This topic is mean, nasty, and one of the most hilarious things that I have read in years. It deserves to be revived.
My experience was a 10-year-long nightmare of meals at my ex-mother-in-law's. In other threads I have written about some of her most notorious failures, liver that you could sole your shoes with and pie dough that could double as eternal road paving but for the others, I could write a book.
One gruesome creation was her refrigerator soup. Once a week she would take all the leftovers in the refrigerator, put them in a huge pot and pour water on them. She then proceeded to cook it for about an hour or two and serve it as soup. Fortunately, the leftovers were served to the dogs. They always had a pack of half starved mongrels that would eat anything.
She did a lot of baking and for that she saved bacon grease in 3 lb coffee cans and stored it on top of her kitchen cabinets. Everything was made with rancid bacon grease. Pie dough, cookies, cakes, you name it. In fact, the whole house smelled of rancid bacon grease.
One Thanksgiving, I gave birth, prematurely, to my youngest daughter and when I was rushed to the hospital early that morning I left the refrigerator full of turkey and all the trimmings ready to be cooked that day. She showed up at our house before I got home and decided to cook Thanksgiving dinner before I got there. She shoved the turkey into the oven, as is, and made her refrigerator soup from the sides that I had ready. The only way to describe that poor bird was unseasoned turkey jerky. And of course, you guessed it. The neck was still in the cavity and the giblets were still in their paper bag in the neck cavity. And the whole time she complained to me that the least that I could have done was to have put the turkey in the oven before I went to the hospital so that her son could have had Thanksgiving dinner on Thanksgiving.
To this day, I have a cast iron stomach. And I think it was all from the training that I got at her table.
