Considering my mom never cooked anything until an adult and moved to this country (she grew up in the far east where servants were a matter of course for any European family), she turned out to be a very capable cook. But I do recall growing up being served what I am sure was a dollar stretcher dish of sliced up frankfurters in a piquant tomato sauce. I don't recall what it was served with but I do recall I was not a fan :-(

And this is no reflection on my mom's culinary skills, but I avoided Yorkshire pudding like the plague when I was a child. As the only American born child in the family and likely more in tune with American culture than the rest of my very British family, I just couldn't imagine the notion of a pudding - what I thought was a sweet dessert item - being served with a roast! And with gravy! Yuck!! It wasn't until my teens that I discovered what a delight a Yorkshire pud was and I now regret not enjoying it when I could in my early life.

Although I make it rarely, I still follow my mom's Yorkshire pudding recipe and it really is delicious. I sometimes do a roast just so I can enjoy the pudding.....and the horseradish!

btw, even though she started rather late in life, my mom did develop a pretty impressive culinary repertoire. One of her standout dishes was sukiyaki, always a company menu, and it was delicious and very authentic if local Japanese restaurants are any measure.

My mom was a good "home cooking" cook - I can't recall anything she made that I didn't like. Beets and candied yams were the only things I remember detesting, but wasn't really forced to eat either. My grandpa used to eat milk toast, which grossed me out when I'd stay overnight with them, but I probably was served it only once and wouldn't eat it. My aunt would make creamed tuna or creamed chipped beef on toast and that still makes me gag to think of it.

One time I spent the night with a neighbor to help with her kids (I think there were 4 or 5 - I was probably 11) and in the morning she made oatmeal, which was fine, but then she put a fried egg on top and poured milk all over the whole thing. I'm still traumatized remembering how I tried to figure out how to get it into the bathroom to flush it, as I was too polite to just refuse to eat it.

When I was - maybe - 8 my parents took me to an Italian restaurant for my birthday. (?) We were suppose to share a big pizza. Shortly after being seated a waitress went by with a huge platter with the biggest "mess" on top that smelled very strange. I asked what that was, and told that that was a pizza. NO WAY was I going to eat that! As I recall I had a hambooger (sic) and they a steak. (So much for the cheap meal at a restaurant. ) I think I was about 19 before I ever finally put a tooth to a pizza and found it to be not so bad after all.

My mother was a wonderful cook. Meals were delicious. But I never learned to like sauerkraut or waxed beans. Every now and then, she would serve a lunch of fried Spam sandwiches, which I loved though today others would turn up their noses at such peasant food.

I was raised in a poor and very strict family, but surprisingly we were never forced to eat anything that we didn't like. But, there was never an alternative dish made separately for us just because we didn't like what was served, so we either learned to like what was offered or went hungry.

One thing I always dreaded was the boiled whole chicken with the soft flabby skin - ugh - I still cringe at the thought of it. It wasn't that the taste was so bad, but it just looked awful. Also, whatever happened to be leftover from dinner, if anything, was slapped on a sandwich for lunch the next day. Leftover potatoes, meatloaf, pork and beans, whatever. Yes we had fried Spam sandwiches, too. Fried baloney sandwiches, which I still will eat.

I guess the weirdest thing we ate was fried smelt. Mom used to buy a huge frozen bag of them - she would flour and season them and fry them whole, which I guess is the proper way to eat them. I happened to think about them awhile back and tried to find it in the store and they didn't have them.

Then we ate a lot of beans, potatoes, greens, cornbread, biscuits, sausage gravy - but I don' consider that weird or bad although I don't know lots of people who were raised on it outside of my family.

As a child of the ‘70s, I have plenty to choose from. Canned succotash. Jello salads. Saltines in milk.

My Dad hated cheese. And pasta. The only time I got mac & cheese is when they served it for school lunch or I was eating over at friends' houses. My poor Mom, 2 things that would really have stretched her grocery budget were off-limits. But we never went hungry. But it was guaranteed that at least once a month, sometimes more often, she would make salmon patties. Ugh yuck. I am in my 60's now and I still can remember how horrible they were.

