This deserves its own thread.

My dad really liked his mom's meat loaf. So my mom did what she could to give my dad meat loaf. Sort of.

See, mom was a free spirit in the kitchen and decided that meat loaf was too bourgoisie, and we didn't have a loaf pan anyway, so she made do with the muffin pan for her meat-loafy creation.

Then she decided that all fine cooking has a sauce, so she did up something in the barbeque vein, combining ketchup and brown sugar for a sweet-savory sauce.

And I present to you: Meat Muffins, with a brown sugar-ketchup sauce.

So, what classics have you banished from your household?

I'm looking forward to the responses in this thread since similar ones in the past have left me with tears streaming down my face from laughter.

However, I honest-to-goodness can't contribute. My mother had a limited repertoire (not Monday=meatloaf, Tuesday=hotdogs limited) and was not a "gourmet" cook, but she understood basic seasoning and didn't overcook food. Except for foods that we didn't like at all (eg. beets for my father, cooked carrots for me), we didn't object to my mother's cooking. I guess I was lucky.

Anxiously awaiting the recipes.

Actually, bad food didn't make an appearance in our house until mom died. Dad's bad food was at least an attempt to keep us fed, so credit to him for that. Over time, we found out that we did like some of the dishes he created once we gave some input and we all tinkered with the recipe (Creole chicken stew) but then he married the stepmonster. Terrible cook, dreadful woman.

Her favorites?

Tuna Casserole. In all it's variations, but particularly the one made with potato chips. Salt, sodium and more salt. Ugh.

She also made some sort of horrific sauce in which to simmer pork chops. Sweet, sour, and utterly disgusting. (and I'm generally a fan of sweet and sour.)

For roast beef, she'd drown a perfectly good eye of round in worcestershire sauce, then over cook it.

Vegetable-wise, she loved overcooking broccoli, and served it whenever possible.

Fortunately she revealed her true nature after a while, and got way, way less $$$ than she was aiming for in the divorce.


(Yes, I'm still bitter. There's no excuse for bad food.)

oh, I forgot sweet-and-sour pork. That one fell under the Dear God No category. Not quite Meat Muffins, but still. At least the rice was okay.

Liver and onions--I wouldn't touch it with a 10-ft pole, but Mom fixed it 2 or 3 times a year because my Dad loved it. It always stunk-up the whole house whenever she fixed it.

Another classic, not my Mom's recipe, but a doozy from the school lunch room: Mexican Hats, which was a slice of bologna, topped with a dip of instant mashed potatoes, and crowned with a bit of oily cheese-product. These things always ended up in the trash can. I'm not sure why they even attempted this one as 90% of it went to waste. Another lunchroom classic: Fisherman's Surprise--a baked breaded fish cake topped with a dip of instant mashed potatoes and a ladle of creamed mixed vegetables on top. Horrific!

My mother has never cooked a bad thing, in my lifetime.
She cooked meals I didn't care for because they were my father's favorites, but I can't say I didn't like them because of taste, really.
She came to this country, from Germany, not knowing how to cook anything more than the simplest of dishes and now she can cook all of our favorite Creole, Italian, Chinese, Hungarian, Russian...American dishes.
She's an amazing cook.

I'm the one with the weird recipes.
Oh, and I make "meat muffins" because I'm the only one in the house who loves meatloaf and it's easy to pop them in the freezer and take out a single serving.
*LOL*
I do use ground turkey breast and oats and healthy things in them. I try. *LOL*

My Mom actually was a very good cook.

Only once did she create something less-than-stellar: she fermented some cheese in a shoebox using whole milk from our cow and some rennet.

After a couple months' ageing, it was hard as shoe-leather, green in coor... and smelled vile.

Our Dad made us eat it, though, so as not to hurt Mom's feelings.

My mother's recipe for spaghetti:

Campbell's tomato soup
overcooked elbow macaroni
ground beef

Seconds, anyone? hah
My brother and I requested real spaghetti sauce from a jar and tacos, etc. Her excuse was that my dad could not handle spicy food. She had no idea how to make it and/or was stubborn and didn't want to make the effort. No, she did not work - inside the home or out..but I digress.

We had home-made cream puffs, and crab imperial and freshly made pasta at my house when my sister and I were growing up. Mom was, and is, an amazing cook. As adults, we (my sister and I) were google eyed upon discovering that people ate stuff like pretzel salad (cream cheese, a pound of butter, strawberries, pretzels, sour cream etc...) and green bean cassarole (Campbells cream of mushroom soup, Durkees french fried onion rings, frozen matchstick cut green beans) and Pineapple Dream Mountain (a boxed angel food cake, a jar of sundae pineapple sauce, a container of cool whip, and maraschino cherries). We wanted to learn more of this wonderous new food from can or box, and of soft white bread in plastic bags.
And so we did. My sister,Nancy, and I have a repitoire of the good the bad and the ugly of gastronomical adventuredom.
We haul it all out for holidays and cook our little fingers off. I like the more gourmet items, and Nancy is the queen of
(and I am quoting my father from last Christmas) "green gelatenous matter with fruity substance interior". My sister (for all of her Katy-barr-the-door open minded eagerness with edibles) did in fact scream in fright the first time she cut into the gift of a home made red velvet cake. She was new to the south. My sister thought someone had bled and died into the desert. She made a bee line for the trash and (oh the humanity) thrust the entire confection into the air above the outside bin where it rained down like "a mauled animal" into the garbage.
Nancy laughs about this incident now....as she rolls egg dipped bread into sweetened coconut and crushed corn flakes for her famous Christmas morning "french toast".

Our mother's worst cooking accident was when an electric fan "walked" off of the shelf and into a bowl of strawberries. We were fortunate kids.

OMG I've just read of "fisherman's surprise". I've gotta tell my sister!!

Oh jeeze! I'm not saying a word of the Tomato soup spaghetti sauce.

My mom was a very good cook. But only slightly adventurous. She was strictly a midwestern, meat-and-potatoes kind of woman. And danged good at it. Ham? Beef? Pork roast? Gravy and dumplings? Chicken? She could do it all and it made your mouth water waiting for it to get served.

Probably her "worst" home-cooked stuff was "city chicken" - not because of her preparation, but just because it was just odd. And, fortunately, served rarely.

She also made a sheet cake that was godawful sweet - kind of a caramelly/vanilla thing with penuche frosting. She and my brother loved it. Dad and I didn't care for it at all.

Then there were the limburger cheese sandwiches. She and my dad loved them: limburger cheese + grape jelly + sliced onion + lightly toasted bread = two happy parents; two sons who ran screaming from the house. Fortunately, these were only made when limburger was available - usually once a year in the spring time.

None of those were bad though. Her truly bad meal (which she was proud of) were those Chung King meals in a can. Again, can't really blame her. The stuff wasn't very good, but it was novel for the time and about as adventurous as mom got.

When mom was in the hospital for surgery, dad's meals were the kind of thing to make you cry: pizza or chipped beef on toast. Do you know how horrible that gets after a couple of weeks? So horrible.

My mother occasionally makes this cabbage dish that just stinks the house and when I have tried to eat it, I just gag.

My mother was a not a good cook, bless her - just wasn't interested in food. I'm not sure how she came to have such a foodie daughter, unless it's just in reaction to my childhood experience.

I have no idea why a brilliant cook such as my mother could feel the need to do up Mock Cabbage Rolls , srsly , something gets lost in the translation , her proper ones are amazing.

Not too too many Dear God Noes during my time with my parents however I do get a bit edgy when she starts messing about with beet and fruit combos.

My mother had a genius for burning vegetables. All of our pots had a layer of char in them which could not be scoured off, no matter how much elbow grease and Brillo were expended in the effort.

Wait just a second. Where's the rest of the recipe? Surely that can't be it? Maybe she reduced the soup with a bit of pepper and basil? Please tell me there's more to the recipe.

I would be scarred for life were I presented with limberger and grape jelly sandwiches.



Quoted for hilarity. Although it's a head-scratcher - I have to work REALLY REALLY hard to burn vegetables to that degree. Kind of like, I have to have the carrots on simmer and then decide to mow the lawn for an hour or two.

present a child with just limburger , no need for the extres , the result is the same.

Nope.

You win Sharil , that is almost as grim as my cousin revealing to me that he hit upon hard times and did the spaghetti noodle catsup combo.

My mom was a very good cook when I was growing up, so I have no stories to tell. (Just about the only thing I objected to was when she would make use of leftovers by stirfrying them in a pan and throwing soy sauce on top, perhaps based on the assumption that if she transformed them into a new dish, they would no longer be "leftovers").

However, my bf has plenty of cooking stories involving his mother. (He often says that she used the smoke detector as a kitchen timer, thus explaining his preference for well-done everything -- e.g. steak blackened and as tough as shoe leather).

