What was your worst childhood meal?

[TheChosenTwo]

Humour me while I’m waiting for everyone to wake up!
Dc asked us yesterday what our worst meals were when we were growing up, the one where the answer to ‘what’s for dinner?’ made your heart sink!
Mine was fish pie, dc1 was lamb hotpot, mil said liver and onions and db was spaghetti bolognaise. Anyone else bored and want to add?

Another on saying liver - 70’s child - ewww I hated it. Many an hour sat in the kitchen being told to clean my plate or I’d get nothing for pudding 🤢

offal in general makes me sick.

the legendary one in our family though was the year my mum covered the Christmas pudding in brandy sauce - but it was onion sauce - she refused to believe me and my sister and we were sat in the kitchen until we ate it - thankfully we fished the packet out of the bin to prove it!

Beef that wasn’t mince, for example in a casserole. Mum just cannot cook it. It’d be there, leather-like on the plate, and I would have to pretend to like it, chewing each piece 75 times before I could force it down. Dad would be congratulating mum for a beautiful dish with “very tender meat” and I would be confused. I’ve no idea if he genuinely thought it was lovely or just humouring her.

I still won’t eat any beef unless it’s been cooked by my MIL. As far as I’m concerned she’s the only person I know who can cook it!

Fish fingers, to this day I can’t eat any type
of fish or seafood because I’m still traumatised from cheap fish fingers when I was a kid.

The worst meal I ever had though was when I was about 15 or 16. My mum got an incredibly bad case of pneumonia and spent 3 months in hospital, 6 weeks of which was on life support. My dad could barely cook a fish finger so extended family and friends of my parents friends had us over for meals or sent round dishes we could just heat in the oven. My friends mum made a big dish of lasagna and it looked delicious, rich tomato sauce, creamy white sauce, golden and crisped up to perfection. It tasted like dish water 😭 She is a good cook as well which made it even worse.

The smell of liver is really awful. ..it's why I can't eat it

Broth. Specifically, a homemade one that my mother thought was quite the culinary triumph. She would buy a bag of chopped veg and a ‘bouquet garni’ on the market on a Saturday and I knew it was coming on the Sunday. Even the smell of it cooking was horrific. I spent one particular Sunday crying all afternoon because it was coming at teatime!

Boiled tongue or stuffed heart. Also boiled marrow. There were quite a lot of heart sink meals as my parents were of the ‘nose to tail’ and ‘local and seasonal’ food school waaay before it was fashionable and my mum was not a great cook either. The worst thing about seasonal eating was knowing once it was marrow season we’d be eating them everyday until all the fresh ones were used and then it was only as they appeared from the depths of the freezer you’d have to choke them down

My mum, lovely woman that she was, could not cook. Unfortunately you couple this with her ‘don’t leave the table until you finish your plate’ mindset, and it made for many a fraught dinner table as a child, lol. I can laugh about it now, many years later! Liver and bacon was the worst. Vile, vile, vile.

Sausage casserole! My brothers and I are traumatised . Mum never even browned them, so they were just sad, grey sausages bobbing around in watery broth. Grim

My mum cooked as if the Germans were still flying overhead. She wasn't born until the 50s.

I particularly dreaded what she called stew, which was any meat cooked in Oxo with tinned carrots and peas. Thin and grey, it couldn't even be passed off as a substantial soup.

Liver and onion.
My Mums recipe, liver and raw onion with oxo water poured over,cooked in the oven until the liver was rubbery but strangely the onion was still raw!

Liver boiled in gravy with peas

I really didn’t like chilli con carne when I was young. I like it now though

My 1980s Mum couldn’t be arsed to cook anything so every meal was some frozen boil in the bag meal. God knows what my microplastics level is 😂

Second to liver and onions was some sort of braised steak stew fondly known as “workhouse stew”.

Ponchmipe. If you've never heard of it you're lucky. It was meant to be served with a meat and gravy but we never had enough money growing up so mum would add a few rashers of bacon. I think my dad had all the bacon as I rarely found any.

My dad bless him wasn’t a great cook and had many a can’t be arsed days. He also preferred plain bland food and as he cooked a lot as my mum worked late we all had to put up with it

he served plain pork chops and plain boiled rice a lot. That’s it, no sauce, gravy, veg.

still can’t eat a pork chop

Mine was liver, think we only had it a couple of times but I can still remember the smell and texture 🤢

Mince in gravy here too

Cant stand gravy to this day !

Sausage toad...my Mum (usually a v good cook!) doesn't make Yorkshire pudding, she makes a bath sponge. Always somehow burnt and soggy at the same time! It's only this year she's admitted "I've never really had the knack for Yorkshires" and started buying Aunt Bessies to serve with a roast

Liver and Cabbage on a Monday.
After my piano lesson.
I hated piano lessons.
I hated liver.
I hated cabbage.
🥲
Now I love cabbage.
Liver is ok.
And I’m damn sorry I didn’t continue with the piano lessons.

Veg.
My parents used to boil veg for a fortnight. It was a disgusting mush that looked like it had already been eaten twice and tasted even worse.
I grew up thinking I hated all veg. Turns out its lovely if it isnt boiled to hell

I really like liver but it has to be cooked properly. My mother's was like shoe leather. I try not to let bad experience put me off if possible.

I also hated sweet mince meat and still do. There used to be home made mince pies with the driest, most horrible pastry. Mince pies are loathsome things !

Steak. No idea what kind it was but mum fried it for ages and it was like leather. We had to stay at the table and finish our meals and I would sit there chewing a dried up mouthful of steak gagging unable to swallow,

Once everyone else left the table and I was still there I used to hide it down the back of the big tall kitchen cabinets that were close the table 🤣. They never noticed/mentioned it.

I just came here to say that 🤣 mum used to get catering packs of powdered curry mix with sultanas which then lasted for months even with 4 of us avoiding eating it at least once a week

Ooo liver, definitely