What is your favourite meal that you were not brought up with?

[FourSeasonsLobelia]

My current favourite meal that I have been cooking almost weekly is lamb plov. I first came across it when I was in Georgia for work and I more or less use this recipe now but I add flaked almonds, sultanas and pomegranate seeds on the top as that is how I recall eating it.

Even my very fussy 14 year old who 'hates lamb' eats it without fuss. (And also without the sultanas and pomegranate seeds).

https://www.olgasflavorfactory.com/recipes/main-course/plov/

https://thewoksoflife.com/stir-fried-tomato-and-egg/#recipe This is my favourite, ridiculously simple but such a comfort food, I lived in China for a while, and ate it for lunch several times a week

So many! I grew up eating meat/fish, potatoes, seasonal vegetables - pretty much every dinner. It was lovely (and sustainable looking back) food but the only sauce was homemade gravy. I still cook a lot of the foods my mum cooked but I also cook and love a lot of spicier food or food from different countries.

My favourite at the moment is guasacaca sauce from Venezuela. works with everything - I make it to go with fish tacos.

I use a NYT recipe but this is similar - www.taylormadecooking.co.uk/post/garlic-chicken-with-guasacaca-sauce-venezuelan

Good old fashioned steak and mash!!!! Never had it at home but now oh my gosh! With a fried egg on top btw!!

fajitas

Anything that isn’t plain meat, potatoes and annihilated vegetables. This is what my mum cooked for every meal. A good cook she was not.

This is definitely my sort of thing. Thanks!

This is definitely my sort of thing. Thanks!

When i was young, my mum thought she was a cut above the rest and that frozen food was common as muck.
So I was never really allowed to eat pizza, nuggets, fish fingers, chips (unless proper homemade ones)
I'm not saying we live on that sort of thing (I'm actually a good cook) but I quite enjoy a fish finger butty these days!

Actually- looking through the recipe again I realised I sometimes make scrambled eggs with a bit of sesame oil, chilli chopped tomatos and spring onions. Not a million miles away.

I am going to use this recipe this week I think. Hmmm.... I have been in a rut foodwise so might try all of these delights! Including a fish finger butty which is comfort food at it's finest.

Korean food - neither of my parents are that into spicy food, so growing up dinners were fairly plain. These days a typical dinner is rice with salmon or chicken, kimchi and a couple of different types of vegetable side dish (banchan) that I prep in advance. I've never been to Korea, I just find it's a style of eating that suits me really well - I like being able to prep several different components at the weekend so during the week it's more assembly than cooking!

My parents would not recognise any of the "foreign muck" that I cook a lot of the time.
Neither would they recognise al dente veg, & they'd be puzzled by any meat that was not grey.

It's difficult to pick a favourite meal, but anything from the Far East is good for me - especially when cooked by someone else.

I like this alot. I follow a Japanese youtuber (called Gorogoro Kitchen) who lives in Paris. She often films her Japanese meals and they always seem to have a miso soup and pickles of some sort with every main meal which is usually a lighter meat / fish and rice. That appeals to me enormously- a lighter meal and I often copy that sort of approach. Small portions of little bowls of deliciousness.

I love shakouka, falafel sandwiches, chicken satay and burritos.

If going out to a restaurant, my favourites are Lebanese, Turkish, Greek and Thai.

The meal that comes to mind when I think about my childhood is roast lemon chicken, tomato salad and bread. We would eat this every Sunday without fail even in the depths of winter when a roast would have been delightful!

Oh wow! My mum couldn’t cook and my childhood traced the development of fast food and the opening of local take aways. When my mum did cook it always seemed to be something from a diet plan.
My gran did teach me to cook and thankfully.
My first love is proper spaghetti carbonara, I never had that as a child. I thought Italian food was frozen pizza.
My husband says I introduced him to pesto.
There are so many other things though at the moment my DH is trying to loose weight so I’m looking for tasty and filling recipes that aren’t hugely calorific.

I LOVED egg and tomato in China. A friend would put raw garlic in, once it was pretty much cooked. Drooling thinking about it.

Sushi.
Id have been mid 20s before I even tried it. Love it!

That is about my perfect roast tbh. My sadly deceased FIL was a wonderful cook and his roast chicken with lemon and rosemary was a revelation to me. He also used to make salads to go with it but not using lettuce as the base but herbs- coriander, mint and parsley in massive great handfuls. He was not from the UK and said this was how his grandmother used to make salads. Total gamechanger.

This Hairy Bikers recipe is absolutely delicious!

My Mum made a LOT of lasagne when I was younger (surprised I never turned into a ginger, Monday-hating cat) and I haven’t touched it since. Lasagne overload!

Pizza
Lasagne
Bolognese
Curry
Pasta
And lots of other food. We ate what my father liked and my mother wouldn't do anything "exotic" just to keep the peace. We had a lot of something and chips or meat, veg and gravy. My mother was a school cook in the 70s, 80s and 90s so everything was in that vein.

@museumum sushi for me too!

I didn’t try it until I was 25, I’ve had 7 years of pure sushi love since then

My mum' awful 70s/80s cooking involved grey, rubbery meat, undercooked potatoes and overcooked greens, with no seasoning or sauce to enliven it - so pretty much everything I eat now in answer to your question.

Mexican and Middle Eastern food.

Toss up between beef massaman and thai prawn stir fry. I grew up in an area with shops that had fairly conservative range of ingredients on offer (unless you could afford to shop in Waitrose when they opened 😆 ) so while she was a very good cook, the most exotic things in my mum's seasoning repertoire tended to be saffron (used for baking) or curry powder. Where we live now I have Chinese, Korean, Caribbean, Indian, Polish, Romanian and South African shops within easy shopping distance.

The recipe books she'd bought or been given didn't help - mostly published in the 50s to 70s and picked up from jumble sales, lots of good plain stodge and the occasional 'showpieces' horrors like carrot and tuna roulade or cod and banana curry.

This is my absolute favourite summer
cold go to soup - delicious! spanishsabores.com/antonias-salmorejo-recipe/