I learned I could in fact say “no” to Jell-o if it had something in it I didn’t like.

Must be a '60s thing. My mom did it too. And it sucked. And it was ALWAYS with green jell-o. Good gawd, woman! I know you were bettah than that!

[zelie_zelerton]

@WhyNot

One upon a time, as I understand it, gelatin was actually an expensive and labor intensive food to make. All that time boiling down bones and gently skimming the crud off the top to reduce the liquid for the gelatin! Then powdered gelatin came out, and with it, cookbooks and fancy molds. What could you possibly cook with gelatin, you ask? Why, Jell-O (brand name) salads, appetizers and entrees of course. Wholesome, with vegetables and fruits and even meats (no, I’m not making this up.)

Check out The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization as seen through the medium of Jello for more (nauseating) details.

omfg the horror!

I had no idea of the suffering you people endured. Carrot and cabbage jelly?!

I could post the leftover veggies that I don’t like? Sod the starving Africans, clearly this is a case of greater need.

[BiblioCat]

@zelie zelerton

Sod the starving Africans…

When I was little, all the starving children lived in China. At some point in the 80s, they all moved to Africa.

[Annie-Xmas]

@zelie zelerton

OK what’s the deal with Jell-o and carrot? Jell-o is the same thing us Brits call jelly yes? Sweet, wobbly dessert food? Where do the carrots come in? And for the love of Gord **why ** do they come in???

After eating jello for dessert damn near every day of my childhood, I can’t look at it. Sweet wobbly dessert food, yes. And carrots come in cause damn near ANYTHING can be put into it.

It wasn’t until I was grown up that I realized jello was very cheap, we would eat it as a treat, and all the inedible leftovers were put into it.

[control-z]

I don’t think all of you know what “white-bread” means, it doesn’t have to involve bread. Or food.

We had no cursing in our house. No alcohol either. No cigarettes. It’s not like my mom was a religious freak, she just was just a reserved person.

[Hypno-Toad]

@control-z

I don’t think all of you know what “white-bread” means, it doesn’t have to involve bread. Or food.

We had no cursing in our house. No alcohol either. No cigarettes. It’s not like my mom was a religious freak, she just was just a reserved person.

“Remember: Emotions are for ethnic people.”

[Larry_Mudd]

One of my mom’s representative recipes:

Fry up some ground beef (garlic or onions optional.)
Drain, and stir in two cans Campbell’s[sup]tm[/sup] Condensed Cream of Mushroom soup and one can of cooked kidney beans.

Heat thoroughly and serve over Minute Rice[sup]tm[/sup].

We had Brand Name ersatz everything. Miracle Whip[sup]tm[/sup], Tang[sup]tm[/sup], Cheez Whiz[sup]tm[/sup], Cool Whip[sup]tm[/sup], Wonder Bread[sup]tm[/sup], Nescafé[sup]tm[/sup], Kraft Dinner[sup]tm[/sup], Cup-a-Soup[sup]tm[/sup], Hamburger Helper[sup]tm[/sup], Rice-a-Roni[sup]tm[/sup], all that crap.

Cheez Whiz[sup]tm[/sup] heated on the stove-top and poured over steamed broccoli, as per the package suggestion. Oh yeah – because making a proper cheese sauce is so darned inconvenient and time-consuming. (Okay, so it it costs a fraction of what you’d pay for the same quantity of Cheez Whiz and tastes ten thousand times better, but OBEY THE LABEL and save almost four minutes!)

Come to think of it, I think my childhood has a lot to do with the fact that there is practically no processed food in my kitchen, and how I tend to eschew convenience products to the point of obsession. (I don’t buy prepared mustard, mayonnaise, yogourt, soy milk, tofu, salad dressing, marinade, catsup, tomato sauce, or anything like that, if it can be made at home.) Fourteen initial years of excessive consumerism will make you crazy that way.

[Monty]

@OneCentStamp

Since neither you nor Monty has stooped to mention it, I guess I’ll have to bring up the cornerstone of Mormon cuisine: green jello. Marshmallows and grated carrot optional.

Come to think of it, Monty’s a convert. He may never have had the privilege.

And I’m vegetarian, to boot. Guess I’ll never have the “privilege.”

Actually, I’m posting to this thread to mention what I miss most about Thanksgiving dinner: canned cranberry sauce. It wasn’t until I was in my late twenties before I ever had the home-made stuff and I thought it was just nasty. The canned stuff is perfect! No seeds, no stems, and it even has lines on it so you don’t have to argue with your little brother over where to cut the thing.

