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My Mom was an awesome cook (and my sister and learned a thing or two from her). She was also a master baker (not officially, but in my opinion, she was!). She was American-born but of German descent and her Mother (my Grandma) cooked a lot of meals typical in Germany, so.....we often had: pork roast, knurdles (a type of dense dumpling), cucumber salads, potatoes cooked all sorts of ways, beets, cabbage (& sauerkraut), sausages. We also had non-German influenced meals such as: hamburger goulash, roast beef, omelettes, breakfast for dinner (love that!), tuna salads, fried & baked chicken, lots of veggies (I seem to remember a lot of green beans), and always dessert! Her baked goods were all from scratch: cinnamon rolls, strudels of all types, cakes, pies, cookies of all sorts, homemade candies, and lots more! Goll, I miss her and her meals. Reading the replies to this post is making my mouth water!
LOLLL After reading the previous post, I was glad to see there are a lot of ppl who had mothers who are terrible cooks. My mom was a health nut...and a not-so-fab baker and cook. Our traditional recipes call for pork, salt, fat etc...but she would always make the "healthy" version...always awful.
Before you could easily find good-tasting recipes for whole wheat cakes and sweetbread, she would substitute in the regular recipes and make tasteless rocks or soggy cake-like things instead of cake. LOL We never had delicious home-made baked goods in my house.
My mom worked, so she baked a lot of casseroles and made a lot of soups and stews. Edible, but ... She really liked putting strange ingredients in, as well. As a child, I didn't appreciate the rice-a-roni w/ raisins (gag) or watery mac and cheese made w/ brie. I recall a lot of overcooked brown rice, as well.
Goodness in reading some of these meals I am thinking I was a pretty lucky person! I would have loved to have enjoyed a tv dinner when I was younger, but I guess the grass always looks greener.......
I hear you - I remember growing up and my mom made everything from scratch. No processed foods or anything out of a box/can was allowed. Hamburger Helper was considered a work of the devil in our household, lol. I would go to my friend's house and they had....Doritos! Kraft mac and cheese! PUDDING IN A CUP!!!I would gorge because I was never allowed these things at home. One thing I wanted SO badly was the cereal Cookie Crisp, anyone remember that? We never had any types of sugary cereals.
I totally appreciate how my mom raised us in terms of food though, and her home made cooking, which I miss dearly now. Whenever she's in town (my parents live a state away from me), she is always cooking up a storm in my kitchen making all my childhood favorites. She's instilled in me a love for cooking and good food.
I want my daughter to eat well too, but I'm a little more in the middle - I don't restrict my DD from everything that I was restricted of. for example, my daughter loves kraft mac and cheese. I prefer homemade of course, but I always keep a box or 2 in the pantry. And I allow her pudding in a cup here and there.
Yeah I remember being envious of my friends who got to eat spaghettios, chef boyardee ravioli, Kraft Mac n cheeses and the like. Such foods did not fly in our house...garbage my mom called them. Lol!
We ate plenty of sugar cereals though as she almost never made breakfast. And Haagen Daaz ice cream was always in the freezer so we weren't "completely" deprived. Hehe.
I grew up with a Mom who was a health nut and ate like a bird and made everything from scratch but I was a picky eater and did not like anything she made. Our plates were always sparingly filled (my dad ate like a bird too) and I can remember my stomach growling from hunger in between meals. If you were hungry between meals you got raw carrot or celery sticks or an apple. I was so envious of my friends who got to have soda, potato chips and food like that in their house. I was super skinny and I can remember my great-aunt and grandmother (my Mom's in-laws) always complaining to my Mom about how skinny my sister and I were. But my Mom did not care, she always made remarks about how it wasn't good to be 'fat'. Looking back now I think she might have had a border line eating disorder.
I do appreciate that she cared in her own way about our health and well being and I was rarely sick.
Chicken must have been cheap when I was a kid because she would make baked chicken legs at least twice a week. Hated them! And I grew up in a house where you could not leave the table until your plate was clean. To this day even the sight of a baked chicken leg will make me nauseated!
Mom prepared a lot of stews, red beans (Portuguese style, and I've yet to find any in New Orleans that were quite as good as hers), fried chicken, and ~ usually on Fridays ~ fried fish. She made spaghetti often, too, but hers wasn't very good.
When I was really small we had pot roast every Sunday, with the potatoes and carrots in with the meat. DELICIOUS! Then for some reason Mom stopped doing that. The only thing that was a set night thing other than that was on Sunday nights us kids would sometimes get one of those Pizzas out of a box mix things, with the powdered parmesan cheese as the only topping.
My mother was a lousy cook, we grew up on cold Spam on white bread, Hamburger Helper, and Tuna Helper. For some reason we didn't have mac and cheese out of the box. Don't know why. Roast beef was one of the handful of things my mom could actually cook, so it was unfortunate she quit making it.
As I have mentioned in numerous other threads, my mom was/is a horrible cook and my dad is a very picky eater, that doesn't allow a veggie to cross his lips. Mom was picky too, but aversion is more towards fruit. She didn't have set days for meals but she had a very limit set of options.
We usually had her version of spaghetti, which consisted of ground beef browned to a crispy crunch (Dad won't eat meat unless is burned beyond recognition) drowned in a couple of cans of tomato sauce flavored only with salt pepper, onion salt, and garlic salt. Mom thought if you added garlic to anything, you had made Italian food! Then she would just break up the spaghetti and throw it in the pan with the meat, then cook it until it was a gloppy mess. Other meals consisted of thin pork chops or round steak, floured and fried to a the point they were hard or burned under the broiler or fried chicken served with either minute rice or instant mashed potatoes, gravy, a can of green beans, pork and beans (for Dad) or Ranch Style beans, canned peaches or pears (also for Dad), maybe a salad which consisted of iceberg lettuce and a chopped tomato and either just a loaf of bread, still in the package, thrown on the table or if we were lucky maybe some whack biscuits or cornbread. Sometimes she would either fry or broil hamburgers too. If she wasn't in the mood to cook, we would get canned soup. Sometimes, usually on Sunday night we would get breakfast for dinner.
On Sunday, the big meal was usually lunch after church. Much of the time she would put a roast (usually a pot roast) in the oven before church. It was one of her better meals.
I also remember this one particularly bad meal she would make too. There was this local "chef" that did a TV show on Saturday afternoons that she liked to watch. Once he did this thing that she tried to copy that was really bad. It was like a poor man's beef wellington. Basically it was fried hamburger meat rolled in pie crust and baked. I just remember her crunchy meat wrapped inside this dry pie crust. She thought she was making something fancy and was always so proud when she served it. It was horrible. I'm sure his was much better, probably had spices and other things in it, and I'm sure no where in the recipe did it say the meat was supposed to be crunchy.
When Dad was out of town on business we would get some of the foods he hated, like tacos, a frozen pizza or canned beef stew. She did have this one good orange glazed chicken dish she would make when he was gone too.
By the time I was in junior high, dinner on Fridays became either take out burgers or pizza from Pizza Inn.
Spaghetti and meatballs with green beans and green salad. Still one of my favorite meals.
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