What meal made your heart sink as a child

[lemisscared]

For me i think it was mince and potatoes. The mince was from a tin ffs!! With tinned peas and carrots.

My mum used to make me eat this and i would gag and cry! Oh and fucking ready brek as i would get pneumonia if i didn't eat it - boak

Porridge! Makes me gag just thinking about it.

*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.

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!

Anything with coriander, cabbage or beef broth

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.

Tripe.

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?

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

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 and onions

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

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?!'

Queen of Puddings. Soggy breadcrumbs. Grim.

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

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.

Homemade stew !! I love it now though

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.

Braising steak, I actually used to cry when she said that was for tea.

I cried over Brussel sprouts. I sat at the table on my own as I wasn't allowed to get down until finished. After 2 hours mum finally realised that I would sit there all night and relented and removed them. I still hate them.
WHY EAT SOMETHING THAT SMELLS OF FARTS??

Anything with beetroot. At school we had a evil old witch dinner lady that used to stand over me and force me to eat it, even as I was gagging. She said I had to get a note from my mum if I didn't want it. I secured said note, and handed it over, only for her to rip it up, dish me up a double portion and force me to eat it.

My mum used to cook stuffed hearts. I refused to eat them so was cooked something else for tea. The stuffing for the hearts smelled delicious but I wasn't allowed the stuffing if I wouldn't eat the heart

Peawack 🤢 and she used to do a vat of it which would last for 2-3 days. Hated it then and still can't look at it

Crispy pancakes and croquette potatoes :(
Awful, awful toad in the hole with undercooked vegetables and burnt sausages and batter.
Hot pot. Undercooked awful circles of vegetable, mostly beans, somehow overcooked meat.
There's a reason I offered to take a turn cooking each week when I turned eleven and could be trusted with the hob

Faggots

Kippers.
I actually loved kippers as a child, but my Mother, for some reason, decided that if we wanted to eat kippers we had to cleanse our palates first, so we were each presented with a small (about 100mL) glass of grapefruit juice, which we had to drink before we could eat the fish. She did this every time she served kippers for a couple of months. So I stopped eating the kippers.
I haven't eaten a kipper for about 40 years; they just make me so sad.
I still don't, and never have been able to stomach grapefruit.