Childhood meals that made your heart SING

[LoveFall]

Inspired by the thread about awful childhood meals. What made your heart sing and your mouth water. I'll start with a couple.

Barbequed chuck steak made on the barbeque after marinating in a special marinade I have lost the recipe for.

Fried chicken my Mom made.

Potato salad.

Roast beef with Yorkshire puddings.

Swedish pancakes (plattar) on holiday weekends. With butter and jam or Maple syrup.

Special open faced sandwiches with a tomato/cheese/shrimp mixture, broiled. Also featured on holidays.

What my Dad named "rollie ups," which were hot dogs slit and stuffed with a piece of cheddar, then wrapped in crescent rolls and baked. Yet again, special holiday food.

I'm making myself very nostalgic, and hungry.

The square baked sponge cake with pink custard, especially if the custard had skin on. The cabbage. For some reason I absolutely loved school cabbage even though it was pale and soggy.

Oh and my nans egg and chips. Absolutely perfect 🥰

Roast dinner was my favourite. Usually chicken but I loved lamb, pork and beef too. The roast potatoes were the best part.

Chicken supreme as someone else said - amazing! It was made from condensed soup :o I wonder if yours was too? If so, really easy to replicate.

Pork stir fry with noodles - a Delia Smith recipe IIRC involving tomato puree and ginger.

Veggie shepherd's pie. This was a mix like ratatouille without aubergine (we called this veggie mix and I loved it) topped with buttery mashed potato and baked. The only format I would eat mash.

Bacon and mushroom sandwich.

Boiled egg and soldiers, made from bread, never toast, and marmite!

Chicken Kiev! Just frozen ones with veg but I would love to have one now.

Oh and sausages, baked in the oven, with tricolor pasta, cooked in stock or with a "perfect pasta" pasta flavouring stock cube (very upsetting when you couldn't buy these any more) and tinned plum tomatoes! God I loved this. It would probably make it onto some people's heart sink list :o

Oh so many! My parents were excellent cooks (although my offering of boiled lambs brains on the other thread was a particular low point).

• pumpkin soup (dad)

-homemade polenta gnocchi with tomato sauce (dad) -meatloaf (mum) -beef wellington (mum) -chicken schnitzel (mum) -french onion soup (dad) -minestone with loads of parmesan (dad) -rack of lamb with marmalade and mint crust (mum) -chocolate cheesecake with tinned mandarins(mum)

We ate very well really.

Roast dinner and apple and rhubarb crumble.

My Mum was (and still is) an excellent cook, so I loved most of the food she made, but my absolute favourite and the most evocative is roast lamb. I have such powerful and warm memories of going to the park with my Dad and siblings on an Autumn afternoon and coming home to a roaring fire, Jonathan Mitchell's Ladies of the Canyon playing, and the smell of roast lamb.

If I had a time machine I'd be straight back to one of those Sunday afternoons in the late 70s.

This thread is making me hungry.

My dad used to make something called Buck Welsh Rarebit - basically it was Welsh Rarebit with a poached egg on top - it was delicious.

Mind you, I once managed to tip the whole plateful, complete with tomato ketchup, into the drawer where mum kept all the Best table linens (I was looking for something in there, with my dinner in my hand, and just tipped it in - tomato, melted cheese and soft poached egg everywhere! My dad laundered and ironed the whole lot before mum came home.

DM's homemade chips with fried egg

DM's homemade pizza and cherry pie.

DGM's and DM's roasts with their famous roast potatoes.

Christmas Gammon

I am enjoying this thread.

So many people have such lovely memories of food lovingly prepared by people they love/loved.

I lost all four of my grandparents and my mother by the time I was 10 so I have scant memories of them, full stop, never mind food memories concerning them.

My memory bank does have a sort of Mexican bread pudding called a "capirotada" that I remember eating during Lent, as a child. It had cinnamon, clove, raw brown sugar, raisins, peanuts and cheese. I have no idea who made it but I fondly remember the scent of it and eating the gooey cheese. I also recall it having sprinkles on it. I have no idea whether it's supposed to have sprinkles or not but it looked pretty.

@SlipperTripper

Mash with cheese, fried bacon and onions and tomatoes, then grilled so the cheese goes all melty. Eaten with bread and butter.

