Good question. Enough that he doesn’t angle for any of your own money. :eek:
How to make the world’s best spaghetti sauce.
How to make the world’s best lasagna.
How to love.
Mom taught me to put holes in potatoes with a fork before you bake them or they’ll blow up. I only remembered this because I laughed so hard, I thought she was kidding. I never tested it out, she could be wrong…?
She also taught me to purl. (Grandma taught me to knit). She was hanging out in a bar with my Dad and Uncle, I was outside on the lawn where they could see me through the window. I was knitting and got tired of the garter stitch, so I went in and asked her to show me how to purl.
How NOT to make meat loaf. No, you don’t just add white bread, chopped onion and a couple eggs to chopped meat, smush it all up, throw it in a loaf pan and pour a can of tomato soup on top. Bleeecchh.
My mom taught me and my sister how to set the table for a formal dinner party. She also made sure we learned our table manners early (my fiance calls it “British boarding school”).
Mom was and still is militant about chores. We had lists of everything we had to do on the weekends – clean the toilets, scrub the showers, wash the dogs, dust and vacuum our rooms – and she would conduct an inspection when we said we were done. That doesn’t even include stuff we had to do on a regular basis, like sweeping and mopping the floor, helping with dishes, cleaning up dog shit outside, doing laundry, ironing, etc. As a result, I know how to maintain a household. I’m certainly not consistent about it now, but I know how to tackle cleaning and get it done right.
Mom also taught me a lot about cooking, letting us help her in the kitchen. Some of my favorite memories are sitting on the kitchen stepstool and watching her make dinner.
No, but we were close–Northern New York.
This is my mother! Especially down to the cigarettes and coffee. She still gives me a to-do list when I come home to visit. In July, the woman starts making lists of what she’s planning to buy for Christmas. My husband gets a fearful look in his eyes whenever he sees me writing something on a pad of a paper. “Hon, it’s a grocery list, not me turning into my mom.”
My mother taught me that running a household is a series of learned skills, then she taught me those skills. How to clean, how to cook, how to do simple repairs, how to organize.
She taught me how to make candy cane reindeers and home-made play-doh.
She taught me how to play a mean game of cribbage or gin.
Boy oh boy did I have to reread this one. I could have sworn your third point was how to make love.
eep.
Always always ALWAYS be nice to people in the service industry.
There can be no cheating or shortcuts when it comes to making mac and cheese.
I’m sure I’ve learned more, but those are the two that immediately came to mind.
Right. You leave off the can of tomato soup. (My bro and I liked bland food, and let’s face it, is meatloaf really the place to fancy things up? 
)
I have thought about this thread all day. I even asked my husband if there was anything that I learned from my mother. He informed me that my mother isn’t the nurturing type, and couldn’t identify anything that she might have taught me, other than fudge.
Ha! I asked her for the recipe and she gave it to me, and it was sink or swim.
So I’m rather sad to inform that I don’t seem to have learned much from my mother. Had she been crafty at all, that may have helped, because I do quite a lot of that. And while she worked at Gerber sewing bibs and stuff, she refused to own a sewing machine at home. All sewing was relegated to my grandmother, who worked at Gerber as well, and owned a sewing machine. I learned more from my grandmother, actually. My mother was too busy working 48 hours a week, then house work, and lastly yard work. Any extra time was spent with my father, preferably with my sister and I somewhere else.
Damn, that sounds terrible. We weren’t neglected or anything. Just not loved so much. I’m envious of you lucky ones who are able to walk away with ‘stuck’ things.
I got nothing.
Never leave the house without holding your keys in your hand.
Going outside in bad weather can be fun.
“A thing asked for is half paid for”
It works to.
Thats all I got. Sad 
When balancing your checkbook, round off the cents to the next highest dollar, regardless of how many there are. Record $7.01 as $8. This ends up giving you a little bit of a cushion against overdraft and errors in general that, if left to gather, can end up being a substantial sum. I did this all throughout college, and found that I had an extra $200 when I went to close that particular bank account.
Thanks, mum.
How to cook and bake. That these can be fun activities.
Asking politely gets better results than whining, and reflects better on a person.
Sarcasm can be very therapeutic.
Sometimes, you just have to howl at the moon.
I guess the ‘taught you’ bit of the title of my OP is a bit too specific. My mum never sat down with me and ‘taught’ me anything: she was a single-mother in the '60s, was working around 50 hours a week and far too busy to impart any of her domestic-goddess wisdom down to me. Mostly it was stuff picked up by osmosis or something. 
I s’pose I should include the stuff that hasn’t stuck as well. My mum (still, aged 83) irons everything that comes out of the washing machine, including sheets, facewashers (flannels) and towels. I learned early on that there is more to life than slaving away over a hot iron for hours, so it is indeed a rare event nowadays to see me put up the ironing board and plug the bugger in. It’s sort of wedding or funeral occasions only, ha!
Was this the dish made with mince, cabbage and a packet of chicken noodle soup? I recently had a nostalgic craving for it (it was the only thing my ex-mother in law ever seemed to cook) and made it myself but with lots of changes. It was fantastic.
From my mother I learned to cook and the peculiarities of how I hang different things on the line and lots of different attitudes. Often differences in attitudes aren’t all that obvious but I said in a recent conversation at work that having lots of different sauces and lots of different teas in the pantry is a cheap luxury, but most people just stick to the same few things apparently. I know I got this from my mother who used to stock virtually every sauce available in my childhood. It wasn’t odd to have tomato sauce on your sausage and HP sauce on your chop at the same time at our table.
Oh god, did you have to endure it too? Just the mere mention of it brings back an olfactory-memory that makes me nauseated. Bad food, bad, bad food.
I think mum found it in on a Women’s Weekly recipe page, and thought she’d introduce some exotic cuisine into our '60’s meat-and-three-veg diet. Fuck, it was awful.
When my kids were tackers, I promised them that, whilst I MIGHT screw up a recipe or two, or offer them stuff occasionally they wouldn’t really like, I would NEVER inflict Chop Suey on them. They’ve experienced their Grandma’s cooking. They understand and appreciate my consideration for their safety.
It is certainly a horror in it’s original form but nowadays you only have to chuck in the stir-fry sauce of your choice and substitute proper noodles broken up and different chinese greens, even savoy cabbage is good.
I think the original recipe is from the back of the Maggi Chicken Noodle soup package. Somewhere I have an old Australian cookbook that is a compendium of all the recipes off the packets and tins from the 1960 and 70s. Things like apricot chicken, curried sausages and whatever that stuff was.
Damn I will have to go and search for it now.
Seriously, don’t hurry back.
Two things IMMEDIATELY came to mind:
First one I remember that my mom taught me is from one time I came home drunk.
“Enright3; a man is not the one who can drink the most, it’s the one who knows when to quit!”
#2 is one I use on my kids and have had the benefit of my kids now telling “I never appreciated what that meant until now” (the same thing I told my mom as a young college student). She’s say: “you’d better remember, I’m the best friend you’ll ever have!” It’s so true. When the chips are down, mom would get mad, but you never doubted she loved us and would be there if we needed her. Best. Advice. Ever.