what was the ickiest thing your mom made for dinner?

When I was a kid, I had a list of things I didn't like. I wrote it out, slipped it under the bedroom door before I left for school one morning in about Grade 3.

Anything that had pasta and/or ground meat and/or tomato sauce distressed me.

Spaghetti and meatballs in sauce was pretty much torture.

how did your mom respond to your list?

She didn't publicly acknowledge it for a long time - but she kept it - I found it tucked into a photo album a few years ago.

mrs hamburger was an old-style mother and wife - she made what my dad liked for the most part. I dealt with it - for the most part.

Before I could speak, my mother had a fair idea of what I didn't like. So I was never served borsht or any other beet product.

Schav could get me heading for the hills. I don't remember if I ever tasted it, but it looked so bad, I knew I wouldn't eat it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorrel_soup

Pachai (calves foot jelly) could also get me running for the nearest exit.

My mother was not a good cook. She make calves liver so badly that I thought it was horrible. I was an adult before I gave it another try and found out it wasn't bad at all.

scotch broth and pig's knuckels with sauerkraut were not on my list of favourites ... and i did'nt have to eat them - though i like them now .

veal liver with onions , apple-sauce and ( german style ) mashed potatatoes were one of my favourites ... also fond of crisp potato-pancakes .

at least half what mother served was awful. We had very different tastes. She served lamb...yuck!, Brussels sprouts...ugh!, eggplant diced and cooked until it was poison...bleegh!, That was combined with her ability to burn practically everythng...I mean smoke filled the apartment. . Add wth that add wth that decent meals when I was shifted to relatives and it made it even worse seeing her food. It sat there like a prop from a low budget horror movie. I was a very skinny child. The relatives also fed us with things mother didn't like....fish, squash, lima beans and several more.

Lucky we were later when I was 14/15 there abouts. It was after my father had died and after her first stroke. We (the children) were tasked with meal preparing and things improved.

In her defense, she never claimed she could cook, that was a main reason she married my father, he was able to cook and made his living that way. She tried cooking and followed recipes, never taking into account variables, so if it said "1 hr.@375 degrees" that's what happened, even if the oven was heating at 425. We all survived, I guess it wasn't really deadly, it just seemed that way at the time.

At least once a week my mom would make salmon croquettes, with a side of spaghetti. The sauce on the spaghetti consisted of ketchup and melted yellow American cheese. I despised it.

I have made salmon croquettes myself, but without the spaghetti!

Porridge - 5 days a week. Still can't swallow a bite. Bitter, lumpy mush. Gagging as we speak. On Sunday mornings, as a treat, we had blood sausage, H O R R I B L E...
Mom then decided we kids still weren't getting our fair share of innards, so ground up kidney, little black bullets of yuck, were added to spaghetti sauces, meat sauce, or, well any sauce....
There was the time she made Pizza with Cabbage, yup, do not adjust your monitor, cabbage pizza, gives one the shivers doesn't it. We are Irish, so everything else was overcooked or mushy, it's genetic I think... She does make a great stew and spuds. Most of the food tasted alright. Aside from that, I'm still alive too, so no major complaints.
I learned the basics from her and then really learned to cook from friends who were chefs. I've been able to overcome my bloodlines and cook a steak medium rare.

My mom cooked vegetables to death,,,she was Irish, too. Cabbage pizza sounds just horrible. She made something she served as a salad.....bananas sliced lengthwise, smeared with Miracle Whip, and sprinked with chopped peanuts. Never seen the like served anywhere else. Oh, she also peeled fresh tomatoes before slicing and serving.

My mom and I sometimes only had dinner every other day, so basically I've always been pretty happy with whatever goes on my plate.

On top of that, bless her and rest her soul.... she could burn water and make it taste bad.

sorry....

My mother was irish of the old school and had some of the habits of the day in that overcooking vegetables was a regular thing - but I think back in what is now sixty years ago, that was common in american cooking. Two items I remember not liking were okra (canned?- whatever, I remember it as slimy) and fresh brussels sprouts cooked to horridity. But, she didn't serve them often. I tended to not like food that wiggled (puddings, etc.) or was weird to me (grapes stuffed with cream cheese, made by one of the neighbors - I was so disappointed that it wasn't somehow marshmallow in those grapes - I'd never seen stuffed grapes before or seen them since). Anyway, she didn't usually make me eat wiggly food - much of which I learned to love some time later in life. Heh, like spaghetti. I remain repulsed by items I ran across in my adulthood, like raw sea urchin and raw oysters..

She did make good roasts once in a great while, good mashed potatoes, good codfish cakes, and things like brownies. She made corned beef tongue with sugar + raisin syrup - and I liked it, just not the fatty parts of it. All in all, I can't complain - or I can, but in many ways I was a lucky kid to have her make all those meals. The one thing I did really despise and had to sit at the table until I finished was my big glass of milk. Years later I learned I like 2% fat better than drinking whole milk - but then I had to work up avoiding gagging to finish the milk. My bones probably thank her now.

She did venture out of the usual sometimes - I think it was at home that I learned I liked steamed artichokes with butter to dip the leaves in.

Little did she ever know that she gave birth to a future food enthusiast, now commonly called a foodie. Her sad death relatively early in my life probably saved her from years of having to listen to a know it all daughter.
; )

My father was irish of the old school too, though from Santa Rosa, CA and not Boston - he made superior silver dollar pancakes, eggs, and bacon.

My mom is a good cook and when we visit her, I want her to cook certain meals from my childhood. The only complaint I have is that she served white beans quite often (my father loved them) and I hated them, yet had to eat what came on the table. Ironically, today I like white beans, I just prepare them differently than my mother did.

that spaghetti sauce sounds dreadful

Back in the 70's my mom was on the jello salad kick, most of which I could not stand. I dont for instance want to see shredded carrots and cabbage in my jello, and I dont want to see congealed tomato juice with or without a lot of crap thrown in. She used to cruise the newspaper for recipes and pick out ones that looking "interesting"....I am convinced that many of them had not been tested before printing, so we saw quite a few presentations that were both weird and horrible, which everyone would hate and so we never had to suffer them again.

innards...just the word makes me gag..And speaking of gagging, my mother used to give me a tablespoon of cod liver oil every day

I only had a spoon of cod liver oil once and I still remember it - given to me by my grandmother. This makes me think in retrospect that my mother likely hated it to, from her own youth.

yep...my mom was a jello salad freak too, but it was in the 1950s. She prepared every possible permutation of jello salad. Other 1950s favorites were Velveeta and Miracle Whip (I didn't know what mayo tasted like until I was an adult)

oh yeah...it was swell stuff, wasn't it?