If I was served anything weird or bad as a child, I did not eat it, including mac & cheese, which to me was the worst.

For a 4-H demonstration contest, my sister would make mini pizzas, using rolled out canned biscuit dough, a can of tomato sauce sprinkled with powdered oregano, and some boxed Kraft Parmesan cheese. She may have added canned mushrooms to it also. My brother Mike and I would not eat this, but Mike used it as crawdad bait, and we would eat the crawdads instead.

If I wanted biscuits, I would make them from scratch myself, but my father liked the canned biscuit dough biscuits, and my mother couldn't be bothered that early in the morning to make biscuits otherwise.

I had rather bland taste as a child, but at the school cafeteria I would put hot sauce on many dishes, and there was always a lot of hot sauce in the school cafeterias in Texas. I pretty much liked all vegetables, and I ate a lot of salads.

I would not eat cheese as a child and stayed away from most dairy products except for ice cream. I refused to drink milk, partly because we had dairy cows and thus had raw milk.

the green slime icky glop the school served weekly: spinach.

It was years before I had it properly prepared; now it goes in lasagna and salads.

My poor mother cannot cook and has no interest in learning, probably because my father is critical and because his mother was a good farm cook. As a result, every week we had the same things. The menus I remember are spaghetti with tomato sauce made with crumbled hamburger, creamed beef on toast, pork chops and carrots with Minute rice sweetened with butter and sugar, some kind of minute steak with canned green beans and mashed potatoes or canned corn. Later, we graduated to frozen broccoli and frozen corn as the side vegetables. Occasionally, we had a side salad made from iceberg lettuce and sliced tomatoes. These days, my parents eat out several times per week and eat the leftovers on the other days.

Once I left home, I couldn't believe the variety of fresh vegetables available and how wonderful they tasted blanched or roasted al dente. I'm happy that I don't have to think of something to feed a family seven days per week.

Mom raised three of us on her own. She was not a cook! She worked a full time office job all day and served as a cocktail waitress a few nights a week. She would make a huge casserole, from a recipe that came from the back of a can or box, and we ate that every. single. night. until it was gone. Then she made another one. Repeat.

Two I remember most were tuna casserole, with a can of peas dumped in (so we were getting a vegetable) and tamale pie, with a can of corn dumped in. I haven't touched either since I was a child. I do not eat leftovers to this day. My husband loves canned peas. He has them out hunting, or when I am not home. The smell of just opening the can just gags me.

When I was about 11, she married a man from Massachusetts. And, boy, could he cook! He stopped at the meat market and the farmers market every day on his way home from work. The table was set nicely, there was a protein, carb, cooked vegetable, a fresh tray of assorted vegetables, and fresh bread with butter, on the table every single night. I learned a lot from him, he was always patient with me being underfoot, trying to help set the table, learning how to peel and cut vegetables. He didn't last long, but I did pretty much most of the cooking after he left. And there were no more casseroles! I planned a menu, mom shopped once a week, and I cooked. My brothers helped me clean up.

Interesting that most of the answers are about poor mom cooking. My mother was an excellent cook, and my father was useful in the kitchen. Weird mostly came from odd ideas kids have. My father did make me cream cheese and butter sandwiches when I was very little. As an adult, I learned this was a common enough combo, but my mother put an end to it. She didn't approve of fat with fat or starch with starch. Therefore no potato or spaghetti sandwiches, like friends had, but she allowed cream cheese and jam. No peanutbutter sandwiches. Neither parent grew up eating them, and I didn't like pb on bread.

Really weird, though? As a teen, having eschewed the bread for lunch, I discovered deli style sliced smoked turkey rolled up around semi-soft cheese and banana slices.

My mother was a really good cook and baker but she made the worst oatmeal, which I was forced to eat every morning. It was lumpy, slimy, and horrid. I avoided oatmeal for years and, though I've learned to make tasty oatmeal, I still prefer oatbran or steel cut oats.

My grandmother was also a pretty good cook, but I hated when Koenigsberger Klopse were on the menu once a week. They are meatballs in a white sauce, with lemon juice and capers. I would probably like them as an adult but because I detested them as a child I am not tempted to make them.

