Not again, Mom!

[browniebaker]

Not Chinese loofah soup again! Mother has always grown Chinese vegetables in her garden. Often, in late summer, there would be a surplus of loofah, too many even to give away. Every night then, it was loofah soup, so we all got sick and tired of it.

[Eric_Malson]

Oh, God.

La Choy Chop Suey.  Yeah, the canned stuff. 

It was putrid and I never ate it...just sort of mushed it around my plate.  Mom always accompanied this horror with a bowl of the crisp chow mein noodles (also from a La Choy can, most likely) which would end up being my dinner.

The chow mein looked like something even the dog wouldn't touch...

Lucky dog.

OMG, how could I have forgotten about "Chinese food" nights, featuring La Choy??

Did your mom ever make the egg-foo young, too? You know, beat some eggs and mix it with the mystery contents of the can and fry.

I thought I hated Chinese food for years, until....well, you know the rest.

We would have counted ourselves lucky to have been served Uncle Ben's. Mom always made Minute Rice.

And I never had real butter until I left home either. How could anyone think that margarine was in any way "better for you" than butter (which was mom's reasoning)?

I shudder just thinking about all of this...

[Raynickben]

I posted this several months ago on a similar thread but it bears repeating.

My parents both cooked and we had a weekly schedule of dinners which consisted of:

-Swiss Style Steak (block of meat seared in a electric frying pan and then boiled with a can of tomatoes). I actually lost a tooth on this once.

- Hamburger Thing (hamburger meat and Birds Eye frozen vegetables boiled together and ever so slightly drained before serving)

-Cheez Whiz sandwiches

-Baked Chicken with Cream of Mushroom soup and croutons poured on top..chicken was never cooked thoroughly.

-Fatty porkchops fried in bacon grease that sat on the counter for years.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

[hannnah]

It's not just my mom, it's my whole family.

My grandmother's culinary highlight is the thinnest pork chops available, slathered in that fluorescent orange seasoned salt and broiled until petrified. The seasoned salt gives them this lovely 50s-horror-movie glow, and you could break a tooth on them. She also did the La Choy Chow Mein thing - although, ironically, I still have a soft spot for the fried-rice-in-a-can and the crunchy chow mein noodles, just not the rest of it.

My mom is constitutionally incapable of adding any seasoning other than salt to any dish for any reason. Her claim is that spices and pepper are "painful," and tomatoes and onions make her sick, and so on and so forth. So, she comes up with "casseroles" like browned, undrained ground beef combined with boiled-until-dead Minute Rice and some kind of vegetable, usually broccoli. The second it gets the least bit cold, it congeals into a grease-laden, tasteless mass - doesn't matter what you put in it or on it, it tastes like congealed grease.

Then there was my great-aunt - to be fair, her older sister was the one who helped out in the kitchen while she watched after the younger children, so she never learned to cook. The problem was, she would go shopping and buy far too much, then freeze it to keep it all fresh and thaw it out next time someone came over. This included milk, fruit, margarine, and vegetables. Few things taste worse than thawed skim milk or thawed margarine.

When I was about four, she had everyone over for a family dinner. I don't remember what else was served, but she had baked potatoes. Unfortunately, they'd been frozen, then thawed, then baked. When you cut into them, they were black all the way through. I think we went out for dinner after that.

I learned to cook as soon as I was old enough to see over my great-aunt's stove, purely in self-defense. After that, Mom let me do a fair amount of cooking. My grandmother - well, she still hasn't ever let me near the stove, but she did share the *good* family recipes.

[Jinmyo]

Tomato Aspic. Yuck

I like things jellied as much as the next true southerner and I love jello, which I know many of you jaded gourmands refuse to admit (although I secretly think you hoard a stash of green jello with fruit cocktail for late night dining pleasure).

That being said, I hate aspic. Nothing says, "I hate the holidays and am ready to get the hell out of here" than a lonely square of jellied tomatoes on a piece of iceberg lettuce.

Actually, I have some measure of respect for aspic.

A tomato water aspic with some pieces of tomato concasse can be very refreshing. Especially after or with a pate.

edit:

Oops. I see Sam beat me to it.

Edited January 9, 2004 by Jinmyo (log)

[Jinmyo]

that fluorescent orange seasoned salt...

I don't know what this is.

Sounds ghastly.

Please elabourate?

[Pan]

I'm not sure if anyone else has made this remark before in this thread (because I haven't read the rest of the thread), but anything my mother made that was bad was a mistake (left to cook too long and burned, poor recipe, etc.). My mother was always an excellent cook when I was growing up.

