I never had this food this growing up.................what would you add?

[Ottakee]

 

Water (Seriously, we drank Kool-Aid or Coke or Hawaiian punch. Being given only water to drink was seen as a punishment.)

 

 

 

SAME HERE.............seriously, I was given Coke in my baby bottle to settle my stomach---dr. suggested it.  I am STILL a popaholic.  I do now drink a lot more water than when I was a child/teen but still drink way more Coke and iced tea (only lightly sweetened) than I should.

 

I think that much of it was cost and lack of variety available when I was younger.  35-40 years ago the local stores didn't even carry many of these items.

 

 My mom was not adventurous and didn't like to cook either.  When I was a teen I was complaining about having to do dishes.  My mom said that if I would cook she would do the dishes..........YEAH.  I took her up on that and never looked back.  By 18 I was cooking for 126 residents in a local nursing home.

 

I think that the internet and more money for eating out helped.........along with going to college where I had friends from all over that introduced me to new stuff.  It wasn't until I was married that I had Chinese food.  I try to be adventurous with our kids too but sometimes cost is a factor for groceries.

[Remudamom]

Never had Mexican food until well into my 20s.  

 

[umsami]

 

 

 

otoh: I had *real* frangos.  what macy's is passing off as frangos, even locally, aren't the same.  (and what they're calling frangos in other markets is like saying a hershey bar is high quality chocolate, it's that bad.)

 

Frangos to me mean this chocolate we used to get at Marshall Field's (think that's where it was) when we visited Chicago.  Are we talking about the same thing? :)

[chiguirre]

We ate lots of Polish and Hungarian food mixed with Italian (for which I give a heart felt thank you to my grandmother's neighbors). My mom did take a Chinese cooking class and bought a rice cooker and wok when I was about 10, so that added to the variety.

 

TBH, I have never cooked stuffed cabbage, kielbasa and potatoes, stuffed peppers, cabbage soup or cabbage and noodles. I can't say I miss any of it at all. 

[gingersmom]

I think I had the opposite problem of everyone.

 

My mother hated to cook and what she made was awful. We ate out several times a week.

 

My siblings and I would be the only children at these fancy French restaurants and other places.

 

On the other hand till I left home around 18, we never had spaghetti or any other pasta dish at home.

 

No hamburger or hotdog buns either.

 

Most vegetables were out of a can or jar.

[SparklyUnicorn]

I'd need about an hour to type it out. My mother was an extremely simple cook who rarely tried anything new.  She never used stuff like fresh herbs.  She served canned vegetables for years and did eventually switch to frozen. She rarely used fresh. Maybe once in awhile lettuce and tomato for tacos or broccoli for a stir fry.  I'd say she had about 5 or 6 usual dishes she just rotated. 

 

 

 

 

[mellifera33]

Plain white rice. I thought that I hated rice because at home it was always minute rice drowned in butter and brown sugar. The first time I had real rice I was shocked. lol

[SparklyUnicorn]

So what are frangos?

 

 

[SparklyUnicorn]

Plain white rice. I thought that I hated rice because at home it was always minute rice drowned in butter and brown sugar. The first time I had real rice I was shocked. lol

 

Yep plain white rice growing up too (although not the minute stuff).  But I still hate rice.  Although I can tolerate well seasoned rice or rice mixed in with stuff.  It has no taste to me otherwise.

[Guest]

Spin off question: How did you end up cooking differently from your FOO?

For myslef, a lot of it was observing my MIL (before I was married). She kept a huge garden and I loved the delicious foods she would make with fresh tomatoes, herbs, corn, potatoes, squash, etc. also, as I was in my late teens/twenties, I was aware that my mother's canned/packaged/boxed style of "cooking" was probably not very nutritious. Once I had eaten great, fresh food, I could see how inferior the taste, appearance, smell - everything boxed food was.

[SparklyUnicorn]

Spin off question:  How did you end up cooking differently from your FOO?

 

A few things.  Mostly because when I stopped eating regularly at home I ended up trying a lot of different things and being very surprised at how good they were.  I remember the first time I tasted various herbs such as rosemary and dill.  I thought wow what is this stuff...it is so good.  Then when I went to some other countries I tried even more foods I had never tried and just loved them.  The first time I tried asparagus was from a can.  My dad would buy canned asparagus (my mother would never make it) and he'd spread it on toast.  It was absolutely vile tasting to me.  So first time I went to Germany I was served asparagus and was pretty nervous about having to choke it down.  But it was so freaking good because it was fresh.  So then after awhile I wanted to learn how to cook interesting foods.  So I taught myself a lot.  Then I got a small inheritance and decided to spend it on culinary school.  I learned a lot there.  Who knows maybe if I had discovered that passion sooner I would have gone to a culinary school to begin with.  And now it's a hobby of mine.  I try new dishes every single week.

[Mabelen]

Travelling and living abroad is what added to my repertoire although it also limited my ingredients as far as Spanish cooking goes. The main points still stand though, I still cook from scratch most of our meals as did my mom and there is plenty of variety in choice of meats, fish, seafood, legumes, fruits and vegetables.

