Saturday, May 8, 2010

Strange Meals My Mother Made


Win a rare, out-of-print
Betty Crocker Cookbook!

Most of us were not raised by mothers who cooked like Julia Child. Many of us grew up with ordinary fare. A few of us grew up shaking their heads over meals an ax murderer on Death Row would turn down. These are the people we want to hear from. Send in your stories by posting a comment on the blog. Just a short description of the strangest thing your mother made.


Pam and I also want to know which meal you think is the strangest. Whoever submits the meal that generates the most comments will win a  Betty Crocker cookbook published in 1960. It’s not signed but it is rare and out-of-print. If you want, I’ll get Hansel to sign it and ask him to enclose some cute photographs of himself.


Here are a few examples of strange meals that mothers made back in the day:

Mama Watts, creator of the dried fruit and nut pancakes described in the January 12, 2010 blog, had ample motivation to excel as a chef.  Here’s her story:  “My mother made the worst liver I ever ate.  It was so tough you couldn't take a bite out of it.  I complained about it one night at dinner and even picked it up and waved it in the air.  She got so mad I had to go get a branch from the Lilac bush outside and give it to her so she could whip me.”  Well, today that mother would end up in court for child abuse but this story is from a long time ago…


Lostpastremembered:  “When I was young my mother made a dish called Frank ‘N Bean Mash (frankenbeanmash).  She served franks baked with beans and mashed potatoes and a scoop of cottage cheese on the side.”  It sounds OK until you get to the part about the cottage cheese.  That’s what landed this one on the Worst Meals list.

Lyndsey:  “My mom had a different version of Snow on the Mountain:  she would layer cooked rice, chow mein noodles, chicken soup mixture, tomatoes, celery, green pepper, green onion, pineapple, cheese and more chicken soup mixture.  This was topped with almonds, coconut and pimentos.”  OH… MY… GOD.  It sounds like the kind of cocktail Dr. Kevorkian used to give people who wanted to end their lives.

I discovered the meal below in an old cookbook.  The eggs benedict look like Ms. Pacmans.  What kind of animal could eat Ms. Pacman?  There’s also something called a “jelly omelet”.  Ugh.  Nobody over 6 would be willing to eat that.



Those little ceramic chickens in the back are kind of cute though.  But wait there’s more:



Eggs Foo Yung?  That blasted me back more years than I'd bargained for.  If you're not sure what this is, don't even ask.

So let's hear from you.  Post a comment with your description of the strangest meal your mother made.  Whoever gets the most votes will win the Betty Crocker cook book.  C’mon, you know you’ve got a story… send it in today.




By Guest Blogger Randy Ashton
All text and photos are property of The Gypsy Chef

32 comments:

  1. My mother was a good cook. But my grandma - oh man! I remember one Thanksgiving that we were at her house. She had this habit of putting everything on high to get it cooked, and it just ended up being dried out and burnt. She also loved to shop at the dollar store for ingredients...are you getting the picture? That Thanksgiving we had burned and dried out turkey (I had to use a knife and drink lots of water!), and she didn't do a wonderful job of separating the parts you do want to eat from the parts that you don't. On the side we had biscuits with black bottoms (they could have been hockey pucks) and the most memorable "stuffing" I've ever had. It resembled throw-up in both consistency, look, and smell. It was all I could do to keep eating everything else with that on my plate. The saving grace was the yams - she just opened the can and popped on marshmallows. Not creative, but at least it was edible.

    That night for dinner, we were supposed to have leftovers...gross! I decided the safest bet was a turkey sandwich, so I looked for other sandwich fixings. The cheese had gone bad, and even the mustard had expired!

    My whole family was SO hungry that night that we decided to go to the after-Thanksgiving sales (we said that we just HAD to have the free snowglobes that JC Penney was handing out). Really, though, we got up at 4am just to hit up a McDonalds. Going to those sales has now become a tradition that we do in remembrance of our day of starvation. :-)

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  2. We're off to a good start with a truly bad meal. Thanks for sharing.