A close second would be pumpkin pie. Of course, my family never had home-made pie. Mom would pop the frozen pie crust, bought “fresh” the day before at A & P (or even Piggly Wiggly), into the oven. As soon as it cooled, she’d pour the pumpkin pie sauce from the humongous can into the crust.

Carving the turkey was the only time either of my parents would use the electric knife. I’m wondering to this day how much the accumulated gunk from a year’s non-use has affected my health.

Speaking of White Bread, that and corn bread (pronounced “cone pone”) were the only two types of bread that ever graced our table. Buiscuits…well, we just won’t talk about that. I think I’m still working on digesting the last one I ate back in 1977.

[aruvqan]

Well, technically I should be white bread, but I am handicapped sob

Way back in the early part of the century, my paternal grandmother in an amazing fit of egalitarianism was roommated with 2 chinese girls. Auntie Grace wrote cookbooks and taught chinese cooking [among other things … and Chang Yang Bei-ching. I could eat wierd things with chopsticks since before I can remember. One of my earlier memories is of being taken to a chinese restaurant and the waitresses commenting because I was using chopsticks, and I was about 5 years old [just before going to kindergarden … we were out shopping for new school clothing for me.]

My Grandmother also had a german ‘maid’ that she had imported back in 1923 to serve as my father and uncles nanny. She sort of became an overall retainer and got passed around to different families as kids popped out and needed nannying=) so german food was not unknown. Combine that with my mother being Iowa mennonite turned baptist when she married my dad, I got a good helping of real food.

The only thing that I can remember refusing to eat was some abortion of a dish back in about 1965 or 66 that mom saw in a magazine … “ham loaf” where you take boiled ham, run it through a meat grinder, add bread crumbs and eggs and make a meatloaf out of it. You sort of hawaiianize it by putting catsup and pinapple rings [canned] on top with the classic maraschino cherries pinned on with a toothpick. Well, I admit my dad turned my brother and I off of stewed tomatoes. My mother was in hospital with pneumonia and he made dinner one night, and opened a jar of home canned stewed tomatoes, reheated them and served them with sugar instead of salt… mom always made them with salt. Yuck

To this day, I love new foods … and the only things I really avoid are foods that have ingredients i am allergic to, and insects. OK, and stuff I have already tried and learned I dont like.

[Bobotheoptimist]

We used ketchup on “taco’s”. Taco’s were unseasoned ground beef on flour tortillas with lettuce and tomatoes. None of that wild salsa stuff for us, no sir!
Spaghetti sauce - ground beef in tomato sauce with some “Italian Seasoning” sprinkled in it. Garlic? No, that’s for them crazy eye-talians with their taste buds and their gold chains!

[control-z]

@Bobotheoptimist

We used ketchup on “taco’s”. Taco’s were unseasoned ground beef on flour tortillas with lettuce and tomatoes. None of that wild salsa stuff for us, no sir!
Spaghetti sauce - ground beef in tomato sauce with some “Italian Seasoning” sprinkled in it. Garlic? No, that’s for them crazy eye-talians with their taste buds and their gold chains!

That’s like a Peg Bundy or Lisa Douglas (Green Acres) meal; spaghetti (possibly dry) and ketchup. Mmmm!

[SpectBrain]

@silenus

Growing up, the only music played around the house was Mitch Mitchell and Lawrence Welk. The day the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, my father turned the TV off rather than listen to “that noise.” Ditto the aforementioned “Let’s see how many Oldsmobiles we can own.”

Man I bet Larry Welk and his boys could sure rock out with Mitch “the Jimi Hendrix Experience” Mitchell on drums.

[DirkGntly]

@bump

Wow… this is truly a frightening thread.

Mexican food was always an option if we went out to eat- my first memory of eating out at a restaraunt was at a Monterey House on Bissonnet in Houston in about 1976 or so.

The Monterrey House?? Oh, man, that brings back memories. My earliest recollection of eating out was in Houston, around 1975, at the Monterrey House - which in this case was near Memorial City…

[kaylasdad99]

@Beware of Doug

Originally Posted by sinjin
Arrrrghhhhhh, I had totally wiped those “ham salad” sandwiches from my memory. But without the butter, we had it with oleo, the white stuff “shudder” because it was against the law to color it to look like butter (circa 50’s and 60’s).

In 1940s Iowa it was similarly illegal to color margarine, but only pre-sale. It came supplied with a yellow dye packet you could knead into the product. My dad’s job at mealtimes was to “squeeze the oley.”

In suburban California during the '60s, the margarine already had the food coloring mixed in. And the box that the four sticks came in was labeled “colored”.

I used to get so excited when I got the chance to open the box of margarine! Because I always thought that this time I was SURE to get a really GOOD color like red, or blue, or green! And EVERY TIME it was frickin’ YELLOW! :mad: