My mother once packed me for school: peanut butter and lettuce sandwiches, with mayonnaise.
Point taken. Leftover brussels sprouts should be scraped off the plate and straight into the compost pile.
My mom made biscuits once when we first got our microwave. You couldn’t eat them but we had a great biscuit grenade fight at the table that night.
I used to think instant milk was the only milk there was… kind of like opaque white kool aid.
My mom also makes instant potatoes that are so thick you need a knife. She also turned every meat into leather.
We did a lot of economy cooking too… hamburg mixed with potato/pasta/rice. My father wouldn’t eat chicken so it was hamburger surprize 5 nights a week then pork chops and beans and pizza night.
Bother. RealityChuck beat me to it, too.
My parents are both decent , although uninspiring cooks, but I’m told that my husband’s paternal grandmother is of the “Gel-Cookery” type, and one of the worst cooks ever. The highlights of her career were a whole roasted salami, and… and this is really, really gross…
jellied barbeque sauce. Unmolded at the table. No one had any idea what the hell they were supposed to do with it. Eventually my FIL cut a slice and put it on his hamburger. Brave man.
Swiss steak. Nothing Swiss about it. Definitely nothing steak about it. I would chew, then spit it into a napkin, then do the trick where I have to go to the bathroom 5 times during dinner, and flush it all down the dumper. In my later years, I had a flashback to this gristle-y, grisly stuff when I ate goat in Jamaica. At least in Jamaica I was old enough to get drunk while I ate.
Crockpot meatloaf. This was just after crockpots were introduced, and the theory was that anything you could cook on the stove or in the oven could be “crockpotteded” just as well. Unfortunately, the cookbook didn’t mention that you had to use MUCH leaner meat than the oven type. After four or five hours of swimming in its own grease it just sort of gave up.
TVeblen’s “Sputniks” sound remarkably similar to what we knew as “porcupine meatballs”—but I think our name expresses the sensation of eating one more accurately.
And at least once a week my brother and I could look forward(?) to finding a Spam[SUP]TM[/SUP] sannich in the lunch bag. A couple of cold slabs straight out of the can and onto the bread. Gelatin included at no extra cost.
My mother was famous for unswappable sandwiches. Honey and dried fruit sandwiches leading to sugar shock and shaky afternoons, vegemite applied with gusto (it should be a light smear, it is not peanut butter), ham or chicken meat or eggs on the hottest days of the year with no refrigeration for the lunch box.
One year my mother discovered capsicum/peppers and from then on everything tasted of nothing but no matter what other ingredients were included. Caseroles, spaghetti sauce, quiche… I never have capsicum in my house now though no longer wish to vomit if they appear in a dish elsewhere.
My dad did all the cooking in my house, too, and it was usually decent. However, I was never able to digest his eggplant stir-fry, and Brussel sprouts still give me nightmares.
Mom still is the best cook, she even caters now that she’s mostly retired. When she was getting her master’s degree Dad was in charge of dinner and he had two recipes: fried bologna sandwiches and celery and velveeta with miracle whip on wonderbread. Dad had to shop for the ingredients himself, since Mom refused. My sister and I just fed the stuff to our dog Whizzer-- better to be hungry than have your teeth glued together with velveta and wonderbread.
Why wait, Ike? Just trash 'em right away, I say. Brussels sprouts are vile.
My mother fed four hearty boys and one girl for thirty years or so, and no one ever complained except that there wasn’t always enough seconds for everyone. Our “competitive eating” skills have been honed to perfection.
She did used to make something called “Shipwreck Stew”, an amalgam of ground beef, red beans, sliced potatoes, and onion that I didn’t care for as a kid, but now that I think of it, would probably hit the spot on a chilly February evening.
Mom does tell the story on herself, though, of the time she was a kid on the farm in Tennessee. One of her first forays into cooking resulted in biscuits so hard even her good-hearted father wouldn’t or couldn’t eat them. They were thrown into the yard for the chickens.
And the chickens wouldn’t touch 'em either.
My mum used to make the wateriest spaghetti sauce known to mankind. There was very little sauce, quite a bit of pasta and a whole lot of watery tomato sauce stuff.
As a result, all of my siblings’s spaghetti is completely moist-free and as chunky and saucy as is possible.
Mum also loved making Chilli Con Carne on a regular basis with a huge helping of chilli in it. Can you imagine what that’s like for a 5 year old? I barely ate dinner most nights because I couldn’t see the plate through all of the tears streaming down my face and out of my nose from the heat.
Ugh. We still rib her about her spaghetti.
Thylacine --capsicum peppers are used in some forms of riot gas, too. Just so you know.
