Not a meal, but I do cook mom's famous pecan pie. Yum, yum!

My mother's 3 day refrigerator coconut cake!

Trin, I love roast beef and yorkshire pudding!

I used to love mother's chicken a la king, but never had her recipe. She'd serve it on toast points. Never had anything to match my mothers. She took the recipe with her :o(

And her leftover mashed potato patties. Never learned how to make them match my mothers.

My mom wasn't a great cook, at least she didn't make any one special thing. We often ate at gram's and even after she married my stepdad I really don't recall anything 'special' that she made.

My dad is a great cook, especially spaghetti.

My mother was a wonderful cook. She would rather do it all herself, so I never learned cooking skills from her.

We didn't have those "around the kitchen" gatherings where everyone shared in the fixing the fixings.

So that's why I don't have her recipes. But I do have her 3 day coconut cake recipe :o)

The single one thing that I hated about beef and yorkshire, was the next day, mom always had me grind up the leftover meat in one of those metal grinders that attached to the counter. That was quite a job!
Then with that she made the most awful shepards pie I ever tasted.
I have never attempted to try a better SP recipe but I bet there is one out there. Anybody know of one??

Trin

My mom wasn't a great cook. She was known for her cherry pies. When I was grown and asked her how she made her pie crusts she said she gave up making her own crusts and bought the ones in the store.

My mother was a horrible cook. If the can opener had never been invented we would have starved. At Thanksgiving we always joked behind her back how 'everything came out of a can except the turkey'.

My mother was an exceptional cook. When she left us earlier this year, I inherited her recipe box and cookbook. My favorite recipes of hers were for spaghetti sauce and beef barbecue.

"If the can opener had never been invented we would have starved."

My mother was a truly awful cook, too.

but my Aunt Bea made a wonderful Heavenly Rice (cooked, chilled white rice, a can of crushed pineapple, Cool Whip, & mini-marshmallows).

& for years & years, I wouldn't eat cole slaw unless Aunt Bea had made it.

As someone said above, when she left, she took that recipe with her.

I do sometimes fix something from my childhood but my mothers recipes could never be called "famous" by any stretch of the imagination. She was a plain meat and potatoes kind of cook. I do get hungry for those now and then but don't make a habit of it. Have to watch the cholesterol intake and just hope a better diet in later years have made up for a childhood of sins.

My mother was a good cook....simple, plain food...nothing fancy. I cook most of the things she did, and I've changed some of the recipes a little bit over the years. I loved her chicken and dumplings and her cornbread dressing. I've gotten so I can make them just like hers. Her potato salad was the best, but I modified it a little, adding sliced stuffed olives and bacon to mine.

Ms Glenda would you post your coconut cake recipe. Coconut cake is my favorite thing in my old age and love to try different recipes. Thank you, Molly

My mother was an ok cook, but she was a good baker and I followed in her footsteps. I've been baking at least since I was 8 years old. I do have several of her recipes, and people especially like her butter tart and sugar cookie recipes.

I don't know if my mom cooked or not. I grew up living with both my mother and grandmother. My grams did the cooking. She could cook too. Except for veggies. Canned veggies slightly warmed or she would boil fresh ones to death. My brother and I grew up not liking veggies until we had them cooked properly. Now we can't get enough. I honestly can not remember a thing my mom cooked. How weird. My dad was a great cook- He had some recipes published too.

Trish

My mother was a wonderful cook. She followed some recipes, but mostly she "made good messes" as she would say. I do have some of her recipes, as well as my grandmother's recipes.
My mother's spaghetti sauce was awesome...I don't have a recipe because she didn't have one...it was one of those good things she threw together and simmered for a long, long time. My spaghetti sauce has come close, but has never been as good as hers. I lost her in May...I will just keep trying for sauce (and ambiance) as good as hers.

My mother has never been crazy about cooking. I can't complain about her cooking, but I've never asked her for one of her recipes. She did make an icebox cake that was very well liked and often asked for by others, with pineapples and walnuts and I don't know what. But honestly, I was about the only who didn't like that cake, so I have never made one. She still makes them, and I still pass on it.