My mother tried - her mother & father were great cooks - but that ability apparently skipped a generation. As a result, I learned to cook and bake very early, as soon as I was able to earn money. The silver lining is, that was probably the driving factor behind my developing a strong work ethic at a young age. ;-)

From my grandparents, I learned to appreciate most vegetables. They were old school, had a root cellar, and did a lot of home canning - with paraffin. Okra, butter beans, asparagus, broccoli, cooked cabbage... prepared properly, I loved them all. My grandparents (and later an uncle) also taught me vegetable gardening, I grew my first beans when I was 5 or 6 years old.

About the only thing that my grandparents ate that I was not fond of was liver, both fried, and as braunschweiger sandwiches. Never had a taste for either. They also cooked & mashed rutabaga, which I didn't mind at the time - but I've never eaten it since.

This topic sure took me back to, well, a long time ago. I definitely remember the Swiss steak with tomato sauce on top, and the liver and onions. I've never fixed either of them even though they were monthly staples growing up.

We did eat some weird combinations though. For a Sunday dinner side dish, my mother would slice bananas lengthwise, spread with Miracle Whip and top with chopped walnuts. Actually kind of tasty.

I didn't eat a grilled cheese sandwich until I was 30 or so. We always had grilled peanut butter sandwiches. Grilled cheese always sounded so bland, but I like them now with real cheese, not sliced American cheese. My father would eat peanut butter on just about anything.

my mother was a decent cook....but made some tbings I didn't like...like boiled vegetables! Yellow squash boiied and drained...eww...same for boiled butternut squash, mashed!...eww watery!!....and boiled and mashed rutabega....uck....or green beans...
She also made something I loved called fondly by us "liver jalop"...because every nutrition conscious mother made sure to serve liver once a week! I hated just fried liver....but this was actually good.. Strips of liver....skinny strips....floured and fried in bacon fat, and put into a pan with the bacon from that fat crumbled and covered with tomato juice some chopped onion and lots and lots of grated carrots.....simmered about an hour and served over mashed potatoes.
She made great pies and cakes....and a mean finen haddie and baked blue fish....but forget the boiled vegetables!

I like Königsberger Klopse mit Soße, and I liked it as a child also, having grown up in a German/Czech community. I can see how it might not appeal to some children, however. I don't make them at home, but I do have them when I go to the buffet at Alpine Village Restaurant, which is now celebrating Oktoberfest. Most recipes call for a combination of beef and pork, neither of which my brother will eat, but my grandmother made them with just veal, as I remember.

My mother liked Vienna sausages from the can, but I would not eat that either. My father liked canned peas, which I would not touch, and I never understood why, as he mostly preferred fresh vegetables, many of which we grew, or rather the maid/cook grew in the vegetable garden that my father set aside for her. I remember seeing Marcia Adams cooking shows in which she used canned peas and said that fresh or frozen peas would not work because the "canned" flavor was essential. I think she used them mainly in a salad, which also included Miracle Whip, and so that was yet another reason I would not eat it.

Lars, I would have happily let you have my portion. My grandmother was from Prussia, it's a customary dish there. IIRC, she used veal and pork.

I grew up eating basic Greek food because that was what my dad insisted on having my mother cook. The emphasis on onion, garlic, tomato sauce, and herbs might have been weird to our neighbors and my school friends, but not to me. I remember envying my school pals because their moms served cooked vegetables with butter rather than olive oil & lemon. They got thousand island dressing on their salads, while I got olive oil & red wine vinegar. We only ate mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving, so I also envied friends who had them almost every evening for dinner. I never tasted bread stuffing until I ate my first Swanson frozen turkey TV dinner.

