THAT recipe...

When my best friend's mom would make liver and onions. We were together enough at each others houses for this to be a problem. It would make me nauseous and I would actually have to vomit so she would let me off the hook and not eat it.

Two words: Swiss steak.

Is that even real food? My dad would make it in one of those ridiculous electric skillets, and the smell...oh, there are no words.

Oh, I can get on board with the liver thing. My mother cooked it until it was hard enough to shingle the roof or make into shoes. And then there was the cauliflower, which I thought I hated, but turns out I just hate it boiled to death until it's bitter and flavoured with nothing but salt. Cauliflower that's battered and deep fried=yum! Cauliflower that's curried=yum! Cauliflower that's curried with curd=Yum!!!

And then there was the six days a week for the first 16 years of my life torture. Fried until nearly black and tough as nails hamburger rolled into sort of patties served with boiled until glue potatoes and either beans or carrots, boiled to death. Salt and perhaps pepper were the only flavourings. Oh, yeah, and the hamburger drippings made into gravy - I hate gravy, I have always hated gravy, I will always hate gravy. I think I tried that gravy once. It took me another, oh, decade or so of moving away from their house before I could look at any of those foods again. Except the gravy. I still won't eat gravy.

Chicken gizzards. 'Nuf said.

There was a time, for about 8-10 months where we had nothing in the house to eat but a frozen cow that my dad got from one of his buddies (where the hell the cow came from, I don't want to know, we lived about 30 min from NYC,) banana chips, and mint tea. To this day, I'm a non-red meat eater and the thought of most things mint churns my stomach. I ate my share of T-bone steaks to last a lifetime.

When I was young and my parents would ask me what restaurant I would like to go to, I always picked a German restaurant (they didn't ask me too often). I loved saurbratten, that pickled and boiled roast with the sweet-n-sour gravy on top. Then the family bought a German restauant and there was an unlimited supply of saurbratten. I ate it every night for the first week. Then one day I fixed a plate, sat down to eat, looked at the saurbratten and realized I couldn't eat it. I had had enough saurbratten to last a lifetime and have not eaten it since.

Richard

Tuna casserole. Macaroni with tinned tuna and frozen peas in the middle, and some kind of tinned soup poured on top.

Beef Stew. For years I refused to eat or make this. My husband finally made it himself and insisted I taste it. Well, whaddaya know. It was just her beef stew. To this day I have no idea what she did to it.

Hamburger helper soup. Burger helper with water, frozen veggies and a tin of tomatoes. She'd make it every time my cousins came to visit. They loved it. My brother and I choked it down.

BenPanced said:

You know the one. The one where the only way to avoid your mother making it was turning 18 and moving out of the house.

Mine is neck bones, sauerkraut, and potatoes. My mother would buy a bunch of beef neck bones and boil them with the kraut and potatoes. Oh, I hated, hated, HATED that mess! There was no way to avoid the sauerkraut; you couldn't pick it off the neck bones and set it on the plate because of the smaller, itty bitty pieces you could never get to. To this day, I've never had a Reuben or a hot dog New York-style, and the only pierogi I'll eat are cheese and potato.

What say you? Have a food nightmare to share?

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I agree! Plus it is getting murderously difficult these days to find an angry German. As far as horrible I have only one word. Carp!!! A delicate dish served in many European households as we serve Turkey on Christman. A truly horror filled repast! Unless of course you love a bit of jelly like fish on your palate!

rosemerry said:

When my best friend's mom would make liver and onions. We were together enough at each others houses for this to be a problem. It would make me nauseous and I would actually have to vomit so she would let me off the hook and not eat it.

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I can relate. My mother seemed to have a love affair with organ meats, especially broiled liver. Revolting smell, repulsive to look at, I gagged every time I felt its loathsome texture going down my throat. And since I wasn't allowed to leave the table until it was all finished, I grabbed the opportunity of sticking a piece in my pocket every time my mother's back was turned. But then I had to figure out a way to explain my greasy pockets...

Woof said:

I can relate. My mother seemed to have a love affair with organ meats, especially broiled liver. Revolting smell, repulsive to look at, I gagged every time I felt its loathsome texture going down my throat. And since I wasn't allowed to leave the table until it was all finished, I grabbed the opportunity of sticking a piece in my pocket every time my mother's back was turned. But then I had to figure out a way to explain my greasy pockets...

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What is it with the liver and onions? Maybe that generation learned it in some secret handbook on successfully getting your kids to leave after graduation and not return...

Hey...

*mentally files idea away for when my kids near graduation*

ooh! We have liver and onions, chicken gizzards, saurbratten, and swiss steak.

I'd be eating good for a week.

Psst. You gonna eat that?