My favourite story of his concerns the time when she decided to make biscuits for the guy she was dating at the time (they lived in the South, and every good Southern woman should be able to make biscuits, right?) So she mixed up the dough, made the biscuits, popped them in the oven. When they were done, they looked and smelled fabulous -- all golden brown and fragrant.

My bf (a teenager at the time) picked one up... and then rapped it on the table. "Thunk, thunk, thunk." He put it back in the basket.

To his credit, mom's gentleman friend screwed up his determination, and consumed his share, and thanked her for making them (even though they were as heavy as lead cannonballs).

Much later on, after dinner, he comes back in the kitchen and says, "What did you do with those biscuits from dinner?"

"Oh those? I threw them out to the dogs in the yard," she said.

"Oh..." he said, a look of concern crossing his face. "You didn't hit them, did you?"

I can only imagine the effect that would have on a young paisana.

My Mom was a great cook, but she had a few dishes I didn't like, but they were some of my Dad's favorites.

She made her mashed potatoes from red potatoes, which are very firm, and she left lumps in them on purpose because that's how my Dad liked them.

She made something called "Puffy Onion Rings" from the Betty Crocker cookbook, the red one from the late sixties. A thick, slick white onion ring encased in a puffy pancake batter.

I ate the onion rings and was made to eat the mashed potatoes, but here are some of their favorites which they did not force on me, as I literally gagged at the smell and sight of them:

Brains
Cooked turnips
Breaded tomatoes (canned tomatoes with torn up bread in them)

Braaaaaaains!!! ewww.

When I read breaded tomatoes I thought of fried green tomatoes and my mouth watered. Once I read the description I thought - ewww.

you said turnips and I read it as cooked tripe , now there is a truly dire flashback

Hah, we had those, too! My mother called them stewed tomatoes, we kids called them stooged tomatoes.

Well, I think I would prefer cooked tripe over raw tripe.

But I think I like lima beans better than either.

My mother was a terrific cook, in the Midwestern farm tradition, so I don't really have any horror stories to tell about her meals. My MIL, now there are stories. As a newlywed, she literally knew nothing about planning or cooking a meal. Her 2 favorite stories that she loves to tell about her cooking disasters:

In the post-war 1940's, she and my FIL were having some of his fraternity brothers over for dinner. Someone told her to do a roast with potatoes and carrots - "Nothing to it," they said, "just throw it all in a dutch oven and cook it for an hour or so. Take it out of the oven and it's ready to serve." Details like peeling or cutting the potatoes into chunks, cutting the tops off the carrots or browning the meat first were not mentioned. Apparently the presentation caused quite a sensation.

At a different dinner party she thought it would make a colorful salad to hollow out whole tomatoes and fill the cavity with canned fruit cocktail.

************
(Hoos - send me that caramel-vanilla cake recipe. You had me at penuche! )

************

Yes, Thomas, fried green tomatoes are a whole other story! My husband and I both grew up on these and we both love them. We grow tomatoes and I catch my husband hungrily eyeing the green ones every year. (He hates ripe ones.)

I usually get more green ones toward the end of the season when I bring all the green ones in before the first frost. Some I ripen, and the rest get rolled in egg, milk, and flour and sometimes cornmeal for extra crunch, then fried.

Thomas, I explained what breaded tomatoes were so everyone would understand that this is not something good! LOL

isabella, this must be a dish from generations past.

A, those stories had me laughing out loud! esp the fruit cocktail in the tomatoes!

A as in Apple - I don't have that recipe and mom's no longer with us. She used to have a recipe box and I'll rifle through it next time I'm home. It was a special cake, too. Not vanilla or white cake; not a spice cake - but more along those lines. It definitely wasn't carrot cake. But it was rich - one little 3x3 square was more than enough for my dad or me. My mom and brother would finish off the entire sheet over a few days, though.

Your MIL sounds terrific - people who can tell stories about themselves, and maintain some humor about it, seem to be rarer and rarer! I love those stories. The cocktail fruit in a tomato is priceless.

smelka, I never had tripe. It doesn't sound very appealing, though!

Here are other treats favored by my Dad: Squrrel heads, including the brain, and bread and milk stirred up together in a glass.

We didn't mind them, perhaps because they had a low char factor.

