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

Casserole. It was grim, like dog food.

Liver & onions, boiled potatoes, sprouts. Why adults insist on children eating food they detest is beyond me, do they think children lack taste buds?

When I was quite young one of my uncles told me spaghetti was made from worms, it was many years before I could bring myself to eat it again.

Tripe is nice deep fried with chilli flakes

So many... I've mostly tried to blank food from my childhood out of my mind.

Tinned ham with plain boiled plough potatoes (all fluffy and dry). Just that. No veg. No moisture. Nothing. Eating it was like being desiccated.

Also mince and tatties. Watery, tasteless mince with bits of boiled carrot and onion floating about in it served with those same boiled plough potatoes. Bleurgh.

Pasta with the consistency of the stuff that comes in tins served with a jar of sauce. I have absolutely no idea how she achieved the weird bloated, soggy pasta. She didn't even cook it for very long.

Cup a soup, especially tomato cup a soup. Even the thought of a cup a soup makes me feel like vomiting.

My mum's 'beef stroganoff'. Huge chunks of undercooked mushroom and onion fried up with chewy strips of minute steak served with a sauce made from a bit of Worcestershire sauce and some cream. I didn't like the sauce (it was crap) so I got strips of chewy meat and some boiled rice for tea.

'Kedgeree' that was essentially boiled rice with peas, sweetcorn and microwaved smoked haddock. It all tasted of sweaty fish.

Anything with fish in it, actually. I have memories of sobbing over being made to eat horrible dry slabs of fish served with boiled floury potatoes (no sauce).

At 12 I decided to become vegetarian purely to opt out of this stuff. Instead I got microwaveable veggie lasagne for several years.

Bogey:I not sure the meals I loathed were 'good for you' (tinned ham and awful potatoes is not health food) or the best that could be done on a small budget. My parents had plenty of money feuding my primary school years; they still insisted on serving me vile food regularly.

After I stopped being vegetarian (when I left home) it took me almost a decade to tell my mum - because I didn't want to be forced to eat her cooking instead of whatever ready meal she picked up for me in the supermarket (not nice, but still better). DH wishes he'd pretended to be vegetarian too.

My sister used to cook for us as teenagers. Her speciality was pasta with a tinned tomato and pickled onion sauce. It tasted entirely of vinegar. Sometimes she'd throw some cumin in if we were really unlucky.

most of it was the seventies meat and two veg, and very uninspiring.

Mashed potatoes. Somehow, my parents made dry, tasteless mash which was inevitably lumpy too. How they made such a mess of it I'll never understand.
Curry. Dad fancied himself as a bit of a chef and just had to be all cosmopolitan and make curry. With sultanas. Just not right. I love curry now, but no thanks to those home-made jobs.
Blancmange and anything similar, like Angel Delight. Still hate the stuff.
However, we used to have liver fairly often and it was a favourite. Generally my parents cooked meat very well and it was always tasty and tender.

Cottage Pie

I've just remembered school dinner 'boiled potatoes.' They had a sort of... skin on them.... bleugh.

Kippers,
Mashed potato,
Pork chops (I hated these the most - I haven't eaten a pork chop for over 20 years and still shudder at the thought of one).

Every bit of meat which is why I turned vegetarian when I left home. Not missing all that cheap fatty grisly meat at all! NOr the usual Chinese fare on a Saturday - deep fried pork balls, chop suey etc (in the very basic days of chinese take aways). I also do not like Chinese now (I am well aware that some chinese food is great - I had some in China!!!!). Because of all the gristle, the only meat I would eat without whining was mince - so 'stew' was made with mince!!! Still hated it though. It always looked orangey and was always cold quicky.

However, things improved and mum went to night school. She did make some lovely stuff and her lemon meringue is unbeatable -much better than shop bought which is too sweet by far. Sadly mum is no longer around:(

I don't mean to imply mum was a rotten cook, but that our circumstances improved and she was able (through night school) to come up with more interesting recipes.

Steamed cod with parsley sauce. "With this green-flecked spunk you are spoiling us Mama".

Meat and potato pie. Not quite cooked enough, so the meat was like a boot and the spuds were flinty.

Fried ham with stewed onions. Slimy, salty and stringy.

Thing is, what they fed us and what they ate differed utterly. Pizza 30 years before it became a supermarket staple. Curry made with hand ground spices. All sorts of stuff, but if the delicious smells woke us we'd be chased back to bed.

I love most of these foods. Stew, pie, mince...mmm.

I only disliked kippers as a child. My mum very occasionally did beans, chips and spam fritters when she was tired, and that was a boring meal.

At 12 I decided to become vegetarian purely to opt out of this stuff. Instead I got microwaveable veggie lasagne for several years.

Oh yes. Whenever I visited after I left and became veggie -it was always veggie lasagne. Then it was samosas or onion bhajis for tea!!! I hate microwavable lasagne.

Liver, amongst other things..I do remember running down the garden and chucking my dinner over the fence once!

Ladeeda: you wouldn't like the versions of mine, stew, pie etc served to us as children, I bet. Unless stringey, watery, flavourless stew is what floats your boat.

Microwaveable lasagne is really awful. I'd get it served in its plastic container on a plate. Lovely.

Like a lot if others

Liver
Tinned meat and veg
Yellow died smoked haddock, I didn't know it was died until a fishmonger told me, without the dye it's nice.
Corned beef
Spam
Spag Bol was made with canned beef and onion

There's probably more that I've blocked out.

Boiled fish with skin on (which you MUST eat), boiled potatoes, runner beans that weren't de-stringed before slicing and cooking.

Followed by tinned prunes in watery 'juice' and cold lumpy custard.

Ah, school dinners. I was well known for throwing up shortly after eating my lunch on a regular basis - funny that

Thank goodness I managed to persuade my DM to switch to packed lunches.

My DM is a great cook. However, when I was growing up she made this casserole thing with slices of mushrooms in it that looked exactly like tadpoles.

Couldn't eat it. Threw it behind the shed Amazed we never got rats.

All of it. My mother was a terrible cook.

My dad used to insist on putting warm milk in our rice crispies during the winter and force us to eat it. The smell of warm milk give me the boak.

If I think about it, I can still taste the last spam fritter I ever had, and feel the resultant heartburn.

We used to have minced chicken in gravy on toast on Mondays. I liked mincing the chicken but it didn't taste right reheated in gravy.