[hjshorter]

Pan, your family lived in many different places, right? Perhaps it was the lack of 60s and 70s nutritional advice and advertising that made your mom's cooking so good.

My mother is an excellent cook, when she sticks to real food. She just read waaaay too many women's magazines while we were growing up. She always served margarine, because she had read somewhere that it was "better for you" - we know now that's a myth. According to the ads, boiling rice is a chore and Uncle Ben's was easier - again, not true. All of her better recipes come from family or the Fannie Farmer cookbook. Every mistake was from Ladies Home Journal or a similar rag.

[AzRaeL]

My mom is a Terrible Cook. How do i list her culinary transgressions? Let me count the ways. I guess I owe the fact that I can cook to her terrible cooking. If she was a great cook, I would have no impetus to learn to cook.

I've tried to forget all her bad food and love her for being my mom so let me see if I can remember what food I hated.

Baked salmon with mayonaise.

This dish itself wasn't so bad as the fact that she served it EVERYDAY. Probably 10 months a year. We get salmon really cheap because we lived near the Fraser River in British Columbia. Every day, she'd slice up salmon steaks, slather them in Mayonaise and bake them in the oven. Day after day, week after week, month after month. To this day, I do not eat Salmon (unless it's Gravlax).

Soup.

she made really really bad soup. Soup comprising of leftovers, stuff her friends gave her, whatever is cheap at the farm, really odd stuff from unknown origins.

I guess her bad cooking stems not so much from lack of skill but extreme CHEAPNESS. ha ha ha.

Now that I live on my own, my food budget for just MYSELF alone is double what she used to feed a family of four.

Edited January 9, 2004 by AzRaeL (log)

[fresco]

My mother wasn't and isn't much interested in cooking, but was competent in the kitchen.

My father, by contrast, was one of those rare individuals with an absolute tin ear to the music of food. He went through a blessedly brief period when he attempted to cook and bake.

About the most challenging thing he took on were pies and my siblings and I, years later, still talk about how incomparably inedible they were, and how proud Dad was of them.

Odd, because his mother was quite talented with pastry.

[AzRaeL]

Geez, I feel bad about ratting my Mom out like this, but hearing all of these stories has reminded me of a sad, sad fact.

I didn't taste real butter until I was 18. My mother always used margarine. I don't even think I was aware that margarine was fake food-it was all I knew. The first time I tasted real butter was a profound moment.

ha! she stayed over this summer at my place. When she left, I found all my butter mysteriously replaced with "I can't believe it's not butter" Ha!

[lamb]

Reading the above posts, I am amazed that any of us survived our Mom's or Dad's cooking.

I wonder what their take on the subject would be - would they say we were all just picky eaters and wouldn't know good food if it smacked us?

[Carlovski]

Baked salmon with mayonaise.

This dish itself wasn't so bad as the fact that she served it EVERYDAY. Probably 10 months a year. We get salmon really cheap because we lived near the Fraser River in British Columbia. Every day, she'd slice up salmon steaks, slather them in Mayonaise and bake them in the oven. Day after day, week after week, month after month. To this day, I do not eat Salmon (unless it's Gravlax).

I thought. that sounds quite good, until I read the salmon was actually baked WITH the mayonnaise!

[bandregg]

My mother onced mistook cinnamon for chili powder while making sloppy joes. Once the spice hit the pan and the smell hit the air she realized her mistake. Then she tried to wash off the ground beef and add in the chili powder if nothing was awry. The cinnamon smell in the air made if impossible for me to pretend that they tasted anything by atrocious.

[woodford]

My Mom once accidentally subtituted powdered sugar for flour in a recipe for potato soup. The results were interesting.

[hannnah]

that fluorescent orange seasoned salt...

I don't know what this is.

Sounds ghastly.

Please elabourate?

Here it is...

According to them, the orange color is supposed to be "attractive." Who knew?

[bigbear]

.....

Talking with my mother once about food, I used the word "aspic". Oddly enough, she had no idea what it was, and asked.

I said, "Well, it's bigger than a toothpick...."

She nearly slapped me.

Now..... THAT is funny.

[Pan]

Pan, your family lived in many different places, right? Perhaps it was the lack of 60s and 70s nutritional advice and advertising that made your mom's cooking so good.

I lived in Malaysia for 2 years, but my parents had also spent a year in Florence (Italy, not South Carolina ) a couple of years before I was born in 1965. We also were in Baton Rouge from 1966-67 when my father was in residence at LSU for a year.

My mother did substitute plain yogurt in place of sour cream or mix the two, so she was not impervious to nutritional advice. But her substitutions worked, and she was a good enough cook that I found almost all institutional cooking disgusting by comparison.

