Bad childhood dinners

[driggle]

While eating ham, egg & chips tonight (childhood fav) I was thinking about the dinners I used to have as a child. My mum only cooked things that were frozen, tinned or came out of a packet. One particular meal we had a lot was Birdseye beef in gravy (which you boiled in the bag it came in) with plain pasta bows. At the time I actually enjoyed it but the thought of eating that beef now makes me gag a little. I remember it being chewy but my mum would cook all meat until it had the texture of a shoe, so I didn't know any better!

What childhood dinners did you eat that you couldn't imagine eating now?

Liver cooked to death with little globules of fat on top. There was not enough chips and bacon in the world to make that taste nice....

I loved Chicken Curry Crispy pancakes and cod in parsley sauce and dare i say it Spam fritters. We used to eat a lot of frozen food back in the 80's! I can't think of anything that my Mum made that I didn't particularly like, but if we can include school dinners there were plenty....egg mornay?? exeter stew and lumpy mash?? no thanks!

Spaghetti and mince. That is, grey, dry mince that had simply been fried bouncing around on stark white spaghetti strands - no sauce, not so much as an onion to enliven the bleurghhhness.

Last time there was a thread about this I asked my dh if he had any memorable meals from childhood and he said West Indian risotto! It had banana in it and yes I did ask if he meant plantain, and no it was most definitely banana!

My sister used to make liver casserole and thicken the gravy with flour. Still makes me want to heave ....

Toast toppers
Sandwich spread
Meat paste (especially the sardine one)

Used to love them all but just the thought of them now vom

groundcontrol I was so glad when we got a cat and I could sneak the leftovers to him (He was greedy and would scoff anything) Pre-cat I used to bag up leftovers and chuck them onto next doors garage roof.

I always did wonder if the neighbours found the bags of peas and carrots

The chicken and ham paste was the worst. That stuff was the Devil's own smegma.

My mother went through a phase of buying Sandwich Spread as well, it tasted like pickled vomit.

My mum's first foray into pizza involved buying the cheapest frozen margarita, tart it up with a few slices of fresh tomato and then GRILL it . It was disgusting and I still can't eat slices of tomato on pizza.

My mother cooked a vile concoction with tinned pilchards and cooked, diced cucumber in it. It was topped with bread crumbs and cheese. Cooked cucumber is indescribable. 😵

Cooked cucumber!!😂

@Arseholesontoast DM used to make neck of lamb stew and it turns my stomach to this day even to think of it. She used to leave the meat on the bone which made it even more horrendous. I have never eaten lamb since I was a child.
My other horrors were
Cornish pastie with a tin of vegetable soup poured over it
Boil in the bag fish in sauce with mash and peas
Tinned dinner which was tinned potatoes, carrots and processed peas and tinned stewed steak in gravy which resembled and smelled like dog food.

Mince and onions. Always knew it was on the menu when we asked was for tea and were told 'wait and see...' We were also told 'Anthony down the road loves his mince and onions' to which the obvious answer was 'well, give it to him then'. Not that we dared

Luncheon meat. Thick pink slices of processed strangeness.

Boiled neck of mutton, lumpy mash with bits of boiled onion in it topped off with parsley sauce. Horrific.

School dinners were vile! Liver and onions - tough and dry in the middle; faggots and gravy, cheese flan which smelt like vomit, slimy pork chops at home and that Homepride sauce thing with the same vomity white chicken sauce or diarrhoea coloured curry with raisin and apple extras.

funmummy you win!!

Oh, I just thought of another culinary excrescence which my mother used to serve with a flourish as "a bit special".

It was overcooked, flaccid green tagliatelle mixed with tinned mushroom soup and mashed up tinned salmon. Complete with the chalky little vertebrae and slimy shreds of skin.

Like evil seaweed.

My grandmother's habit of adding tinned fruit to main meals. Apricot chicken, curry with tinned pineapple and sultanas etc. Very 70s!

"Steaklets".Long burger type things that we had with mash,peas and gravy

This thread is making me a bit nauseous

My mum had a chip pan with congealed lard in it, when she wanted to fry chips she'd turn the cooker on under it and it all melted. Was oddly interesting to watch the giant globule of fat slowly shrinking...

the rest of the time it just sat on the stove, big pan of lard. Used over and over and over and over

Why did so many mums cook liver until you could sole your shoe with it?? I love liver nowadays - tender, lightly pan fried calves or lambs liver served rare is one of my food heavens; but it took me well into adulthood to realise that liver wasn’t the grey, gritty, tubey horror that my mum served up with lumpy mash and packet gravy.

My mum also made a very weird curry with diced frozen turkey, banana, sultanas, tinned peas and carrots and an insipid yellow sauce from a packet. We ate that with slightly undercooked Uncle Bens packet rice. Rice was considered foreign and exotic in our house.

Good god what the fuck am I reading?! The worst my mum made was liver. Usually we had bolognaise, curries, fresh fish, apple crumble, soup, alla panna, lentils, baked apples. We had no money but mum could make something out of nothing.

Some people just can’t cook though! I have no idea why - back in the day when we had cookery lessons at school!

My parents generally over cooked everything. So yes rubbery liver, the aforementioned pork chops, let’s not mention fish. They still do in fact, not sure why they haven’t figured it out (sausages don’t need to be black etc).

Just recently my mum expressed amazement that I cooked salmon in less than 2O minutes. Which would be fine, if it had been the first time she’d expressed such amazement in the last 25 years.

School dinners though. 🤮 I suppose it did make home cooked food a luxury. My mum did make a decent Sunday roast though, (used to joke how Sunday was the only day I ate - it was).

I wonder if this thread is shedding the light on why there wasn’t an obesity crisis earlier. (I jest by the way, just in case anyone takes that as a serious thought.)

I used to love chips & egg, in fact I liked them so much my step-dad used to call me Chips & Egg!
The meals I hated were anything involving potatoes and vegetables, not because I don't like those foodstuffs but because they were boiled and salted to within an inch of their lives! Anyone up for slimy, salty, bitter sprouts? Mmm yum 🤢