The weirdest things I can remember eating are probably no longer considered strange. My mom & grandmother would make Greek rice stuffing for the Thanksgiving and Christmas turkeys. Rice, golden raisins, pine nuts, ground gizzards & hearts, seasoned with allspice. I loved the stuff, but it sure was a far cry from the traditional American style bread stuffing. My dad used to make calamari stew for his lunches. Weird then, but pretty run-of-the-mill now. When my grandmother came to visit, she & my mom would make broiled kidneys. I couldn’t stand them, but it’s probably not considered weird now. My grandmother would make tripe soup/stew. Something else I wouldn’t touch, but not really considered strange any longer. I suppose the weirdest thing was my grandmother eating fish eyes when a whole fish was baked for plaki. She grew up in a poor Greek village, so I always assumed she ate the fish eyes because she learned early on to never waste anything that was even remotely edible.

Like Rita, I grew up poor, and we ate what was on the table or went without. Mother was often gone and her mother stayed with us, so Grandma did the cooking. The only things I remember turning down was boiled greens covered with a healthy pour of vinegar, why Grandma did that I do not know, and cornmeal mush. I still can't stand the stuff and I went to bed hungry more than one night rather than eat that mush. We were required to take one bite of something before we could refuse it, but were not made to eat it if we really didn't like it.

My brother hunted small game and if he only shot one squirrel then we had stew, because that's how you feed 6 people with one squirrel. We had rabbit, squirrel, partridge, pheasant, even porcupine. That tastes like dark meat turkey, incidentally. We picked blackberries in the National Forest, singing as we picked so that we could avoid the bears. Grandma used those to make blackberry dumplings, which I loved. Grandma would also boil big pots of potatoes and if we wanted a snack we could have a cold potato from the refrigerator with salt on it. But mush was what we had when we didn't have anything else, ugh.

Dad used to say that Grandma could make a good meal out of nothing, and sometimes I think she did. She baked bread a couple of times a week and when I was a young teenager we bought a farm and then we had a garden and Grandma had chickens. Cows were milked and vegetables canned and Grandma cooked to her heart's content. She taught me to bake bread when I was 7 and I was standing on a chair peeling tomatoes for canning while I was still small enough I couldn't reach the sink.

I've gotten much pickier now than I ever was as a child, funny how hunger will whet an appetite!

Annie

My mom hates cooking but loves baking. She did not make good meals. At all. I was an adult before i learned that cream of wheat was NOT supposed to be a solid disk floating around in a pool of milk. You had to chew it. She cooked everything to death without seasoning. ew. She justified that by saying that she did not salt food because my father would dump salt all over food before tasting it. He said he did that because she did not season the food. ( I will agree with her on this one. He DOES dump salt all over everything before tasting it. Then he will complain that its too salty. Grrrr.)

My parents both seem to love soups and stews. I really really don't. It was always beef stew, chicken stew, chicken and dumplings, 15 bean soup. Yuck Yuck Yuck. I will make Brunswick stew for SO when it gets cold out but i don't eat it. And I will make potato soup because its basically liquid loaded potatoes and who wouldn't love that?! But thats it.

The worst concoction she came up with was fish stick casserole. It involved frozen fish sticks and tater tots, cream of mushroom soup, cheese, and heaven knows what else. It got tossed.

The best meals from her were simple and hard to screw up. Hamburgers. Mac and cheese from a box. Homemade pizza from frozen bread dough. Canned veggies with butter. Anything that involved creative thinking or using ones own judgement to choose the flavors usually ended up a disaster. My parents eat out a lot now that they are empty nesters.

I hated creamed codfish served on plain boiled potatoes. The cod came in a wooden box and had to be soaked to remove the heavy salt. It was still far too salty when cooked and the house reeked of fish for days. I remember seeing a whole canned chicken being opened in the kitchen and how gross it looked. It made this sloshing sound as it plopped out of the can. It had a horrible odor. I could barely gag the meal down. I have never had canned chicken in my house. I ate a small portion of these meals though as in the 1950's no-one was catering to fussy eating. Eat or go hungry, your choice.

My 4 siblings and I had a favorite meal that would probably be considered weird or bad now. We even chose it for our special birthday dinner - the day each of us could choose most any food we wanted for the family meal. I remember mom and dad trying to get us to choose steak or roast beef, but mostly we would not change our minds. We wanted white rice cooked in milk with brown sugar on top. I remember mashing the sticky gooey rice flat and piling on the brown sugar. Yum. It was soooo good.