My mother's meatloaf was never a favorite, to say the least. She tried to doctor it up every which way, but when we heard we were having meatloaf for dinner, we'd want to cry. She didn't even like her meatloaf, but told me (later on in my life) that she felt that she should make a meatloaf every now and then.

Other than that, she's a pretty good cook. Her baking is her strong suit (as is mine).

Waaaaaay back in the 60's my mom was a pretty good cook, especially considering the fact she had to cook everything on the stove top or in an electric skillet (our oven was broke, and for some reason, never fixed.) We lived on a potato farm and also raised cows, so beef & potatoes were our staple. Nobody, but nobody, could fry up a pan of potatoes like my mom could - perfection!

But, I digress...this topic is about GROSS food! Every now and then my mom cooked liver (which is probably what stunted my growth way back then.) Other than having to eat the liver, I was very lucky when it came to food.

Now my FIL (who was a wonderful man,) is another story. He used to cook something called Ring Liver Pudding, until my MIL literally forbade him to do it (or only if she was going to be gone for a day or two!) When it comes to stinking up a house, cabbage can't hold a candle to ring liver pudding...

By the way, those "Mexican Hats" truly sound like an abominattion - they get my vote...ick!!

I just had a memory from my youth , nothing horrid but cute ....

My mum was an immigrant and for the longest time stuck to her tried and true recipes , giving the food the locals ate the hairy eyeball ( she thought it was all too too processed , she could have been spot on come think of it). After a while she caved into pressure from my bro and myself and "went native". It was kind of cute too see her bang out what , I am sure in her mind was odd exotic cuisine ( yeah , flip that in your mind , tuna casserole , hot dogs , hamburgers, meat loaf to name a few).

"Squrrel heads, including the brain"

OK, that's it!!! May I be excused from the table, please?

I think at one point this link was posted here, but in case you didn't see it then (or you did but once just wasn't enough,) or if you just long for the "good 'ol days," check out some of these recipes from The Gallery of Regrettable Food:

http://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/knudsen2/index.html

nubs, I just realized I accidently called you "smelka". Sorry! No offense to the real smelka, of course.

I'm a "nubs" too - it's getting confusing around here, lol!!

My mother wasn't a good cook, but she wasn't awful in the horrific ways that I'm reading on this thread . . . there were some nights we got canned baked beans mixed with hamburger and seasoned with a dry packet of Liptons Onion Soup, but that's about as bad as it ever got.

Campbell's Tomato Soup! As spaghetti sauce!!! Oh, the humanity . . .

Okay, I had tripe for the very first time two years ago at a terrific Italian restaurant in Los Angeles that specialized in traditional Italian cuisine.

It was really good! Really. Fer reals. Srsly.

Hello, nubka, nubs!

I don't mind if Smelka doesn't , heck I think I got called Cathleen the other day as well , no biggie

Classic Recipe from Mom

Get a cheap chuck roast from Kroger.

Cut up some boiling potatoes that have been in the refrigerator for a month. Discard the ones that are too green.

Peel the root-hairs off the carrots. Discard the ones that are too flexible to peel.

Pull the emerging root off the lone remaining onion in the pantry.

Break a bay leaf in half. Put the other half back in the McCormick's bottle.

Add lots of Morton's salt and one-quarter teaspoon of pepper.

Combine in a pressure cooker with tap water halfway up the meat.

Pressure-cook on "High" until everything is gelatinous and gray.

Bon appetit!

The only bad food I ever had was my mother-in-law's, she made the worst tuna casserole ever, ugh. Nothing but canned tuna, cream of mushroom soup and canned peas. Ugh, major salt fest. Also hated her brains and scrambled eggs she used to serve up for breakfast.

I've been getting a kick out of this thread, sort of regretting I haven't any memories of appalling foodstuffs to contribute. My maternal grandmother was Mexican/Native American and trained as a chef at the Waldorf Astoria. She later owned a restaurant and a catering business. My mother, stepfather (a professional restaurant manager with chef ability) and my grandfather all were great cooks with individual flair. So we were all picky and the only time I got to sample abominations like tuna casserole with potato chips, shoeleather tough lamb chops and Campbell's Tomato Soup as a sauce were when I visited friends.

Mrs. V, what are Mock Cabbage Rolls? Why would somebody want to mock cabbage rolls?

Lawks , count yer blessings.

with mock cabbage rolls one goes to all the bother of making sauce , preparing meat and rice as per , cept instead of stuffing the nice big cabbage leaves , its all tossed into one casserole.

In answer to your question , I know not why