I can still relate to kitchen smells reminding me of old times though. My paternal grandmother used to make pot roast for most Sunday dinners at her house. So when I make a pot roast, cook it slow all day, I think of being at her house on a cold winter day. My maternal grandmother used to bake blackberry cobbler with berries we kids would pick from the woods at her house. The smell of blackberry cobbler will take me back to sitting on her back porch, barefoot, in filty dirty summer play clothes with my cousins. We would also make homemade vanilla ice cream to go on that cobbler. That is my favorite dessert, and even though I do really love the taste, it's also the comfort of the memories that go with it.

My mother was a great cook, but to my knowledge, she never had a recipe for anything. I remember her saying that recipes took too many ingredients!

Pot roast, gravy; fried chicken; biscuits; pies and BB cobblers; Just good hearty tasty meals for a large family; nothing fancy.

She would whip up a cake batter with her hand. I think it was like what the recipes now call Hot Milk cake. She made an Orange custard sauce to go on it that I've never had anywhere else.

I don't cook much any more but when I do it is pretty much like Mama's. And I try but I can't match her fried cabbage or fried sweet potatoes!

Nothing like Mama's home cooking.

Sue

My mother was a wonderful cook and had to deal with our food allergies to boot. We loved prime rib and Yorkshire pudding. And, Glenda, my mom also made wonderful left over potato patties that she fried in butter, and I don't make them as well as she did. Wish I knew her secret. She died when I was a child and I never had her recipes. They weren't written down. She was well known in the neighborhood for her baked bread.

However, I did work to replicate her potato salad, June pea and shrimp salad, deviled eggs, sage dressing, banana cream pie, and hamburger and gravy over mashed potatoes recipes.

My mom didn't/doesn't cook. She opened cans and boxes. So there aren't any recipes.
She did make a peach upside down cake with canned peach slices and Bisquick a couple times, that was pretty good.
I got tired of things like greenbean sandwiches (Wonder bread, butter, and canned beans) or a bowl of Lima beans and bread at around ten or eleven so I started cooking for us most of the time. It was just the two of us by then.

My mother, was a great cook and baker, but like Glenda's she took her recipes with her. She made an awesome ground beef stuffing for the turkey (I didn't know there was such a thing as bread stuffing growing up) and we always use to fight over it at the dinner table. Every Christmas, my dad would make his Italian sausage with the meat grinder attached to the table. My mom's pizza was famous in our little town, that people called my sister after mom passed away asking for the recipe. Unfortunately, I never inherited her cooking or baking abilities.

My great grandmother was a great cook for all I know. I ate many of her meals but did not get ONE recipe when she died. I don't think they were that complicated but the other relatives got her box of recipes.

Mom is 82 and not in the best of health. My husband and I live with her. In the last few years, 2 of my brothers and my daughter have at different times offered to buy the makings and bring them over if she will teach them to make some of her/our German dishes. So we have all learned to make (I know I'm not spelling these right) Case Knephla (cottage cheese turnovers that are later either fried in butter or added to a milk based soup), knephla and saurkraut, blechinde (pumpkin turnovers), Case Kuchen, and rivela (sort of like spaetzle and also cooked in a milk based soup).

Mom doesn't cook often anymore (DH does most of the cooking), but when she does, it's still awesome. I can make those dishes now, but it's still never quite like Mom's.

My mom cooked the day to day stuff (something pan fried,a starch and a vegetable but my dad did the roast beef,roast chicken and holiday turkey or ham cooking. No recipes really, just technique. The closest thing to a recipe is my Dad's stuffing but again that is more technique than a recipe. No measuring. I remember him telling me how to make the dough for Russian Pelmeni. You take a little mound of flour and make a little well, break an egg into the well and add one eggshell full of ice water. Mix and add flour until it's right. LOL There you have it, a recipe of the kind I grew up with.

donna, I was interested in your German dish names because we have German heritage, too. "Casa" is actually Kase (with an umlaut on the a) meaning "cheese." Kase Kuchen is cheese cake. Kase Knepfle is a marvelous comfort-food dish often translated as "cheese buttons." The pumpkin turnovers are variously called Blachinda/Plachina/Blachenta. The Amish/Mennonites have a soup called Rivel that is made with either dough balls or dough seived into it like spaetzle. You can find all these recipes on the web!