If it were brown rice (which I don't think any of us had ever heard of then) cooked with milk and just a sprinkle of cinnamon and brown sugar I won't think it was unhealthy today. But I know we had only white rice and way more than a sprinkle of brown sugar on ours back then. I now think it was probably an end-of-the-month, stretch the grocery budget meal. Or a meal that could be put together when a trip to the store was not possible or mom was tired and needed a quick, simple to make meal.

I grew up eating Italian food and for the most part it was normal stuff but every once in a while my grandmother would make some kind of snail stew. The other weird thing was beef tea (because my grandma thought I was anemic).

Thank you everyone,,,,I need to go back and be sure I didn't miss any posts but I have to respond to nature girl...... rice with milk and brown sugar was called rice pudding by my mother. haha! (it is really hard to type with a cat on your lap!!!)

Ugg to Salmon cakes. I hated those salty things growing up. I make them now. I make fresh salmon with plans for leftovers and then flake it and make cakes. We still eat them on saltines with whole grain mustard.

For the poster who mentioned fried Spam....I still have it maybe once a year....one salty Spam and egg sandwich on hearty bread hits the spot and I am done for quite a while but I do enjoy it!

My mother was not interested in cooking. Her favorite thing to do was round steak (not trimmed), floured and stuck in the pressure cooker, resulting in a gray, flavorless piece of meat. Beans in the pressure cooker was another favorite. Often the beans would burn which caused a terrible odor. She wanted me to get a pressure cooker after I married but I wouldn't entertain the idea!

I enjoyed this topic!

My mom was a good cook and aspects of what was regularly on our table were down right cutting edge for the time and place (salads, fresh or frozen vegetables instead of canned, minimal use of cream of whatever soup, some ethnic food, actual seasoning), but the most frequent side dish to any meal remained boiled potatoes with pan gravy. There were also things we ate as very young kids which disappeared as we got older (chipped beef on toast). In retrospect, my brother and I realized that this was probably because our parents could finally afford something else. The "food" item we consumed the absolute most of as kids, however, was Kool-Aid. I mean we drank gallons and gallons of the stuff. The full-on sugar version. Never with meals (that was milk or water), but gallons nonetheless. We still tease Mom about this occasionally. Nothing can embarrass my retired public health nurse mother like reminding her of this particular youthful parental indiscretion.

Mary, hey, we drank gallons of Kool-Aid too, it was only 5 cents a pack. We drank a lot of iced tea, too, sweetened, of course. My teeth hurt just thinking about it.

I grew up in a very standard middle class, white bread neighborhood......no other ethnicities around. So I ate a lot what my friends would have considered weird, simply because my folks were British and these were common and traditional British dishes - steak and kidney pie (the only organ meat other than liver I will touch), kedgeree, curry, Lancashire hotpot, kippers, steamed puddings, etc.

When I had sleepovers at my house, I made my mom promise to cook American dishes because I wanted to be part of the "crowd" :-)

Weird but not bad to me; pickled herring. Roe fried like spam and eaten on rye toast. Stinky cheeses melted on rye toast in the oven over asparagus. .. yummeey. I loved the homemade liver pate and fried liver that we had as children. I still love liver though I only eat chicken liver. I also loved the eggs with sugary egg sauce. Rye bread cooked in beer with a sugary eggy topping another delicious one!

Bad to me but not weird; cabbage in cream sauce. Overcooked till the flavour was gone vegetables!

Weird and bad to me... Bacon grease on rye toast.

Oh yes, I remember putting cold, left over baked beans in a sandwich. Delicious.

I'd never heard of Königsberger Klopse so I Googled it - yucky looking as all get out.

Sheilajoyce, what was really awful about the pork and bean sandwiches is, we smeared Miracle Whip on the bread first! UGH!

And finally, boiled potato sandwiches really aren't so bad, especially with mayo (well actually MW) and mustard, tastes a lot like potato salad.

