Not again, Mom!

[fresco]

Some people get really upset with their parents' cooking:

http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/...1467556,00.html

[Jinmyo]

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?

SALT, SPICES (INCLUDING CHILI PEPPER, BLACK PEPPER, CELERY SEED, NUTMEG AND CORIANDER), ONION, PAPRIKA, MALTODEXTRIN, GARLIC, SILICON DIOXIDE (ADDED TO MAKE FREE FLOWING), AND ANNATTO (COLOR).

Well, at least the annatto is a natural colouring.

[srhcb]

My Mother is a great cook We've always joked that she's a "Professional Mother" because of her BS in Home Ec Degree. Besides that "formal training" she aquired great skills, especially in breads and desserts, from her Serbian mother and learned to make my Dad's Scotch/English favorites from my other Grandmother.

I was never a fussy eater, in fact I'm told that my first word was "bite". About the only complaint I cwould have about Mom's fare is that she tends to overcook fresh vegetables, but, then again, this could be my Dad's preference?

[zennenn]

My mother made absolutely luscious roast beef and gravy, and her pies and cookies are held up as the standard for everything my siblings and I (six) encounter in restaurants and in anyone's home.

But she didn't make roast beef for dinner every night, and she didn't serve dessert as the main course.

Vegetables were consistently mushy, pork chops bone dry and steaks done gray. And I can relate well to the Ladies Home Journal type disaster recipes.

She has not taken it well that my sisters and I have deviated from her method.

[Katherine]

I thought of a lot of weird and substandard things my mother has done since she started to take shortcuts or modify recipes to make them "healthier", but finally something came to mind that I hadn't thought of in years.

I've said before that she was a health food fanatic, back when organic or natural were kooky. She used to buy some sort of (supposedly) natural margarine, which she thought was better for us than butter, and she used it for cooking. (Hey, Mom, it comes out of a chemical factory, how natural can it be?) But to "butter" bread, she would take a pound of butter, some water, some oil, and some gelatin, somehow mix it all up, set it in an old-fashioned ice cube tray. After it set, she would cut it into slabs and freeze it. It was stored and served frozen. I still recall what it looked like on the knife as we cut it to put it on the bread...

[lia]

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

My mom once accidentally subbed cayenne pepper for paprika on roasted potatoes. Frustrating because her roasted potatoes are delicious.

[Mabelline]

I thought of a lot of weird and substandard things my mother has done since she started to take shortcuts or modify recipes to make them "healthier", but finally something came to mind that I hadn't thought of in years.

I've said before that she was a health food fanatic, back when organic or natural were kooky. She used to buy some sort of (supposedly) natural margarine, which she thought was better for us than butter, and she used it for cooking. (Hey, Mom, it comes out of a chemical factory, how natural can it be?) But to "butter" bread, she would take a pound of butter, some water, some oil, and some gelatin, somehow mix it all up, set it in an old-fashioned ice cube tray. After it set, she would cut it into slabs and freeze it. It was stored and served frozen. I still recall what it looked like on the knife as we cut it to put it on the bread...

That almost qualifies as child abuse

The one that my mom did that I still crack up about was a big bowl of greens with dinner one night. My dad had taken a large spoonful, and proceeded to sprinkle pepper vinegar on them, went to pick up some on his fork, and this big green blob came away. So he says "What's this?" and as we all look at it, we realize the Scotchbrite scrubber that sat on the sink must have fallen in with the greens when they were getting rinsed. Dinner that night ended up in laughing fits everytime someone tried to make an effort to be dignified and eat with a straight face.

[Eric_Malson]

I was having some good eats this evening over at Sam Kinsey and Kathleen Berger's place, and we were discussing--what else?--e.Gullet, and one of my mother's regular creations that I had completely forgotten resurfaced in the memory banks.