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  3. My mom doesn't spend much time in the kitchen - she never did. We were a take-out family. She learned to prepare a single sophisticated '80s dinner party meal (brie en croute and duck a l'orange), but never quite mastered the basics. One day, when we were pretty young, we wanted mac and cheese from a box. Easy enough, right? Wrong. When Mom tasted the mushy noodles in watery cheese sauce, she thought it 'needed something' so she dumped in sugar. Yes, sugar! And then, since she found it too sweet (duh) she added a palmful of cayanne pepper to balance out the sugar. I choked down a few bites with a huge glass of milk but quickly learned to make my own mac and cheese!

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  4. Oh Pam. I'd love the book....but my mother (and grandmother) were really great cooks. There may have been meals we didn't like, but it had nothing to do with a failed recipe. Things other people were appalled we ate (like chicken feet, beef tongue, muskrat and pickled pigs feet, homemade to name just a few) we thought were perfectly normal. And, amazingly, so do my kids!

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  5. Pam
    That is a really fun post! I can't wait to read people's experiences with bad food! Unfortunately I can't really contribute anything! We ate well, with my grandmother at the helm in the kitchen; then we moved to France and in France even if you don't have a passion for cooking (my mom's passion was archeology) you still cook well, or pick up stuff at the Charcuterie. I love old cookbooks, that one is precious!

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  6. Katie, Ugh... thank you.

    Barbara, I wish I could have eaten at your house when I was growing up. Don't give up on winning the book though. You actually ate muskrat?

    Tasteofbeirut, I guess people who move to France dine pretty well.

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  7. My mom doesn't like to be in the kitchen and never will, so I can't provide any strange meals. Pretty much everything she made didn't turn out right haha. We ate out almost every single day. When we ate at home, we were usually eating leftovers from the restaurant.

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  8. isn't egg foo yung a classic (and nice) omelette thingy!

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  9. My mother made a risotto dish with mushrooms that looked, tasted and smelled like several people had eaten it before .... shortly before it became sentient.

    I have never in my life encountered something equally repulsive and I give my mother all the credit for me being able to have breakfast during a forensic medicine lecture.

    "... and here you can see the maggots in the victim's abdominal cavity..."

    Yep, just like my Mama's cooking.

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  11. Ivan, Eggs Foo Yung can be a "nice omlette thingy". I just had a bad experience with it from a street vendor in San Francisco.

    Emily, you freaked me out with your post. I think you're in the lead for this contest so far!

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  12. Anonymous to protect the not so innocent...my mom has always hated to cook. Thanksgiving dinner was always the same, no changes: a frozen turkey given to my dad from work, can of cranberry sauce sliced with can lid, can of green beans, can of corn, Stovetop stuffing, sweet potatoes sprinkled w/brown sugar and marshmallows, nice chilled glass of Cranapple juice in our wine glasses, brown n'serve rolls. Lemme see: brown, yellow, red, orange, green..Yep, all the colors represented with no flavors whatsoever.

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  13. I just happened on this site, and this article is hilarious! My mom is a great cook, and so were my grandmas - no wierd food there, so I can't complain!!! However, I do plan to call my mom today and thank her for never feeding me jelly omelets!

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  14. My mom did fine, but my AUNT...where do I start?
    Let's see, the spaghetti dinners where the pasta was not cooked all the way, you couldn't cut it or chew it. It still retained its shape from being curled in the saucepan...
    The time I stayed over and she served the boxed crispy taco shells with mayonnaise (yes, just that and nothing else).
    Her kids LOVED to come to our house for dinner!

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  15. My mom was and is a great cook, but when I was little, she was working and time (and money) was tight. She would make meatloaf in the microwave in a glass loaf dish. She used Lipton mushroom soup (as a kid I wouldn't even touch a mushroom) and I would watch the yellow fat boiling and bubbling up the sides of the glass loaf pan and the meat going from red to grey....urgh! I can still see it. I ate a lot of canned ravioli back then.