What is your favorite mom cooked meal from your childhood?

Meatballs and mashed potatoes.
Mom would make meatballs, brown them in a skillet, and then simmer them in a homemade sauce that was somewhat like a thin, sweet BBQ sauce.
We would dip a big dollop of mashed potatoes on our plate, then add a meatball to that, and the "sauce" was the gravy.

Thanks for the memory.

I have a notebook full of hand written recipes that were my gram's staples. When I make pork and saurkraut I make knoephla to go with it, gram's recipe is for "Nefflies-Saurkraut dumplings".

My maternal grandmother was a terrible cook and a worse baker. I doubt she could have learned to cook as a girl, given the poverty in which she grew up 'across the sea'. My mother was the breadwinner for her parents during the Depression -- no time to learn to cook even if her mother had been able to pass on anything. (Now, I have to take that back a little. Gram was rumored to make a good root beer -- the alcoholic kind.)

My mother did leave a recipe box, though. Many of her dear, kind friends passed on to her recipes for all sorts of good things to eat. (One is for Hot Milk Sponge Cake, sue_va!)

wish i could...i can do anything she did, except turn out a leg of lamb...for some reason they've been terrible everytime, so gave up...

My Mother was a good cook, but she cooked only simple things and used what she had on hand. She came from a Polish family, but not once did she ever fix a Polish dish! I do have a lot of recipes she had when she moved to the nursing home, but they were nothing she fixed when I was still at home.

Sue

The interesting thing about this thread is how few of our Moms, Grams, etc. used written recipes! I've enjoyed reading all of it.

Chisue, that is it. . . I had forgotten that Mama called it Sponge Cake. Could I please have the recipe? I remember the sauce was more like a custard, and she squeezed oranges into it while it was cooking, and then dropped the hulls in for a minute or two, to get that good flavor. I also remember slurping the custard off of the hulls! :)

I need to see if I can come close to making it like she did.

TIA

Sue

I think the only thing I make that my mom made is pumpkin bars - from her recipe. She was a good cook but it was meat and potatoes and gravy and I just don't eat like that any more. I used to make her potato salad which was famous but we don't eat much potato salad any more either. I did make it a couple years ago when my brother was home for Christmas though.

One thing my mom used to make was leg of lamb. I just don't like lamb at all, but it was such a cheap meat back in the 60's and we ate it often.
As we got older and it was just her, dad and DB. She found the love of hamburger helper. I bet they ate that 5 days a week. I cannot bring myself to eat that stuff, as her whole house smelled of it. It seemed like every week a new flavor was born. Yikes!
We did always get to pick whatever we wanted for our birthday dinner. I remember well when I was on a Swanson frozen TV dinner kick, and that is what I wanted! It was either the fried chicken one or the beenie weenie one, I can't remember.
I also remember the frozen Po'Boy sandwiches she used to get, they were yummy!

Trin

Mother was a great cook. Just plain stuff. But she did the cooking and we did the cleanup. That woman could dirty every dish in the house twice before the meal was on the table!

Her pie crust was absolutely so flaky it melted in your mouth and her fried chicken would probably beat out anyone's. And the chicken gravy would have lots of little crispy bits in it. Yum! BUT she used lard for both. Needless to say, I don't cook exactly like my mom these days.

She canned all our vegetables and some fruits so, of course, I don't equal in that department, either.

But I can do a pretty good job making her Swiss steak, fried chicken and potato salad. I can make her sticky buns and noodles, too.

Sure wish lard wasn't a no-no!

We would stand behind mother when she was frying fatback so she could use the drippings for good ole sawmill gravy, seasoning veggies.

She'd give us the fatback so we could eat then chew on the rind.

Went to a place outside Fayetteville, NC that served fried fatback on the buffet.

My Mom was a good cook.....we were really poor but she made everything taste good....I bet it was because she cooked it with so much love.
I wish I had her recipe and baking dish for the tamale pie she made.
And her enchiladas were the best. I can do a pretty good imitation.
I have lots of her recipes and still remember how nice it was to come home from school and have oatmeal chocolate chip cookies with a cold glass of milk.