What meal made your heart sink as a child

Most of the meals my Mum used to cook. Not her fault, she did her best on a very limited budget but I hate meat, anything with fat or gristle, tinned ham, the list goes on.
On the plus side, she did make lovely cakes and pies so I prefer to remember them.

Homemade stew !! I love it now though

The works canteen reminds me of school a bit - any food that isn't eaten on the 'hot' counter makes its way to the 'salad bar' for the rest of the week. Egg salads are particularly ripe by Friday.

Aaaaargh!

I used to work for a multi-national company who outsourced their canteen to the cheapest contractor they could find. It used to be a case, when doing overtime, of "Order what you like" from an approved list of takeaway places but that was stopped and we had to make do with whatever leftovers were in the canteen.

Only, they'd have thrown all the sandwich fillings from lunchtime into the one container. So, you'd get a plate of ColeslawHamTuna&SweetcornEggsaladChickentikkaPotatosalad sandwiches. Nobody, I repeat nobody, ever took a bite of them let alone actually ate one.

Childhood meals?

Worst I can recall is tripe and onions in a milk and butter sauce. My mother liked it but none of the rest of us did. Only she kept forcing it on us, on and off, for years in a "Well? Do you like it now?" manner. That and the sinking feeling whenever she decided to "Be adventurous" as it meant she'd decided to make something new only, knowing her, hadn't followed the recipe quite so precisely so you were in for something special. I can recall a chicken dish that was 99% garlic-flavoured. a stew that had tons of cayenne pepper in it and a steak marinade that had turned the meat to shoe leather.

I grew up surviving on frozen food pumped with e-numbers and was a fairly unfussy little girl, but the Satan's Spawn of the food world I remember are...

• Apple crumble with evaporated milk tipped liberally over the top. I LOVED crumble, but hated evaporated milk. I also loved single cream and could never tell the difference between that and evap milk* until it was in my mouth so Dad delighted in giving it to me as then I had no choice to gag my way through it.

• School dinner salmon, served on a Friday. Bright pink, smelly fish coated in luminous orange breadcrumbs. Yak.
• School dinner curry, served on a Monday. Bright orange, powdery curry with stringy lumps of tasteless chicken. The chicken looked much more appetising with the curry ON it, as if you got a cube of chicken that wasn't covered in curry you could see it in all its grey, gristly fatty glory.
• cheese and crackers for school dinner dessert. No one ever chose it - who would, over the heaven that was cornflake cake?! - so it meant that one plate of them could stay there for a whole week. If you were the unlucky schmuck who got into the dinner hall late and missed a cookie or cake, you were given the cheese and crackers - no chance to refuse... two stale, soft Jacobs crackers, a sliver of butter and hard, curling grated cheese that tasted of the undersole of a rotting, unwashed sock.

The weirdest combo I ever had on a school dinner was Fridays. On a Friday, you either got saddled with the luminous pink/orange salmon, or the turkey burger. The turkey burger was GORGEOUS and I had it religiously through my entire school career with chips... apart from this one day. I asked for the meal as normal, from the 'regular' dinner lady who had served me the meal for the past six years... who refused to give me the burger with chips - I had to have it with mash. Horrible mash, lumpy, cold on the edges lukewarm in the middle, and fresh from an ice cream scoop. It's always baffled me because the pan of chips was full - it wasn't as if they'd run out - AND she gave the girl after me a burger WITH CHIPS!!!

#scarred

Queen of Puddings. Soggy breadcrumbs. Grim.

I've read this thread with my hands over my mouth!! I don't make my kids eat meals they don't like-am I 'making a rod for my own back?!'

Cabbage and liver on a Monday.
I love cabbage now.

Liver and onions

I used to enjoy everything my mother made but the heartsink meal was school dinner of brown stew which had thick sliced carrots in it. Whole old potatoes which had been standing around and had started to go black and sodding rice pudding for dessert. I went hungry on those days.

Liver. Kidneys. Tongue. Child of the 70's. I've been veggie for the past 26 years.

Bacon and cabbage.
Every. Single. Tuesday.
Heady mixture of farty boiled cabbage smell around the house that day.
Only one out of 8 hurley waving children who couldn't eat it.
"Eat it! Or you'll end up like Cuddy Roche!". Who is Cuddy?
So cabbage sat there like wet gloopy laurel leaves....

Liver....yum...the more sinews the better.

Turnip. Why?

Tripe.

Corned beef hash...out of a tin with mashed potatoes and onions OR individual chicken pies....frozen ones...made me feel sick.

Another horror was something called steaklets....like burgers but in a steak shape. Frozen horror.

Anything with coriander, cabbage or beef broth

Beef stew, with chewy meat that wouldn't go down. I was forced to stay at the table until I'd eaten it all. I cried endlessly but mum and dad weren't having it.

And the stew was always contaminated with parsnips, which as we all know, taste of perfume. I'll eat stew occasionally these days but no parsnips allowed!

*Boiled ham, boiled potatoes and boiled cabbage when visiting family in Ireland. It was night after night (or so it seemed)

To be fair, if I properly didn't like it I would be able to have an alternative so the fact I found It tolerable meant I couldn't complain!*

Sweet Jesus. We moved to live in Ireland when I was 12. I no longer live there, but will never forget the horror of boiled hairy bacon and cabbage. It is truly the most disgusting meal in the world.

Porridge! Makes me gag just thinking about it.

mr brains faggots...... what was my mother thinking!

Stuffed marrow or anything with parsley sauce

Sweetcorn soup 😷

Stuffed hearts.

Anything with lentils.
Kedgeree .

tripe and vinegar or kidneys on toast ( nearly typed kidneys on toad. That would be really bad !)

Stuffed marrow was particularly revolting, and also liver wrapped in bacon. I hated it and was told it was soya and not from an animal, which was fine until my DB found a 'tube' and then the truth came out.

Anything with red meat made me gag and almost puke...my heart sank every time we were served bangers 'n' mash, spag bol or ham sandwiches.

I perfected the art of hiding sausages under mashed potato, in my pocket or knocking them off the table for the dog without being spotted.

I could also fold up all the ham in a sandwich into one tiny corner (which I left or pocketed to throw in the bin later) without anyone noticing.