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  16. I collect cook books! I grew up eating rice with butter and brown sugar on it- I didn't know that was odd until I was grown..

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  17. It's difficult to pick the worst meal. There wasn't anything in the freezer except Swanson TV dinners. One of the most memorable events of my homelife was when Swanson added a dessert between the psuedo-vegatable and potato-like glob. My mother considered herself a 5 star chef because of her avante garde idea to add canned peas to her lasagne recipe around the dreaded holidays. After school I made a sandwich every day. I used the only edible stuff in the fridge: mayo, mustard, ketchup and relish. My parents called it hilarious. I called it a misguided active neglect on their part. Thanks for the memories.

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  18. My mother thought of the kitchen as a room between the back door and the rest of the house. My fathers creativity towered above all others. He was famous for discovering an unimaginable benchmark of culinary achievement: adding Lipton's dry onion soup mix to the cheapest ground beef you can find. This resulted in a so-called meatloaf with enough salt and fat in it to kill a healthy hippopotamus. And I remember a hippo or two gnawing on a slice of this home made goodness.
    Plop-plop-fizz-fizz. No cook book for me please. Mary at the deli does all my cooking for me. I get a clammy sort of sweat just thinking about cooking.

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  19. My mom used to make us a "salad" which consisted of jello (usually the red kind), cottage cheese, and mayonnaise (yep. mayonnaise) all layered on a leaf of iceberg lettuce. She also used to make "spaghetti sauce" with a combination of ketchup and barbecue sauce. I had no idea what real tomato sauce was supposed to taste like until high school at least.

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  20. Hey Randy and Pam, you know, my mother was the queen of odd meals. But I can't think of any now-the weirdness was just so regular and often that I think I've repressed it all (smile). If I come up with something, I'll be back!

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  21. Actually, the amount of strange things I ate seemed pretty normal (nobody else got pb-and-canned-frosting sammiches? what?) but my mother very famously loved lemon fluff. She'd make it fairly often and let me tell you - lemon? Sure. It tasted of lemon. Fluff? You could bounce a chef's knife off of that thing - it was like rubber. It was traumatic. My younger brother seemed to be on the path to cook like her - he used to fry eggs in corn syrup. I guess he thought it was an oil or butter substitute? Very odd.

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  22. My mother believed that all foods ... meat or vegetable ... should be cooked to a soft paste. Everything could have been drawn up through a straw. She also had a penchant for putting loads and loads of black pepper on nearly everything. There was a giant can of it right on the stove. If you ate down to the bottom of the bowl, there was often a sludge of black pepper there. My stomach stopped aching when I went to university, but I get the rampant poops from black pepper (if liberally applied).

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  23. Mrs. H, It hurt to publish your post. How ARE you? Is it OK now?

    Bookaholic1017, Love your name and thanks for the colorful description.

    failingrelationships, I grew up so bored that having a Swanson dinner seemed like going out to a glamorous restaurant. I even thought that the tin tray was kind of nice. I feel your pain.

    Amy, Mayo is a dicey condiment in general. I share your angst over having it with cottage cheese. Wow. What were they thinking?

    Beth, frying eggs in corn syrup is pretty hard to beat.

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  24. My father has always been a creative and (almost all the time) a succesful chef in our home. He reads a lot of cookbooks, but never follows any recipe, he just combines and take what he feels like. Most of the time the results are great, but I have a few dreadful memories. Like the time he would experiment with the traditional norwegian "pickled" herring. Normally, it is made with a tomato or mustard-base, and with onions and spices. Well, my dad tried with strawberries. Vinegar, herring, strawberries? No winner.

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  25. Mari, pickled herring... unless you're a fish too tired to hunt I can't see eating it.