She called it "frozen fruit dessert" and it consisted of canned fruit cocktail (with the liquid, for sweetening), a lot of Cool Whip, and some lemon juice (ReaLemon, no doubt) all mixed together, spread into ice cube trays and frozen. No one else in the family seemed to find this stuff quite as appalling as I did (making me, once again, the "difficult one"). I would never, under any circumstances, consume the individual components on their own (with the possible exception of the lemon juice).... put them together and you get something utterly disgusting.

I wonder if Sandra Lee knows about this recipe?

[laurenmilan]

I've said before that she was a health food fanatic, back when organic or natural were kooky. She used to buy some sort of (supposedly) natural margarine, which she thought was better for us than butter, and she used it for cooking. (Hey, Mom, it comes out of a chemical factory, how natural can it be?) But to "butter" bread, she would take a pound of butter, some water, some oil, and some gelatin, somehow mix it all up, set it in an old-fashioned ice cube tray. After it set, she would cut it into slabs and freeze it. It was stored and served frozen. I still recall what it looked like on the knife as we cut it to put it on the bread...

Good god, I grew up in a Country Crock household myself... my father used butter however, and over time I came over to my father's side of thinking.

Can't get into Country Crock again ever since "Discovering" butter.

[stevea]

My mother had the disadvantage of living with three picky eaters (my dad, my brother, and me). Although I finally came around, to this day my dad and brother refuse to eat any "foreign" food. And by their definition, "foreign" would include pizza, as well as anything containing onions or garlic. This limited my mother's cooking potential.

What they would eat is meat and potatoes, so that's what we always had. We lived on a farm and butchered our own cows, pigs, and chickens, so the quality of our meat was quite high (I still remember steaks as big as dinner plates that were fork-tender, even when cooked well done). But mom seemed to be afraid of germs or bacteria or something, so she always cooked everything to death, including vegetables. I thought I didn't like vegetables, but what I really didn't like was string beans (straight from the garden, no less) cooked in a cream sauce for about an hour.

When I went back for a visit last summer, my mom cooked hamburgers for dinner (dinner is the noontime meal in Minnesota, supper is the evening meal). My wife watched as mom heated some oil in the cast iron pan and then fried the hamburgers. About an hour later, she and mom were still standing at the stove and the burgers were still frying. After dinner (my wife and I weren't very hungry, so we didn't eat much of our burgers), I asked my wife why she didn't stop mom from reducing good meat to cardboard and she said, "I couldn't believe what was happening, and I just wanted to see how long she would go on like that."

Of course, in my early bachelor days, I was no great shakes as a cook. In college, my roommate and I were particularly proud of a pork chop dish we made that also included cream of mushroom soup and canned peaches, baked in the oven. I swear we once made this dish for a couple of women we were trying to impress. You can imagine how that worked out.

We also had a habit of making what we called "Kansas shit." To make it, go into the pantry, pull out several cans of whatever you can find, mix together, and bake. "Cans of shit" yielded "Kansas shit."

[Mudpuppie]

Good god, I grew up in a Country Crock household myself... my father used butter however, and over time I came over to my father's side of thinking.

Can't get into Country Crock again ever since "Discovering" butter.

My parents' philosophy, as yet never officially recorded, is "Why use the real thing when there is a pre-packaged substitute?"

I never ate real whipped cream until I was an adult. I thought Cool Whip was real whipped cream.

We had Real Lemon, all of the various butter substitutes that appeared in the 80s, Egg Beaters, No Salt, jarred garlic, dehydrated minced onions, and Stove Top on every holiday.

Fortunately, dad had a garden and we ate real vegetables.

[Human Bean]

SOS (aka creamed chipped beef on toast) made regular appearances at my house - I saw it was already mentioned. We were fed it once every week or two, probably as an economy measure. I think the other ingredient besides the dried salted beef slices was Campbells' Cream of Something-or-other soup. The final product definitely looked worse than it tasted, but it didn't taste that good either. All-in-all my mom wasn't such a bad cook though, but like some of you, we didn't get too many fresh veggies. I don't understand why we were almost always served canned veg though; I'm sure frozen were available.