My Mom was a really good cook. Everyone absolutely loved her Chicken and Dumplings, and she was often asked to make them to bring to potlucks and other events. I, however, did not like them. The dumplings were the flat kind and to me they were just so slick, I could not eat them. That is the only thing I can recall that she cooked that I did not like. I never told her that - I just sort of ate around the dumplings and cut them up smaller so it looked as if I had eaten some, I just didn't want to disappoint her that way.

Oh yeah, we drank a lot of full sugar Kool-Aid as kids. Also loved Tang cause the astronauts drank it :-) My mom made salmon croquettes on a regular basis. It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized that salmon didn't have to come in a can.

Speaking of cans, I thought all hams came in a can too. Geez, and I grew up in Iowa, the pork capital.

OH..... Elizabeth, I had totally scrubbed the image of the whole chicken in a huge can! I could have lived without that memory, or the one of the many canned hams that use to be our staple.

Rice with brown sugar was a breakfast treat when nothing else was available.

Was not allowed Kool-Aid....it was the artificial colors...my mother and her father before her was sure artificial colorings ( particularly green!) would kill us all!

Yeonasky, I came from a Norwegian family and Christmas we got to have pickled herring as a treat. We ate the rollmop type. I loved them and still do! I would imagine that they were expensive which is likely why we only had them at Christmas. My Mom is an excellent cook but I find that her food has not been as appealing now as she has become more and more diet conscience. She won’t use butter anymore as she thinks Becel is more healthy. She will only use the leanest cuts of meat/poultry and removes any semblance of fat or skin. She won’t fry anything and so on. Oh and not a sauce to be found.

My mom was a great cook- she learned out of self defense because her mom was terrible, lol. Grandma could bake circles around anyone, but her cooking left much to be desired.

Grandma made this incredible molded jello salad. Layers of gelatinized cottage cheese, ground meats, or even a tomato soup layered right in with fruit jellos and chunky fruit/cream salad for a layer. It was terrible. When she did a just fruit one it wasn't quite so bad :) Also had the habit of getting nice fresh produce, then boiling it till it changed colors and was almost mush. She could char a good steak- because that is how her beagle liked it, so that's how she cooked it for the humans too.

And bless her for packing my lunches for a while- the school food was downright out and gross, the smell of melting plastic filling the halls as trays of ew were reheated. But her favorite to pack me was a thermos of chicken soup, and PB&J, and a thermos of orange juice. PB&J and oj isn't terrible, but throw in the chicken soup and it's just a terrible combo. Sometimes it was meat and cheese sandwich, and that went great with the soup, but still nope on the oj. Sometimes it was tomato instead of chicken soup, and just... I would trade a buddy my oj for their milk. We would sometimes trade sandwiches too :)

There's only a couple things mom made that I didn't like. A casserole with klusky noodles, cream soup, cashews, turkey, and I think a can of Asian mixed veggies. It was one of my least favorite after Thanksgiving dishes, lol. I disliked her scalloped oysters as a kid, but kind of like it now. And a soup that had meatballs cooked into it- I didn't like how greasy it was. So after mom learned that, she would just make the soup a day or two ahead and take the fat off the top before heating it up for dinner. And remelt the fat to serve as a drizzle on the side for folks that liked it.

I can't remember who made it, my grandma or one of my aunts or uncles.. but there was a stuffed pepper thing that was a ground meat and rice, both uncooked, packed into a pepper and baked?.. and an egg cracked into the top for service. The rice was half cooked kind of crunchy and the meat funky overdry, and the pepper slimy overcooked.. and the almost raw egg on top to mix in with it all was just nope. There was a tuna salad stuffed tomato version of it too without the egg at the end, sometimes both in the same pan.

ETA: my dad didn't cook. His mom was a "dinner is served on time, not ready, overdone, or other " sort of cook. He was in the military too. It was just fuel to him, tasty or not.

