what was the ickiest thing your mom made for dinner?

You didn't like pasta with tomato sauce?

Were you one of the evil spawn children we all hear about?

When I was a kid, I would have loved having spaghetti with tomato sauce EVERY day if I was allowed.

...same here. I will never eat another bite of Miracle Whip if I can help it. Margarine is also banished from my house, If I am going to put grease on something it better have enough taste to compensate for the calories.

Re jello, my sense is that it and the recipe scrounging were tied together with my moms sometimes mad scientist approach to the kitchen. She could not believe that something edible could be made according to the recipe, she she needed to try it to find out. And I am pretty sure that she had a list somewhere of stuff she had put in jello, and when she came across an idea for something that she had not thrown in before she had to try it.

liver!!.

I also think that the tomato sauce they put on spaghetti is hideous. We used to eat spaghetti quite often but never with tomato sauce. I still don't use tomato sauce for spaghetti, it runs the entire meal if you do....

Jello.
I refused to eat it. The other four kids ate it by the bucket.
I even tried eating Jello as an adult. Completely repulsed.
==
~~~~~~~~~~~~Scalloped Potatoes~~~~~~~~
Background: My mother would occasionally make corn bread to go with a meal. We kids all loved it and the pan never made a second pass around the table. My father never ate any of it. At first, when we were very young, I thought he was being really nice to let us have his extra, but later, when there were three fewer kids in the house, he still did not eat any cornbread. Ever.

One night, when I was about sixteen and an aspiring folksinger, I was learning a song called "And I ain't going to be treated thisaway" (Woody Guthrie) and in one verse he's lamenting that
"They feed us on cornbread and beans, boys... "
Feed us just cornbread and beans.... .. "

And I got it.
I went to Pop and asked him and he told me that growing up his family would have been dirt poor, but they could never gather up enough cash to buy more than dust. They were dust poor. Grandma did her best but there were weeks when all they had to eat was cornbread and beans.

Okay, fast forward. In 1960, the workers at Hamilton Standard went out on strike for a couple of months (it might have been the whole summer) and things got very tight at our house. I was about 13 then,
Woody would have sung:
"It was scalloped potatoes every night, boys.
Scalloped potatoes and green beans every night,
Scalloped potatoes and green beans every night, boys,
and I ain't a gonna treated thisaway. "

There was no avoiding eating those things. In my mother's house, if she ladled something onto your plate, you would stay at the table until it was consumed. Except Jello, I got a pass on Jello. I don't know why.

I was glad when that strike was over.
==
Anyway, there we were; I told him that his cornbread was my scalloped potatoes. He didn't disagree, but I don't think he said anything to my mother because she was still making those things twenty five years later and I was still putting the smallest amount possible on my plate and eating them.

Joe( It was still her house)Nation

no need to be. It broadened my palette

Great post, Joe

Ditto on the Miracle Whip. Only Hellman's will do

And my kraft boxed spaghetti, which I see they are making again

http://www.amazon.com/Kraft-Classics-Italian-Spaghetti-8-Ounce/dp/B000E1HVR0

I loved it at the time, until after a few years of eating it a couple times a week. Keep it away from me now.

Peas.
Nothing fancy, just plain ordinary garden variety peas. They just would not go down.
In our house you ate what was on your plate. You sat at the table until it was gone. "I'm not having good food go to waste" was a catch cry,... that and "Think of the poor starving people in Biafra".

Those cold overcooked peas sat on my plate for a very very long time, finally my childish will was broken and i forced a spoonful into my mouth. I swallowed them whole so i didnt have to taste and ... up they came unbidden. Back to the plate and table from whence they came along with most of the rest of the meal.

After that i was still served peas if the family was having them but never forced to eat them. Why, if she didnt want food wasted, she continued to serve them up I'll never understand. I still cant eat them.

In my teens, when the poor starving biafran children came up I suggested she put the food in a box and send it to them cause I sure as hell wasnt going to eat it.

Then there was the famouse honeyed carrots incident. That one is family folklore.

Of course, Kraft sucks...

The honeyed carrots incident?

One of those things where you had to be there Osso.

anything that involved tomatoes that had been processed (other than ketchup) was on my NO list

My mom didn't cook that much. It was my dad who cooked things that bothered me. The ickiest was probably when he was starting to experiment with Thai cooking and improvised a dish that consisted of ground beef balls (just ground beef, no seasoning or anything) in a peanut butter sauce (also no seasoning or anything, possibly some fish sauce). Unspeakably vile. But he liked it. (Which meant I had to eat it.)

Aaaack.

double aaack

I, too, am intrigued by the honeyed carrots

There wasn't any NO lists in my house, if it was on your plate you ate it, if you did not like what was served you did not eat but you had to sit at the table with the family and eat something from the meal, and the freedom to not eat most of the meal was iffy on a good day. No trying to grab a PBJ near bedtime either..

I got told that I had it good, because in my dad's day of bing a kid complaining about the meal was justification for getting the back of the hand from his dad for mouthing of and being ungreatful.

my guess is that they were very burnt...