My mom used to make this stuff that was supposed to be Chinese. It was sauteed Spam and celery, with soy sauce. Served over rice, of course. Actually, at the time, I liked the Spam, but big chunks of cooked celery were not to my liking…
OH MY GOD! I thought my mom made this crap up herself! All the kids doused it in ketchup to eat it. God, it was awful. Every other thing my mom makes is excellent; I love her cooking. But hamburger stew was the stuff nightmares were made of.
My Mom is actually a really good cook. The only problem I had as a child was good old German cuisine, which she loved to make. And believe me, we had some of the most disgusting things in the world:
Cow’s Tongue. It has little goosebumps on it, for heaven’s sake, I’m not going to eat it.
Blut- und Leberwurst. I sincerely hope there’s no English translation for that. Some kind of sausage (maybe like blood pudding?), but you open it up and squeeze the stuff inside on a plate. Looks like somebody vomited onto your plate.
Pig innards of any kind. Preferably if you got to see the pig’s head on a plate, its eyes replaced by radishes.
Sour Lungs. Don’t ask and I won’t tell.
My mom was a great cook. It probably would’ve been better if she hadn’t been, then my taste buds and stomach wouldn’t have gone into shock from eating my Mother-in- law’s cooking.
MIL thinks a real cook shouldn’t need to open a cook book or read a recipe. And since she’s been making the same 4 dishes for the past 50 years, she has no need for such things. :rolleyes:
Most of them are edible except for the spaghetti & meatballs: hunks of hamburger meat the size of your fist (no seasoning, or bread crumbs, just meat), Macaroni (not spaghetti), and plain tomato sauce.
Man. I will have to show my mom this thread so she’ll feel better. She sometimes feels insecure about her cooking skills.
Some of the moms on this thread put her to shame. But then again, I am starting to remember some of her dishes. Maybe she is the worst cook ever.
I do remember the macaroni and cheese (straight from the Kraft box) that she managed to screw up. How do you screw up Kraft Mac & Cheese, you ask? Just follow the directions on the box—it’s simple, isn’t it? Not with my mom. Oh no. No directions on the box for her! She added capsicum (hot red pepper) to the mix. I think she took the cayenne capsules (they sell cayenne in pill form for health) and emptied them into the Mac & Cheese. And sometimes she didn’t use any milk or butter to get the powdered sauce to be creamy. So not only was it congealed and nasty, it was HOT HOT HOT! I refused to eat it. She was offended.
She does this a lot. She wants to make every meal “healthful”, so she’ll add something vile to a perfectly decent dish. I keep on telling her, “If you want some bean sprouts, just eat them on the SIDE! The side! You don’t have to befoul a perfectly decent dish!” But, oh no. That’s too obvious. Too simplle. Instead, she’ll add bean sprouts to breakfast cereal. Seriously—she’s done this. (She never can coerce anyone else to eat such concoctions, needless to say.)
She isn’t a bad cook when she follows the recipe or uses more “conventional” food combinations, but too often I see her eating Chinese noodles with milk (a la breakfast cereal), peanut butter and coconut oil sandwiches, or half a jar of grape jelly with raw sunflower seeds on top (just empty the big slab of jelly straight out of the jar onto a bowl, sprinkle the seeds on top and yummm! A tasty desert! :eek: )
Her big gross-out of all time was the…Peanut butter, Blue Cheese Dressing, and Red Cabbage Sandwich. She ate it, no one else did. But we’ve never let her live it down.
Just think about that one for a while! :eek:
We had cow’s tongue. I liked it as a cold meat on sandwiches with cheese and salad.
Sour Lungs? I am going to regret this 
but I have to ask: What is it?
Blood and liver sausage. You poor thing. <pat pat>
My mom is an excellent cook, but there were times we were pretty broke when I was a kid, so she went through a rather protracted phase of searching for altrernative (cheaper) protein sources, like tofu or lentils. She seemed to have missed the part, though, where your SEASON the damn things!
Have you ever tried to scarf down an unadulterated slab of cold tofu? I still can’t look at the stuff, no matter how good it smells or what it’s been cooked with, and avoid all tofu-based food products. If I want ice cream, I want ice cream, dammit, not frozen tofu!
And having read the other posts, maybe someone can explain to me what the point of using dry milk powder or canned vegetables is, assuming one has a refrigerator and freezer? Fresh milk is pretty darn cheap, and around here, anyway (Chicago) fresh and frozen vegetables, depending on the season, are far more nutritious and economical than canned. Plus they don’t look and taste like the aftermath of a garbage disposal!