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  26. My mother made a salad that was lemon jello with raw cabbage inside. She is otherwise good cook, so I have no idea what possessed her.

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  27. My mother was not much of a cook when I was growing up. We ate a lot of fast food. I do remember when she decided she was going to cook at home. On night one, she made pork chops. They were actually..good! My brothers and I made a fuss over them. The next night, it was chicken. Something tasted off about the chicken though....on the third night, we were treated to stuffed peppers, again with an 'off' flavor..sweet and not right. I asked her what she had used to make her peppers. She walked to the cupboard and proudly pulled out a bottle of allspice. 'See? It is all spices!' she said with a straight face. I still haven't let her live it down. She is a much better cook now, by the way.

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  28. While mym mom was actually a pretty good cook while I was growing up, I do remember jello mixed with various things at every single meal. she also must have thought jello had some magical, medicinal properties, because no matter what was wrong with us, headaches, stomache aches, chicken pox or broken ankle, she made us eat our jello. She always said "it's so good for you" or "it'll make you fell better" or "at least eat your jello for god's Sake!!" The curative powers of jello!!

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  29. I can't list every Strange Meal my Mother made-there's too many & I'm not sadistic enough to share all the culinary atrocities she created (you're welcome, btw).

    I didn't like Homemade Soups until I left home. That's when I discovered that not only was Ketchup not the usual base for soups...but I also learned that most cooks chose to add the pasta at the end- rather than at the beginning. I'd always believed that soups (other than Campbells-which saved me on many occasions) were basically vats of watery ketchup, mushy veggies, hard meat & macaroni the size of your pillow. Oh- not to mention the thick layer of grease bubbling at the top. YUM.

    What about mom's favourite 'treat' for me? Take an old style flat bottomed cone (for ice cream). Now fill it with butter. Then place it in front of your child along with a bowl of sugar. Dunk it upside down in the sugar & eat- dunking every other bite or so. Revolting. But not as gross as the fact that my mouth waters remembering it...ugh!

    Then there was the 1st time she ever tried Shake n Bake. She's never been 1 to waste time with instructions. So after adding the chicken to the bag, she added the spice package & then added a small amount of water. Squished it, plopped it onto a pan and threw it into our abused oven. Then she attempted a 2nd new dish for the 1st time-Coleslaw. Again- why bother looking up a recipe? She threw together whatever seemed right to make the dressing: Miracle Whip (a crime in itself), strawberry yoghurt,green onions,sugar,maple syrup,Lemon Curd (we were out of lemons apparantly), a glob of Cheez Whiz & some juice from the jar of pickled eggs. I consider myself lucky to have survived that one.

    I think I've blocked a lot of those memories- especially the dish that involved gelatin, pickles, pineapples, meatballs & cocktail weiners & peas.

    That cookbook looks hilarious! It's clear that there's a huge need out there for a 'safe space' for kids of all ages to share our Mothers' misguided (& near poisonous) 'FrankenMeals'.

    My mother still can't cook. That's ok- I make her homemade soup now (& so far- no pillow sized greasy macaronis have landed in her bowl!).

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  30. My mom and grandms are great cooks, can't complain there, but my sister, poor her she tries but nothing taste good. She tries and follows recipes but they taste bland. Like the other day, she made pasta al dente but it was to crunchy for it to be aldente, and she squeezed ketchup with red wine and kraft cheese. I ate it cause she was so proud of it...

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  31. The pickled herring is actually a traditional dish for christmas, only the strawberry version is not.. Here is a link with picture and recipe if you are interested: http://www.solarsen.com/e/p/sursild.htm :)

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  32. Oh yeah! I forgot "church roast" That's where you put in some kind of beef roast when you leave for church, and pray through the sermon it would be a short service..because when you got home- the gray, dried out piece of meat was dinner...with milk that was poured before the potatoes were cooked..Burnt meat, warm milk, and I didn't even like potatoes!

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