My dear old mum said to me "Do you ever look back on your childhood and think what appalling food you were given?"

[sandyballs]

Bless her, she really wans't the best cook in the world and this seems to be bothering her in her old age. It made me wonder what we will look back on and stress about regarding our kid's childhood .

My mum was a very good and inventive cook. We often had pasta, home made Chinese, risotto, etc.

But, being the 70s, we also had lots of rubbish. Pudding was usually tinned fruit with evaporated milk, or Angel Delight, or Cornish Ice-cream (which I used to hate). And does anyone remember Sweetheart desserts? It was a tin of fruit gunk/syrup stuff which you had to whisk up with milk. I thought that was fab!

Home made chips with most meals. Quite a bit of offal (liver, kidneys for my dad, tongue for us all).

Vesta meals as a treat - remember especially the chow mein with crispy noodles.

80's and my dad cooked (everything home made).

Sis has ADHD so we didn't have any processed food really as sis would react to flavourings/colourings.

Saturday was always liver, spinach and home made chips. I hate all three. Had to eat it all though. They used to relent a bit and let us have tomato ketchup.

Well, mum's liver and bacon casserole is something I took the recipe for and which now gets eagerly devoured by DS.. same as other posters of my age I remember Sunday roasts being beef or lamb more often than chicken. Mostly reasonable food at home, though hideous school dinners (to this day I cannot touch corned beef). Angel delight and instant whip, bleahh!
Actually, the one meal my mother cooked that I would never eat and was allowed to refuse, oddly enough, was "shepherds pie" made with M&S tinned mince and onions topped with SMash. And served with pickled red cabbage for some awful unearthly reason.

oh yes, I used to love tongue sandwiches

oh and 'kitchen sink pie' is what happens to leftover meat, veg, spuds etc - everything goes in the pie except the kitchen sink...

Housemum!!! PMSL at "pizzer".
I canT write my mums worst ever experiment in case she comes on here, and shell know its her straight away. But put it this way, it was something with lentils..
I didn`t know until my teenage years that you could drink water on its own as an option, I mean that it was possible to choose water!!!

hahaha Sakura, I know, who would have chosen water!!!!

Reading all these is making me laugh so much, I was a 70's kid too and these things were normal!

My worst dinner was cod roe and chips - fab chips (homemade, blanched then fried, all proper like!) but cod roe was like eating fine gravel! bleugh

My favourite dinner was when mum made Campbells meatballs and spaghetti with grated cheese and let us eat it on a tray in front of the telly (only if dad wasn't in though!).

How are we all alive with all that processed crap? I feel guilty if my kids have beans on toast for tea the day before pay day - no veg?

When I was a younger (in the late 70's/early 80's) we ate

Meat stews/casseroles
Pasta with home-made meat or mushroom sauces
Home-made minestrone
home-made lasagne
risottos
home-made stuffed ravioli and tortelli
fried escalopes (chicken or veal breasts breaded - i.e home-made nugget type)
Tuna salads
Grilled fish with veg or salad
home-made pizza (though she usually bought the bases from an Italian shop)
Polenta with meat sauce or stew
Cured meats (salami/mortadella/prociutto etc)
Simple currys (Quite radical for my mum) with rice
Home-made steak and kidney pie and shepherds pie (though these less often than the pasta/rice things)
Liver, bacon and onion
As we got older and my parents got a bit wealthier - we had more red meat, calves liver(rather than lamb or pig) with veg/mash, grilled or fried steak with saute potatos and salad

We ate quite a lot of salads (radicchio etc) bought from specialist Italian importers or home-grown because my mum hated the lettuce in the UK so much and thinly sliced bitter type lettuce with a good dressing were staple light meal eating in our house.
Dad also did quite a lot of growing veg in our central London garden so home grown tomatos, green beans, lettuce etc were eaten quite a lot too. Every sunday we had a big roast with roast potatos and veg and mum usually made a simple cake (baking and desserts were not really her thing)

We didn't really eat dessert as such just fruit really though we did have the occasional home-made apple pie, rice pudding and the very occasional budino (Italian version of processed pudding) or angel delight type thing.
On the face of it a reasonably healthy diet - However it was eaten in VAST quantities hence all of us (except my younger sister) have a weight problem.

In addition my father who had been incredibly poor as a child would binge eat on sweet stuff (as did I). Food had such a strong emotional resonance in my house. It was equated with love and comfort and ease.

If you come from an extremely poor rurel background then suddenly having plenty of food can seem overwhelming.

