Your Mom's Weekly Dinner Rotation (pizza, bread, cream, meals)

[salonva]

What a sweet recollection. My mom didnt have a meal rotation per se, though my in laws did.
I do know though that we had roast chicken just about every Friday night. We were not very religious, but Friday night was a table cloth and candles and roast chicken. I remember that most of my friends also had Friday night chicken.
For my mother though, I remember having pot roast, lamp chops, meat loaf, tuna noodle casserole, were very typical meals. We also had a potato at just about every meal. I think it was my Dad, who grew up super duper poor, who grew up with potatos for meals, so he pretty much insisted that any meal should have a potato. we did sometimes have meatballs and spaghetti or macaroni and then we did without the potato.

[elston]

In the summer we ate out of the garden.....tomatoes, beans, kohl rabi, lots of chard, cukes etc. Dad was a fabulous gardener.

[7G9C4J2]

My mother never had a "Monday must be X, Tuesday must be Y" rule, but there were definitely certain dishes that were in frequent rotation at the supper table when I was growing up.

Noodles and tunafish, made with one tiny can of tuna for the whole family - it was more tuna-flavored noodles, really
Tunafish casserole with biscuits on top
Spaghetti made with a can of tomato soup
Baked beans and brown bread (Mom grew up in New England)
Meatloaf
Country ribs and sauerkraut
Broiled chicken livers on toast points
A couple of different baked chicken varieties: Chicken Imperial and Savannah Chicken Sesame
And after my aunt married a Polish gentleman and Mom found out how good kielbasa was, that was added to the rotation on a regular basis, too

We always had dessert when I was growing up; it was invariably canned fruit in heavy syrup that Mom canned every summer. I remember peaches, plums, pears, applesauce - one year, she tried making pear-sauce, though that wasn't a big hit. And there was always something that passed for "salad" with every supper, too, although she defined "salad" very differently from the way I do. For example, she'd serve a lettuce leaf with a banana split lengthwise laid on top of it, alternating dabs of peanut butter and Miracle Whip on the banana halves, and call it "salad."

[mainebrokerman]

some of the rotation depended on the season what we could shoot-we'd often go in the woods after school, and shoot a bunny, squirrel, patridge/grouse or even a deer

if we could catch fish,,we would eat it,,

if blueberries , blackberries, apples, were in season (and fiddleheads) we would eat that.

outside of picking, shooting, or catching our meals, saturday night was baked beans night... i'd rather eat a rotten mackerel...... still dont like them...


a treat would be be any type of sweets ....or steak/roast/ribs

[70Ford]

Yeah, we had a "fried food night" once a week, maybe twice, be it chicken or pork chunks or something me, my brothers or my dad had killed, squirrels or rabbit or quail or some floured deer meat out of the freezer.

Mom made something she called "freezer soup" every year - using the odds and the ends left in the freezer - and it had literally, anything in it.
Imagine a soup with 5 different types of meat, 4 or 8 different types of freezer burned vegetables. .... Heck I remember one time, she threw some dry, been in the fridge 3 days already, mullet roe - the yellow ones- in there. That soup was hard to choke down. (You better choke it down, or starve.) . Tasted like eating old wet cornbread.

Besides the, ahem, freezer soup moments, my mom was/is a great cook.

She makes a dish for me when I come home. It's very simple. It's a hen that's been cooked on a slow simmer for hours. The meat literally falls off the bone. It tastes like chicken. Because the bird is old. Most chicken these days to me tastes like meat. But I remember when I was a kid, and we would walk out in the yard, and we'd be 1 less chicken after that walk. I remember holding the legs and plunging that chicken into scalding water. I remember saving the feathers so mom could make me a feather pillow that smelled like feathers and every once in a while, one of those quills would punch through and stab you in the face. I remember how it was the best pillow in the world.

And I remember how good that chicken was for dinner.

[Dirt Grinder]

We occasionally had La Choy Chicken Chow Mein (remember the two cans and the crunchy noodles?) and Hamburger Helper in our rotation (not weekly), but those were the only processed dishes we ate. The rest varied with season and availability.

[Mattie]

Originally Posted by raj kapoor

I can hardly believe that no one in this thread mentioned MEATLOAF.
And then of course one can have a MEATLOAF SANDWICH for lunch on another day.

We had chicken and dumplings and spaghetti a lot.

One of my best food memories is that mother's breakfast biscuits showed up at the table for dinner as CHOCOLATE BREAD PUDDING. (the only reason I did not eat them all in the mornings)

Raj

We had meatloaf occasionally, but not on a weekly basis. Now, bread pudding, on the other hand, was a huge favorite of my father's. The more raisins, the better. That fell under the category of "Dad's food" in our house. In other words, after he had his fill, it was up for grabs. We kids thought it was gross.

Originally Posted by Dirt Grinder

We occasionally had La Choy Chicken Chow Mein (remember the two cans and the crunchy noodles?) and Hamburger Helper in our rotation (not weekly), but those were the only processed dishes we ate. The rest varied with season and availability.

Flashback to faux Chinese food! Yup, that was a fairly frequent visitor to our dinner table. Shudder!

[Wry_Martini]

My mom wasn't a very good cook, but these are the things she made often:

- spaghetti with sauce from a jar
- this disgusting chicken casserole (none of the kids would eat it!)
- tacos (from a boxed kit)
- this tomato based stew (none of the kids would eat this, and neither would my dad!)
- scrambled eggs and pancakes for breakfast


We also did a lot of take-out, like pizza, Chinese, etc.

[elston]

We frequently had boiled potatoes, either "in their jackets" or peeled and boiled; we would all stab the tater with our fork and peel off the skin and then mash it flat on our plate and melt lots of butter (oleo) on it.....this could go with baked spam and some canned peas. We also frequently had "salmon wiggle" or creamed salmon and peas......this could go over the boiled potato or on toast or with noodles. Someone mentioned meatloaf and that was also a regular.....Sunday dinner was usually a roast chicken.....and the left overs would be re served in a variety of dishes thru the week.

[mainebrokerman]

elston,,,yes!!
potatoes was a staple growing up- baked, and mashed, and in the early years- loved french fries cooked in hot oil