My father didn't really do any cooking except for grilling; his version of grilled steaks were thoroughly charred on the outside, nearly raw in the center. My parents both seemed to like this; it put me off steak for life.

And, ah yes, ReaLemon - I'd pretty much forgotten about that until it was mentioned earlier. It was a staple at my parent's house. Vile, nasty stuff; not even vaguely close to "real."

[Toliver]

I never ate real whipped cream until I was an adult. I thought Cool Whip was real whipped cream.

You whiners! If you had Cool Whip, you had it good.

We had "Dream Whip". It came in a freakin' box, fer cryin' out loud!

People have sought therapy for less...

[Mabelline]

hey tolliver! I had Scotchbrite pads disguised as food

[reesek]

no salt!

what IS it?? my mother claims to have a salt intolerance (i say claims because i think what she has is an MSG intolerance - she eats a lot of olives and seems just fine) nonetheless - ours was a household entirely without salt. she omitted it in baking and all cooking. fortunately she didn't cook with no salt, but it was the "table" salt.

the only thing she cooked with salt was her "sweet and sour" i don't know what the derivations of this dish were - eastern european for sure, but it was horrid.

baseball sized "meatballs" of hamburger seasoned with garlic powder and pepper were wrapped in cabbage leaves and cooked for approximately 6 months in a "broth" made of tomato juice, water and sour salt (a mysterious product - all i remember about it is that the brand we used was called rokeach).

serve in large bowl - orangeish fatty liquid with grey meat inside fetid-smelling cabbage. dis-gusting.

[Mudpuppie]

"No Salt" was the most palatable of all the salt substitutes we were subjected to in the 80s. (Emphasis on most, it all being relative.) I don't remember who made it. It was pretty bad -- had a really bitter, almost chemical flavor.

[JennyUptown]

My parents' philosophy, as yet never officially recorded, is "Why use the real thing when there is a pre-packaged substitute?"

I never ate real whipped cream until I was an adult. I thought Cool Whip was real whipped cream.

We had Real Lemon, all of the various butter substitutes that appeared in the 80s, Egg Beaters, No Salt, jarred garlic, dehydrated minced onions, and Stove Top on every holiday.

Fortunately, dad had a garden and we ate real vegetables.

We might have been separated at birth. One year I talked Dad into growing corn in our average sized backyard. I thought it was awesome, but oh, what the pollen did to his allergies...

Back to Mom. Dear, sweet Mother whom I love so much. She's not a gourmet chef, but she always tried.

She doesn't do that much anymore! Her specialties include some weird Weight Watches pineapple pie she swears my father loves and spooning gravy out of a jar. Her mother, my Nana, used to make fantastic gravy and after hundreds of "failed" lumpy attempts during my childhood, she seems to have finally given up. I was appalled.

Cannot make and should not make coffee.

Fortunately she's ace at cookies, cakes, etc.

Her signature dish? Goulash, but it's not like any goulash you have ever seen before and Hungarians would surely disown it. Elbow macaroni, bacon, tomato soup, ground beef, baked en casserole. More like Beefaroni, but whatever. We eat it, we like it.

[tsquare]

Another Mom who didn't know how to boil water when she married (at 23!) She learned, experimented, thrived (and often worked full time). Probably why I am hanging around here now. I was the picky eater, but she only cooked one meal option and tried to be reasonable to all of us. Only time she offered a second choice was liver and onions night. 2 of the 3 kids ate hot dogs instead. She tried to convince us that lobster wasn't tasty - but failed at that. Selfish shellfish eater.

We did eat some of those faux Chinese things - I liked them in those days. Won't touch them now. But we also had "Asian" food from scratch - stir fries of beef and pea pods, or beef with onions and bell peppers, teriyaki, sukiyaki...

My sister made tarragon chicken - threw in way too much tarragon. It was inedible.

