Boomers: back in the day, what food did you parents rely on (canned, boxed, etc.) (friend, teenager)

[MarisaMay]

Canned tomato soup, canned mushroom soup, canned spaghetti, fish fingers, frozen peas, frozen beans, instant mashed potato. Self mix puddings, custard from a carton.

My mother always said she wished we could just take a tablet each day instead of having to eat. She said she never cooked a meal until she got married at twenty-three.

[thinkalot]

My mom was a great cook. We ate well until 1968. That is when she went back to work. All of the women in the neighborhood went back to work when the oldest kid started college. That is when we started eating out more. Pizza or McDonalds about once a week.

I was the only one that ate Chef Boyardee. Only the ravioli. Lots of Campbell's Soup.

Leftovers were good. Mom turned those into a different meal, not just reheating the next day.

[elnina]

My mom never used that processed crap. Everything was fresh, preferably from a farmers market and cooked from scratch.
With a good organization and planning cooking meals isn't time or labor intensive.

[ocnjgirl]

Originally Posted by pathrunner

My mom worked full time for the local school district so she would get home at about 4-5pm (unheard of in a lot of today's working world) and she would use her good ole old-fashioned electric can opener to open a can of Franco American Spaghetti or Chef Boyardee ravioli. Another favorite was Hamburger Helper. Rice-A-Roni too. Uncle Ben's Minute Rice. Campbell's Pork 'N' Beans. I'm trying to remember what else was popular then. Help me out!

My mother had to work with long commute by train, so we had lots of shortcut foods. Hamburger Helper lasagna was a favorite. In elementary school, I went through a long phase where I would only eat Campbell’s chicken noodle soup for lunch. It had to be strained first though, so it was just the noodles lol. My grandmother made sauce with Spatini. We always had SpaghettiOs and Chef Boyardee ravioli. We also used Freezer Queen individual packets of turkey and gravy, where you put the whole bag in the boiling water and then put it on bread. We always also bought Chungking or LaChoy chicken chow mein, the kind where the cans are taped together, one with the sauce and meat and one with the vegetables. We would have frozen small eggrolls with it, but I can’t remember if LaChoy or Chun King made them.

I loved Swanson chicken pot pie, the small ones with top and bottom crust.

[Ken_N]

Originally Posted by pathrunner

My mom worked full time for the local school district so she would get home at about 4-5pm (unheard of in a lot of today's working world) and she would use her good ole old-fashioned electric can opener to open a can of Franco American Spaghetti or Chef Boyardee ravioli. Another favorite was Hamburger Helper. Rice-A-Roni too. Uncle Ben's Minute Rice. Campbell's Pork 'N' Beans. I'm trying to remember what else was popular then. Help me out!

Lots of Hamburger Helper (lasagna), chef boyardee, spaghetti-O’s, franks and beans, Lipton instant soup (Is it soup yet?), Hawaiian Punch in a can, Tang (what the astronauts drank).

[1insider]

Both parents were the first generation in each of their families to move off the farm. Even though we lived inside the city limits my father plowed up the entire back yard for a vegetable garden and we raised chickens. The main store-bought items we depended on were flour, sugar, corn meal and some meat. My mom would put up enough butterbeans, peas, creamed corn, okra and other vegetables to last from one season to the next. It stuck with me and I put up veggies every summer. My freezer right now is still stocked with peas, butterbeans and creamed corn from last summer.

[LeeHoLee]

My mother very seldom used convenience foods. Campbell's tomato soup was one, and when I was around 12 she discovered a boxed pizza mix she'd buy a couple times a year. Was it Chef Boyardee? I don't remember, but we loved it when she bought it. Strange that she kept buying it though, because she made bread dough all the time. I'm not sure why she never thought to use that and make pizza from scratch.

[BOBNCHI]

Kraft Mac n Cheese occasionally on Fridays during Lent.

[Vision67]

She used Campbells soups and the recipes from the back of the cans, e.g. Chicken with broccoli, tuna noodle casserole.

She also bought powdered milk to mix with whole milk to stretch it out for 7 kids. Day old bread was also a staple.

We ate a lot of rice, beans, potatoes, and pasta but not a whole lot of meat other than hamburger.

Occasionally, we had liver and onions. We kids hated that. But my dog Skippy loved it. She would hide beneath the table and I would pitch her liver when my dad wasn't looking. We kids were not excused from the table until plates were cleaned.

"Kids in China were starving", we were told. I guess that was supposed to make us appreciate whatever was served.

[HJ99]

Parents were depression era kids. Big garden and butchered own meat, etc. But Mom also the frugal shopper so got sprinkling of modern convenience products cause she would buy them when on super discount, usually when they were being pushed at beginning of some marketing campaign. Our local shopping town had like 7 grocery stores though wasnt that big. Lot competition on price. What was weird, she was a great "from scratch" cook as were women in her family. But lure of cheap won out so cake mix even though she made a killer sour cream chocolate cake from scratch. Marked contrast between high quality "from scatch" stuff and "crap in a box/can/etc".

First time I had something called pizza was sometime in elementary school. To me looked like cat food spread on a cracker. But other kids were wild about it. And no it was only euphemistically called pizza. Nothing like real pizza. The cooks at our school were creative with what I think was government food rejected by the Army. Or surplus from WWII, who knows. I was last in line one time and they were low on soup so cook just took big pot over to sink and added some hot tap water..... Mmmm