I've just remember something bad I had to eat as a kid. A relative had known how to cook, but as she became more career oriented, she stopped paying attention to what she was cooking, and made just a few things for holidays at her house--really without paying much attention. Undercooked chicken (maybe microwaved?) and the worst, unevenly cooked roast beef with garlic cloves in. I know some people like the properly cooked version of this, but I refuse to try. SOOOOO BAD!!! Meat which started as good quality, reduced to musty, mushy ick. All that garlic made it taste like a cross between smelly feet and mouldy books.

I enjoy reading the responses. I was primarily raised by an aunt and uncle and we ate only farm fresh food and meat but when I went to visit Mom it was interesting to see what she thought was "good" food.

I lived for a birthday party at a friends to get Kool Aid. It was water or milk in either location for me. We did get Coca-Cola when we got pizza which was maybe twice a month and it was served in juice glasses which I think held about 6 oz.

For all the liver people....that was something else my mother believed in.....I hated it then and hate it now....Bless you'll who like it!

And ....who else is old enough to remember life before refills, at restaurants and at home. one glass of milk with meals, one little soda as a treat: again six ounces, the only unlimited was water and half the time it was out of the hose. I do really like the vat of unsweet iced tea i get two times a day....

Hehhe Anne.. We had unlimited water. Milk was at meals. Unsweetended ice tea and when it was warm, homemade lemonaide almost unlimited. Coffee was almost endless refills at eating out almost everywhere- most places didn't charge coffee by the cup while seated- but there were charges to go.
Kool aid was 2 packets- always mix flavors, 1 cup sugar, in a gallon of water. Lemonaide was 1 generous cup juice, 1 cup sugar, likely a muddling of fresh citrus slices, in a gallon pitcher.

But I wander from nope to mmmm overmuch.

Anne, most of my water consumption was from the garden hose, because if I went into the house Grandma would find me a "chore" to do. I didn't go inside. We never had Kool Aid except at Bible School, that was a huge treat. We had cows so we drank milk. Period. I remember going with Mother to my uncle's gas station and splitting a bottle of Grape Nehi with my brother and sister, so that was probably 3 ounces each, LOL.

Rita, I still eat baked bean sandwiches, love them. If Grandma made baked beans my breakfast was invariably baked beans spread on a slice of bread and then folded over. We didn't usually buy hot dog buns, but if we had them, I'd use that instead.

I do like liver, Grandma fried it with bacon and onions, and always served with mashed potatoes, it was one of my favorite meals. Now the liver usually becomes dog treats, unfortunately.

And I can my own chicken, so I always have some on hand.

Annie

I have never had a baked bean sandwich but it sounds kinda good.

Hot dog bun? Why in the name of anything would you buy hot dog rolls when you had bread already...wasn't it enough we let you eat hot dogs??? LOL

With my siblings and I it is love/hate. Going to see Mom wasn't always something we wanted to do but the liver lovers liked liver week! I was in the hate group but I do make it on occasion for the husband....he is that good to me!

Annie....I freeze a lot but don't can even though I grew up with it, I am afraid I will make someone sick. My aunt never canned chicken though...that is interesting.

• Forgive me, I am just now a pressure cooker convert. I grew up with it...but afraid to try on my own until the electric ones.....Now about 40 percent of my meals involve an instant pot

I really like reading the responses. It interests me when I think I grew up in one home with nothing but healthy food and another with weird food...and see that neither is fully true and it seems (I hope) that we all had folks who loved us and thought a hockey puck steak and canned veggies, a baked bean sandwich, or organically grown beef and veggies were making us grow.

I have to remind myself that the adults in my world did the best they could....some just were amazing at it and others just got by but did way better than they were raised.

I hope my own children think that.

Weird and just bad = Space Food Sticks

Just bad = Sweetarts, which gave me cavities.

We had good home cooked meals, and 'gourmet' stuff too. My parents were part of a a small gourmet group, and hosted dinner parties. I believe that sort of thing was fairly popular in the 60s & 70s.

I loved frogs legs as a child, and always ordered them at a local restaurant. Is that bad or weird?

We also ate a lot of candy & convenience foods.

Oh I remember Space Sticks. My Mom would give me a couple every day when I was a freshman because we had this weird schedule that didn't have a lunch break. They did have an odd, funky flavor & texture but they did keep me going.