Mom didn't like lima beans, so we never had that fight. Of course, I grow my own shell beans now. And she made sure we were all cooking by the time we hit the teens.

Mom was the best.

[Katherine]

Her signature dish? Goulash, but it's not like any goulash you have ever seen before and Hungarians would surely disown it. Elbow macaroni, bacon, tomato soup, ground beef, baked en casserole. More like Beefaroni, but whatever. We eat it, we like it.

You're wrong, she was separated from my mother at birth. That "goulash" was a dead giveaway.

She used to make it every week, though we really did like it. After she went back to work, she trained me to make it. It was a typical dish of the times, and after I moved away from home, I adapted it to my changing tastes, cutting back on the tomato, and adding garlic, red pepper, paprika, fennel, and other spices, which improved it a lot.

Although she never baked it in the oven. I found that packing the leftovers in an oven dish, then covering them with bechamel and grated cheese, and baking made an incredible casserole.

[winesonoma]

My Mother wasn't a bad cook; hit about 60%of the time. Then I move to Calif. and the first visit; Whats that ? Lamb butterfiled on the BBQ with Garlic and a red wine marinade. do you have mint jelly? awfully rare. So much garlic (we have calif vampires). try it. That's LAMB, yes. She had never actually tasted lamb before only over cooked mutton from her mother and she cooked the same way. Always let me cook when I came to visit.

[Human Bean]

If you had Cool Whip, you had it good.

We had "Dream Whip".  It came in a freakin' box, fer cryin' out loud![

People have sought therapy for less...

I remember Dream Whip - ugh! Cool Whip was ambrosia compared to that stuff, but Dream Whip (perhaps better referred to as Nightmare Whip) was available long before professional food technology developed Cool Whip.

This reminds me of another common dessert back in the day-- a Jell-o company product called Whip N' Chill. Anyone else remember this? It came in a packet; add milk, whip with a hand mixer, chill in the fridge, et voila, a modern chemically-synthesized dessert based (very loosely) on the old-fashioned concept of a mousse. It came in several flavors, and seemed pretty good at the time (although I was just a kid, and didn't know any better).

[Mudpuppie]

So all you anti-dream-whip folks probably wouldn't be interested in this recipe?

[lia]

You whiners!  If you had Cool Whip, you had it good.

We had "Dream Whip".  It came in a freakin' box, fer cryin' out loud!

now.....Cool Whip i hated, but Dream Whip I LOVED.

BUT only in its powder form, i'd eat the contents of a packet in one sitting. That and Coffee Mate.

[hjshorter]

Her signature dish? Goulash, but it's not like any goulash you have ever seen before and Hungarians would surely disown it. Elbow macaroni, bacon, tomato soup, ground beef, baked en casserole. More like Beefaroni, but whatever. We eat it, we like it.

That sounds suspiciously like what my mother calls American Chop Suey. Ground beef, onions, tomato soup, elbow macaroni, mixed together and served with a shake of cheese from the green can.

Bacon would have made it slightly more edible, but we never had bacon.

[AzRaeL]

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

Here's the Recipe

http://www.virtualcities.com/ons/ak/a/aka89012.htm

golden baked salmon

Ingredients

1 pound salmon

1/3 cup mayonnaise

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 medium onion, sliced

1/2 cup grated cheese

1 tomato, sliced

Dash paprika or black pepper

Place fish in ovenproof baking dish. Sprinkle with salt. Spread with mayonnaise like you are frosting a cake. Sealing it to the bottom enhances the flavor as it keeps the salmon moist. Top with onion, tomato, and cheese. Add paprika or pepper. Bake at 375 for 45 minutes. Add small amount of water to dish if necessary. I have done this with 8 to 10 pounds of fresh salmon by increasing the amount of mayonnaise to cover the fish and seal it to the dish. Bake it just a little longer. It is very moist and my guests always love it. Any type of fish can be substituted for salmon.