Nobody else in my household eats it, so I do extra mash and make it for myself when they have a freezer bolt on (fish fingers etc)

I might have to make that, @SlipperTripper - it sounds divine!

My mum wasn't a fabulous cook but she bought the best meat she could afford and made a bomb of a gravy so

all of her roast dinners
all of her stuffings
xmas pudding and xmas cake
her chops/potatoes/gravy/onion dinners
and best of all proper fried fish and chips on fridays.

She also did a wonderful mixed grill with chips on saturday tea time and my cousins would come over for it too and we'd have such a laugh around the table. then we'd all go out to our various discos/clubs/college things.

My two aunts were chef-level good cooks. Their coffee cakes, their duchess potatoes, fish pies, cheesecakes, and best of all my aunt's steak and kidney pudding served in a traditional bowel with a napkin tied around it ... on a Tuesday for a normal family lunch.

Yorkshire puds
Corned beef hash
Dumplings in stew
Today I still love these.

Sunday roast
Yorkshire puddings
Dahl
Baking - used to come home from school and the whole house smelt of cakes.
Chicken a'la king
Chips and egg
Pancakes

My Nans homemade chips
dads bacon stew
Golden syrup sponge and custard
My primary schools manchester tart, the dinner lady who made it lived on our street and would sometimes make us some in the school holidays.
Pink custard
Kentucky fried chicken and plain chicken drumsticks

Mini Kiev’s. The small round frozen ones with cheesy garlic filling. 🤤

I love mini Kiev’s I have them as a lunch.

School apricot crumble and custard. The crumble was lovely and hard/ crunchy!

Aww these are brilliant! Noone in our family could cook for toffee, bless them, and I had extreme food aversion as a kid, but I fondly remember my dad pandering to my weirdness and making me salad faces when I would only eat raw stuff, and then cheese on toast with paper-thin cheese cos any thicker would turn my stomach. My mum would regularly visit the fruit barrows and fill her shopping trolley with everything they sold. Used to love seeing what was in season, especially when there were plums. There were those pick and mix nut stalls in markets then, too, and broken biscuit stalls. Omg why were broken biscuits soooo good!? My mum's mum baked, and would always have several cakes wrapped up ready for us to take home when we visited. I wish I'd kept her recipes. She used to buy me the biggest, fattest raisins she could find, and little miniature loaves of bread to make salty lettuce sandwiches with. Good memories.

Broken biscuits are the best, @bingowingsmcgee, because all the calories fall out of the broken edges, so you get all the taste and no calories. Honest!

@elp30

I am enjoying this thread.

So many people have such lovely memories of food lovingly prepared by people they love/loved.

I lost all four of my grandparents and my mother by the time I was 10 so I have scant memories of them, full stop, never mind food memories concerning them.

My memory bank does have a sort of Mexican bread pudding called a "capirotada" that I remember eating during Lent, as a child. It had cinnamon, clove, raw brown sugar, raisins, peanuts and cheese. I have no idea who made it but I fondly remember the scent of it and eating the gooey cheese. I also recall it having sprinkles on it. I have no idea whether it's supposed to have sprinkles or not but it looked pretty.

Your memory of that special food aligns with mine of some sort of yogurt-like thing my Swedish Finn grandma made, and something called, as I remember, Mama's brod. A yeast bread flavoured with cardamom, I think. It was so good with a cup of the special hot chocolate she made by mixing cocoa and sugar in the cup, and then very slowly adding the milk, stirring like mad.

My dad used to make cheese soup. Was basically fried chipolata sausages (or occasionally bacon), then water added then grated cheese once it was to the boil and seasoned with lots of black pepper. Always served in a Pyrex bowl.

My mam is a good cook, she makes a mean Sunday dinner. Been 15 months since I've had one. Next week though!

Also, curried mince and rice. I just can't replicate it at all. Mine tastes of misery and desperation.

My Nanna’s mince stew & dumplings. At Christmas we always had prawn vol a vents, I loved those.

We would have a liver sausage sandwich on a saturday, I remember the sausage being cut into slices and fried, served in buttered white baps - I've never been able to recreate it.

Also my parents would buy a jumbo pack of tinned beef goulash. Can't get it now, tried to make my own but not the same.