Our diet was quite healthy but the emotons behind it made food a big issue for all of us. tbh now I'd have preferred to have been fed badly by someone who didn't really care too much about food and who did not equate it with love.

My mother now (in her 80's) actually eats much more processed junky food than I do. She has just had enough of cooking. She did it (very well) for so long that she wants a rest now - Can't say I blame her

Also her view is that a lot of ready meals and more processed foods taste much better than they did when I was younger so she eats them more now.

God, this is funny!
I seem to remember that chicken/turkey was a real luxury too...we only seemed to have it at easter and xmas.
Does anyone remember eating haslet? I think its a pork product. I vividly remember haslet sandwiches and shoving them in the bin and going to the tuck shop for a sherbert dab. (Needless to say by the age of 10 my teeth were riddled with cavities!)
We always had fish and chips on saturdays for lunch - it was the law

tomato sauce/salad cream snadwhiches!!!..mmmmmmm esp when warmed up in microwave!

my mum is a fab cook and also made us fresh cooked from scartch pizzas, chickend kebabs, gorgeous beef casseroles with bouquet garni seasonaing, shepherds pies, spag bol, massive and delish 'dinners'..mmm...so wonder im such a fat knacker

Anyone remember that "chocolate" topping you could get to put on ice cream that then went hard?
We got through vast quantities of that in our house.
And superwhip? anyone? It was really foul processed "cream" but we thought it very posh.
I had a bit of a thing for salad cream sandwiches (on processed white bread ovicously) and my brother and sister ate red sauce and brown sauce sandwiches respectively.

dream topping and angel delight licked from the bowl..the day [rince andrew and fergie got wed, we had passion fruit 'flavoured' angel delight!..my.. we lived it up!

My mum was a sensational cook but I can remember being given spam fritters at school. Strange squelchy things.

I remember eating pizza (homemade base) but with MINCE as a topping, when i mentioned this in cooking class i got a very odd look from the teacher. Mind you, curry was also made with mince and raisins! but my favourite 'meal' was rice topped with two halves of a hard bolied egg covered in campbells condensed mushroom soup. mmmm total comfort food.

I used to eat loads of boil-in-the-bag stuff, my mum can't cook (my dad cooks though and always has done) and had a friend who worked for meals on wheels, so she'd put in a big order once a month [barf]
also ate lots and lots of tinned lentil stew from Aldi because that was one of the few things my mother could cook and my brother would eat. Took me 20 years to get over my hatred of lentils.

We ate really well. Mum was a good cook. No, a fantastic cook, although the interest has waned over the years. And all the veg and most of the fruit was home-grown, and the eggs from our own hens. A bit basic - casseroles, roasts, etc. Never low fat anything (kept a bowl of dripping from the sunday roast to do the potatoes in for months at a time), no artifical sweetenes and plenty of sugar. But my parents are in their late 70s and still going strong.

Yum - pizza with mince! I still remember that fondly from childhood in the 80s. I'm sure you could even choose it in pizza restaurants. However, one of the few foods I remember fondly from my childhood. Mum was an AWFUL cook - or should I say heater upper of food.

I remember weeks and weeks of frozen chicken tikka masala as it was on special offer at the supermarket. My brother was regularily fed tinned 'chunky chicken' bleuruurgh. Burgers in a bun which were microwaved. Haslet. Potted meat. Soda Stream (which was actually pretty cool at the time). I also recall my Mother making a lasagne from scratch (only time she ever made anything from scratch like this) and me/brother being amazed and still ranting about it 20 years later. Those were the days

Goodness me, my children are all old enough to be judgemental. Daily i am an appauling mother. I am one of those mums that doesn't mind the silly things. 'That' cool mum that the kids friends like. This is becuase i had my children when young.

However they will get to 19 they will wish they had a conventional mother who cooked and didn't swear, who knew instantly the vitimin content of alfafa sprouts and cautioned them on crossing the busy road at 18.

I think i am one huge hippy. It going to bite me in the bottom.

My mother was, and largely remains, a quite superb cook.

She has many many many failings as a mother, and I could and do go on about these, but oh boy is she a good cook.

what about those pies in a tin??..not the large flatish tins(they were gross too) but the small tins.erm...what were they now?, grandad used to love em, really soggy like suet??

D'you mean Fray Bentos pies, PinkChick? Used to be on the shelf above the Vesta Curry and Chow Mein in our old supermarket.

Or do you mean Goblin pies? They were in small tins and were made in a factory near where I live. There used to be a permanent whiff of cat food in high summer.