*shudders and shoves plate at A.M.*

I know lots of people adore it, but I abhor meat loaf. MEAT in a LOAF? Ew. Once my mother made me eat three big girl-scout bites before I could go out trick-or-treating, and I had a really cool costume. I've hated it ever since.

We're so weird. We love 'variety meats' (organ meats) and eat them whenever we can. For some reason, though, they've become expensive. The bones and saurkraut sound great! We eat carp, especially at Passover and in the summer.

Of course, we don't like badly prepared anything. I agree with the dislike of overcooked califlower. Eeeew.

I hate fresh lima beans, though. When I was a kid, when forced to eat them, I'd swallow them whole, with milk, like they were pills. Unless, of course, they ended up in the stomachs of the three dogs that lived under the kitchen table.

Cranky said:

Two words: Swiss steak.

Is that even real food? My dad would make it in one of those ridiculous electric skillets, and the smell...oh, there are no words.

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Actually Swiss steak can be quite good if it's properly prepared. I first brown a thick slab of inside round steak, then add onions, carrots, celery, stewed tomatoes, oregano, and a dash of pepper and slow cook it in a covered casserole in the oven at 300 degrees for 3 hours. Then I strain the vegetables and add to the gravy a little red wine and flour to thicken it. The meat always comes out very tender and delicious.

My mother used to make this thing she called "little meats", ugh. It was ground beef cooked into greasy obscurity with carrots and potatoes chopped into tiny pieces and all whirred together. It was so greasy and so gross. To this day, she STILL likes it. Thankfully I haven't had to stomach it in years, but it was nasty.

Two years ago I was asked if I wanted mashed potatoes, and I said yes. As the host is spooning them onto my plate, she revealed that she made them with cauliflower. It was too late for me to say no at that point, so I took a small bite just to be courteous, and they were GOOD!

Not potatoes with cauliflower added, but 100% cauliflower mashed and whipped until they resembled 'mashed potatoes'. I think she added a spoonful of sour cream and some butter

It sounds like most of these horrors were horrors of bad cooking. My mom was a good cook and only made us taste foods. If we hated it we didn't have to eat it. But that didn't let me off the hook entirely. She was a single mom and worked all day so we spent a lot of time at babysitters. When I was in second grade the babysitter made the lunches. I could not eat those sandwiches! I would truly throw up. So I'd leave them in my lunchbox (Monkees, for the record). But the "courtesy girls" -- sixth graders who sat in the classroom while the teachers had lunch in the teachers' lounge -- said I had to eat them. I took to throwing them away on my walk to school. I was tortured, TORTURED, by the guilt of having littered whenever I peeked into the boxwood hedge where I dumped the sandwiches.

I got over it eventually. I can eat sandwiches, even bologna.

But I can't eat a lima bean. It doesn't matter how it's cooked or where it's hidden. There is something in those things that turns my esophagus inside out. Gaaaaahhhhh!

Angela_785 said:

*shudders and shoves plate at A.M.*

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Thanks... Mmmm.

See growing up I wasnt' "forced" to eat anything. In my parent's house you either ate what was on the table or you went hungry. It's a side effect of being dirt poor.

That served me well when I joined the Army and wound up in Infantry/Special Operations units where real food is a luxury. We are sometimes called "snake eaters".

I've eaten things that would make a billy goat puke. Including said billy goat. I'm not picky. I'll pretty much eat anything that doesn't crawl off the plate and escape or doesn't manage to eat me first.

The upside is I'm rarely ever hungry and I don't have problems finding something to eat.


YMMV

Carrots. That's it, just carrots. I used to like them, then for some reason Mom went on a carrot binge and we had them at least once a week. Otherwise I can't think of much else Mom cooked that I didn't like.

Dad would make gizards and livers and such, but at breakfast, and completely optional eating.

My mom was and is a good cook, but as a child of the Depression, she thought it was a sin to throw anything away. So we ate leftovers of things that really should be eaten fresh, like fish. Also, hard boiled eggs refrigerated overnight to get flaccid and icy, served the next day for lunch.

My husband has introduced me to the idea of It's Okay To Toss It.

Three-bean salad.

Angela_785 said:

What is it with the liver and onions? Maybe that generation learned it in some secret handbook on successfully getting your kids to leave after graduation and not return...

Hey...

*mentally files idea away for when my kids near graduation*

Click to expand...

My mother was a BIG believer in the restorative, preventative powers of beef liver. OMG.

I refused to eat it. Refused, I say. To the point where I'd not eat rather than face THAT.

Mom swore to me if I didn't eat my liver as a kid, I'd be forced to eat it raw, ground up, when I grew up and was pregnant.

To this day, I firmly believe that's the #1 reason I have no children.