[Toliver]

Geez, I feel bad about ratting my Mom out like this, but hearing all of these stories has reminded me of a sad, sad fact.

I didn't taste real butter until I was 18. My mother always used margarine. I don't even think I was aware that margarine was fake food-it was all I knew. The first time I tasted real butter was a profound moment.

I share your pain.

I never tasted butter until I moved away from home.

That fake stuff follows me where ever I go....crossword puzzle clue "4 letter word for margarine": [GAH] "OLEO" [/GAH]

When I made Christmas cookies at my mom's house this year, she said they tasted better than hers and wondered why.

Maybe it was because I used BUTTER, Ma!!

Mwaahahahahaha!

[Mayhaw Man]

[We also were in Baton Rouge from 1966-67 when my father was in residence at LSU for a year.

The meal plan for instiutional food at LSU is one of the best institutional bargains in the history of the world. The food (generally) is great for something that comes off of a steam line. It is pretty much regional stuff (Louiaiana obviously, SOuthern in general) and LSU was one of the few schools that I have attended where the majority of students participated in the meal plan. It is the only school I ever attended where graduate students were not constantly hungry

[mighty quinn]

i'm the youngest of 8 and my mom didn't know how to boil water when she got married-this made for some kitchen disasters and a pretty repetitive menu. once she tried to pawn off fried eggplant as veal parmesan ("mom, i know that veal is a cow and doesn't have seeds!") we had mac and cheese with stewed tomatoes and zucchini every friday for supper- to this day i can't deal with stewed tomatoes!! the worst, though, was the time she burnt beef and rice soup- mom was going through a very difficult menopausal spell- she insisted that we shut up and eat it anyway! (to this day she vehemently denies this legend but we all know it's true) strangely enough, we all grew up to be pretty good cooks in our own right and quite competitive in the kitchen and we count in our ranks a former restaurant owner and a butcher. we all love to eat!!

[KarenS]

My mom is an O.K. cook. She would always try new cuisines and experiment. I remember her chicken roasted in a thick layer of salt. No one could eat it (she did admit failure though). She is very frugal- we were always getting the bargain bin vegetables. The worse was the "sale" fish. It was never very fresh. I never really learned to love fish until I left home. My dad can't cook (I asked him how he managed to live so long and not learn how). When my mom goes away, he will microwave frozen burritos. I love to cook; my grandmother once watched me making marinara. She asked why I went to all of that trouble- she said that she just used ketchup!

[PopsicleToze]

I love to cook; my grandmother once watched me making marinara. She asked why I went to all of that trouble- she said that she just used ketchup!

Karen, I just have to say

"You've come a long way, baby!"

(In case you're not old enough to know that statement, that was from an old TV ad. I'm not sure, but I think it was for cigarettes . Nevertheless, the woman had come a looong way!)

Edited January 10, 2004 by NolaFoodie (log)

[Cusina]

After reading all these posts, I guess I could have had worse! Spam and velveeta? Bleh! And that season salt, wow, horrible. Amazing you all survived to tell the tale.

My mom was the ultimate healthy cook. She still has microbiotics cookbooks on her shelf from the 70s that are covered in illustrations of funny mushrooms and stoned hippie women in aprons exclaiming over broccoli. (strangely enough, mom is not the least bit hippie, but hey). Healthy is good in theory, but not very tasty. She had food allergies to onions, corn and a lot of other things so her cooking was quite bland. Regulars in our household included:

baked chicken. Just chicken and salt.

baked fish. fish, salt and 'ooo' lemon.

Spaghetti that was served on the table IN the water it was cooked in. Mush. with her sauce which was basically tomato paste, water, ground beef and garlic.

Steaks that were cooked to shoe leather (kills all those germs you know). I completely stopped eating beef in high school as a protest.

The absolute worst however was her fish soup. Egad. Fish not worthy of being prepared any other way combined with water, celery, carrots and tomato paste, a little salt. Voila.

In her defense I think dinner was almost always held at least 30 minutes after she thought it would be served due to my father's workaholic tendancies. She also taught us how to eat artichokes and fondue and steamed the veggies perfectly. And makes killer pies and cookies for the holidays. I'm certain I owe my good skin, strong bones and resilient immune system to her too.

I wonder what my kids will say about me in 20 or 30 years??

[Tmnoland]

The only thing I can think of off hand that was pretty horrid was burned flour gravy, browned up further with Kitchen bouquet. gak!

When we were growing up if my Mom wasn't wild about something she was eating she would say "It's okay, but...I wouldn't want it everyday". To this day my brother and I use that line to mean this sucks!

--therese