The meals of my childhood:

Great memories! My mom was a great cook but she did come up with some odd things as "staples" for

dinner:

I think she calls them Deviled Hot Dogs: hot dogs split in half, covered with a thin layer of mustard then topped with mashed potatoes and then baked until brown. These are quite good actually!

Pancakes with different flavors, such as Tang, berries or chocolate chips (the Tang one has a funny story, we were on a long sailing trip in Mexico and she was making breakfast while we were anchored out somewhere - it was a little rough that morning and while making our Tang, some of it spilled into the pancake batter. Delicious! it became a family favorite back then.

No one mentioned Rice A Roni?? we had that a long, a natural given our proximity to SF (we were in Sunnyvale).

The pizza in a box was a great treat but I think it is the origin of my dislike of pepperoni today!

We had a rotisserie oven, and did a lot of chickens, since they were cheap and we were mostly broke after my parent's divorced. I remember my sister and I vowing never to eat another roasted chicken again when we grew up, and what do I do every Monday night most weeks? make myself a nice roasted chicken, still my favorite!

We had lots of good things though:
* teriyaki beef
* cheese fondue
* baked fish with tarragon, sliced onion and tomatoes - mystery fish from Co-op!
* chili - mom calls it Sailing Chili because she'd make in the crock pot before we went out and had it for dinner that night - so good
* porcupine meatballs in tomato sauce (the meatballs were made with raw rice and cooked in the pressure cooker - wish I had this recipe still!
* spaghetti with gravy (recipe from an old Italian neighbor who called her sauce gravy, which is what my boyfriend's family calls it also, very traditional and Italian..)
* grilled hamburgers as a treat

we rarely had beef if I recall, too expensive, but once in a while mom would make veal paprika - yummm...

fun to recall - we had great family meals and we were always so skinny! what happened?!

 
My mother never cooked anything "ethnic" until I was out of the house. We usually had

some sort of "whole" meat (nothing ever really made into a casserole, her mother never did it that way). Roast pork, roast beef, pork chops, hamburgs, beef in gravy over mashed potatoes. That was about the farthest away from "pure meat" as she got; you get the idea. She was/is a great cook, but only the basics. Lots of vegetables, pressure-cooked, usually.

Never any spices except for salt and pepper. On a whim, maybe parsley! She thinks I'm waaaaaay wierd for having a herb garden of my own. Well, I may be, but not because I grow my own herbs. :eek:)

She never ate fish, so I don't think we EVER had it, except for maybe fish sticks from the freezer once or twice. "Cooking fish smells up the whole house!" She reminded me that she made creamed tuna once in a while (I don't ever remember that!).

Macaroni and cheese, and grilled cheese sandwiches once in a while. Chicken on occasion. Turkey at Thanksgiving and ham at Easter. Only fried anything was French fries, but not so much for health reasons - it was just too greasy to clean up after, I think, with 4 kids running around.

She made corned beef hash and fried eggs for my father once in a while - I guess us kids didn't like it, then - love it now.

On the other hand, she was (and still is) an avid baker. Half-moon cookies, snickerdoodles, molasses cookies, chocolate chip cookies, lemon pie, apple pie, cakes, cakes, and more cakes. Did I mention that she made cakes often? And decorated them intricately, too. It's a wonder we were skinny kids!

Dad cooked supper once in a while. While it was a rare occasion, it was definately a treat for us when he did.

He used spices ;o)

 
I collect Depression-ware. Amythyst to be exact. It used to come in laundry

soap boxes. My mother passed her collection on to me and I'm collecting more a la EBay.

 
When I was a kid we didn't have "Hamburger Helper" or "Kraft Macaroni and Cheese" or

"Rice-a-Roni". We had mac and cheese with american cheese!! We had "Minute Rice".

Please don't tell anyone, but I still love "Minute Rice" smothered in butter and salt to this day. I hide the box in the cellar.

 
Why do you think she waited until you were out of the house to cook

"ethnic foods"? Maybe she didn't realize you had more sophisticated tastes.

 
Or maybe she and my father went out to dinner after that, and she got exposed to it. These days

she makes spaghetti about once a week and lasagna occasionally.

 
Interesting Dawn. Did your mom have a special culture but not

adhere to it? When you wrote "out of the house" you meant after you moved away? Did she then create a new repertoire? The kids who were of East European background that I knew all enjoyed this really neat food that my mom actually did try (successfully) to make for us. But it was always an experience to eat at a Ukrainian household (I wasn't much of a kid by that time) and gorge on perogies.

We had never had fresh garlic in our house until 1964. How incredible that seems.

My Polish friend's mother was a caterer. Although it was 45 years ago, I will never forget her Turkish delight in pastry!!!!

Yourse sounds exactly like my mom except that we ate lots of chicken because it was free to my dad from the local plant. I can never figure out why kids used to say I was so lucky to have chicken. Was it expensive then?

And at our cottage, my dad caught pickerel and trout but we never ate fish in the city.

I don't think we ever told my mom that she was a good cook. I think she never knew.

 
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