LOL Stacy

My DSIL would buy instant decaf coffee and put it in an old regular instant coffee jar, so her DH wouldn't know he was drinking decaf. It actually worked until the day he caught her making the switch!

A friend's mother always used to make chili and would run the kidney beans thru the food processor, bury the cans in the garbage, and put the beans in the chili. Her DH didn't like beans in his chili. Friend called her mom one day to find out how she made her chili, cause friend's never tasted like her mom's. That's when she found out. That is how I learned to eat kidney beans, after she told me. My DH likes lots of them in his chili, and I never liked them. Now I eat them whole.

Tami

My mother used to mix up powdered milk and put it in a regular milk bottle--but it didn't really fool us. Powdered milk tastes nothing like fresh, no matter how you try to visually disguise it.

After DH's by-pass surgery he still got scrambled eggs he loves for breakfast. Didn't know for years they had no yolks...only a drop of yellow food coloring swirled thru them before cooking. He still has them that way to help keep cholesterol down.
Suzi

My Uncle loved real butter but not margarine. My Grandmother would buy margarine add some milk and whip it up with the mixer. It looked like fresh butter and he never knew the difference.

Linda

My husband has not had regular sour cream for his baked potato for years. I've either used fat free sour cream or yogurt, I just put it in the same sour cream container for years! When we are having company or I need real sour cream I save that container and use that one so that the expiration date on it isn't 6 years old! LOL!!

When I was a kid we lived on a farm. We had a couple of cows and my brother made a pet out of the bull. Well after my folks had the bull slaughtered my brother wouldn't eat meat that came out of the freezer paper. So my mother bought a package of beef at the grocery store and saved the packaging. Every time she cooked some of our beef she would put that package on the counter where he would see it. He at the beef without any problem. I don't know if he ever knew what she had done.

I almost killed DH trying the decaf "switch"
He drank pots and pots of coffee a day. All the way up until bedtime. I started slowly adding decaf to his regular can of coffee, until it was all decaf. A few days later he almost died from the worst asthma attack he'd ever had. They had to pump four shots of adrenaline (sp) into his heart to keep him going. The doctor asked Larry about his coffee intake. Larry told him he drank coffee all day and all night long. Doctor asked him how he knew coffee helped keep his asthma under control. We shrugged our shoulders and said we didn't know that. I had to fess up then that he'd been drinking decaf.
Back to regular coffee and he hasn't had an attack since.

Mom used to do the powdered milk thing too, but she'd use half whole milk and half powdered to make 1 gallon stretch into 2.
She also crumbled up the heel piece of a loaf of bread into a can of tuna to soak up the oil and stretch the can of tuna. I still do that.

My mother stopped buying whole milk when I was a small child. She's always been a keen investigator and wanted to keep us healthy (as I have been a big girl since before puberty), and she was aware that skim milk was better for us. Well, she knew better than to just switch us cold turkey. She started with 2%, but she saved the whole milk gallon and would pour the 2% into the jug. After a few weeks, she decreased it again to 1%. Then, finally down to skim milk. It worked, I've been drinking skim milk for as long as I can remember.

My DH won't drink skim milk, I know because I had to do the slow and steady switcheroo on him as well, saving used containers and adding new lower-fat milk versions into it. He drew the line at 1%. I think 1% is as low as we should go as we have two young daughters, I think they could benefit from some fat in milk.

It's funny that his Mother (my M-I-L) and two sisters only drink whole milk and he finds it disgusting. We were there visiting at Thanksgiving and she offered us cereal and milk for breakfast one morning. The idea of drinking whole milk was repulsive to him. He could not drink it! I, however, drank it and enjoyed every spoonful of it. It was almost like having cream for breakfast!

When I was 6 years old my Parents had Milk Cows. I like store bought milk not "fresh" milk. My Mom would put the cows milk in a Store Bought container to trick me.

Oh yes, the "liver n onions" sneak in. Mom would also sneak in Venison Steak. I love it now.

Gayle

This isn't really a "trick of the trade" as much as a longstanding family joke. For years, whenever my mom cooked a whole ham, she always cut the end of it off. As she was teaching each of us girls to cook, she told us to cut the end of the ham off because "That's the way Mama always did it."

Come to find out from one of Mom's sisters awhile back, their mom (my grandma) sure enough did always cut the end of the ham off. It was so it would fit in the pan. :-)

I must have been in my teens before I figured out that my mother wasn't allergic to spinach - the reason she gave when she made all of us eat it, but not her.

My in-laws used to raise rabbits to eat. So when we were at their house for supper one evening, we told my daughter that it was chicken. She ate it right up. You know almost anything can pass for chicken. I'm always suspicious if it doesn't look like chicken!

Funny!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I switched my DH's coffee to decaf.. he knew! bIG OLD HEADACHE! yikes!

LOL...When my son was in grade school Guess jeans were really in style....All the kids wanted them....even my son.

I went to the goodwill and bought a used pair of Guess...carefully removed the "Guess" and sewed it to a pair of Penney plain pockets....

He didn't know the difference until one of his friends noticed the snap on his pants didn't say Guess....boy was he mad at me...

LOL LOL

We bring that up every now and then and get a good laugh out of it.

patti

When my friend's GS Michael was little he didn't like fish. When they would go to their vaction house in Florida they would get Amberjack from a neighbor. They told Michael it was Amberjack Chicken and he loved it. One day the neighbors came home from fishing and were cleaning the Amberjack and Michael was there. He came running in all excited saying "Nanny, did you know Amberjack chicken starts out as fish!!"

Linda

When i was a kid, I won a goldfish at a carnival. You threw ping-pong balls and if one landed in the goldfish bowl, you win it. I named the fish George and we bought him a biggger bowl. He lived to be 10 years old. I was in high school and George was still alive. The truth is the fish kept dying. Mom would go to Woolworths and get a replacement every time. Love ya, Mom!

My mom hasn't confessed to anything. We did serve turtle and squirrel to some unsuspecting relatives a couple of times. They thought because we lived in Arkansas that we ate like that all the time. Really, that was just stuff we pulled when out-of-staters came to visit.

My kids think practically all meat is chicken.

My ds#2 loves 'pasta'. I let him call it that because Hamburger/Chicken/Tuna Helper sounds less enticing.

I didn't sneak and do this as my ds knew i was going to do it.When he was a teen all the boys were wearing OP shorts.We didn't have the money for those and i never bought them name brands anyway.Since i sew ,i borrowed a pair from one of his friends and traced them off.Then i made ds several pairs,but instead of OP,i put BD on them,his initials.He was a verrrrrrrrrrryyyyyyy happy camper.His friends couldn't believ how well they turned out.All you could hear them say was they look just like OP's.

Pays to know how to sew and do other crafty things.
Kathi