[PrairieSong]

Sorry..posted this earlier in thread but thought it didn't post.

[PrairieSong]

So what are frangos?

I was wondering the same thing.

[SparklyUnicorn]

I thought of something else I never had growing up...brewed iced tea. My mother was a wonderful cook as I stated above but for some reason we always has Nestea. And Tang, lol. On our first date dh offered to make me hot chocolate but was out of cocoa so he offered me hot tea. He then discovered he was out of tea bags so he made me..hot Nestea! Only time I ever had that. Tried not to laugh but it was hard.

 

LOL!

 

That's something my dad made sometimes.  Real brewed iced tea.  I don't care for it though.  I love that Nestea stuff, but it's got way too much sugar so I don't drink it.  I have the diet stuff, but it doesn't taste as good to me.

[myfunnybunch]

There are so many thing I thought I didn't like that it turns out I do when they're cooked properly. 

 

 

YES.

 

Who knew that I actually LOVE beets???

 

My mother apologizes every so often for simply not knowing that fresh spinach is amazing, and that broccoli is best al dente instead of mushy, and you don't need to boil beets until they're dead. :D

 

But my mom grew up in a home in which basic fresh veggies were available because my grandmother was an avid gardener, but they were "cooked 'til dead." And my grandmother grew up during the Depression often eating mostly (sometimes only) corn mush because that was all they had so having even a basic variety of vegetables was a luxury to her, but she never learned how to cook them beyond making them sort of edible.

 

I wonder what my kids will say about my cooking!

[Slartibartfast]

We didn't ever really eat Asian food, Indian or Mediterranean. We did eat a lot of Mexican but I am from the South West.  

 

Now my parents order take-out from Thai places and such but there wasn't a lot of Thai around when I was a kid. 

 

We didn't have a lot of fresh vegetables. We had squash, tomatoes, green beans and such in the summer while everyone's gardens were putting out food but in the winter most of the vegetables were canned. I never buy canned vegetables, they are nasty! I do buy frozen vegetables. 

[Loowit]

My mom and dad are meat and potatoes people.  Most dinners were some sort of meat, potatoes cooked in some way, and a veggie.  My mom made almost everything from scratch, no boxed things like Hamburger Helper.  She grew up in a home with mostly convenience foods and hated it so she wanted to do things different.  She didn't cook middle eastern or Asian foods.  If we wanted those we went to a restaurant.  After I got married, DH was used to boxed type foods and I tried that out.  For our first couple years of marriage we did that, but I hated it.  So now we do things more like I did as a kid with homemade from scratch foods, but I try to add in some adventurous things at times.  We have to deal with food allergies though so that is limiting.

[Luckymama]

Both my parents were great cooks and bakers. My dad baked bread every week from the mid1970s until his death in 2011. They were both from California and grew up eating fresh and varied foods. I remember my grandmother shipping boxes of canned green chiles to us because they weren't available in NJ and PA during the 70s and early 80s :lol:

 

We didn't eat any tofu or edamame. We didn't have much fresh fish because it wasn't always available where we lived.

[Alice]

I hate to even say this, but I was in my early twenties before I realized one could make a stir-fry using all fresh ingredients, rather than opening a can of LaChoy and cooking up some Minute Rice. My MIL enlightened me, when she made some type of chicekn with stir-fried vegetables - fresh onions, peppers, celery and whatever else I don't now recall.

 

The Minute Rice comments are making me laugh. When I was engaged to dh he came to visit me and looked in my kitchen cabinets and discovered a box of Uncle Ben's. The look on his face was like he had discovered my secret heroin habit. He very seriously said "When we are married we cannot have this in our home." I laughed. He didn't. :)

 

The Chinese take their rice very seriously. (At least from his family's part of China they do.) We got a rice cooker for our wedding and I quickly learned to use it. 

[cjzimmer1]

My mom is not a good a cook but then she never really had the opportunity to learn as a child.  She was the second oldest of 13 and her family was so poor they never had a refrigerator(nor did they need one because there was no extra food to store).  Every night after work her dad would stop at the grocery store/butcher and pick up the cheapest thing available.  When he got home, her mom would cook it and then they would have supper at 8-9 every night.  Liver was usually on the menu several times a week. Things like spices were non-existent because they cost extra money.

 

So when she got married, she didn't know how to cook many things and then she could only do it in huge batches that they would then eat for the week.  My dad was not adventerous in eating so this suited him just fine.  So growing up, every meal was a meat, a microwaved frozen or fresh veggie (I'm thankfully she never resorted to canned veggies) and boiled russet potatoes (never mashed because dad didn't like them that way and usually unsalted because my mom would always forget to put salt in).  We did have variety in meat because my dad raised poultry so we had duck, goose, chicken and turkey.  Beef was rare except for a couple of years when my parents bought a 1/2 a beef.  So as much as I hated boiled potatoes, when my mom tried to be adventerous, the results were worse.  Think things like spaghetti squash and strawberries and cheese sauce, dried beef (the really salty stuff) with velvetta cheese or barbeque racoon.  I know she made something with rabbit too (my dad raised those as well), but I never ate it because I played with those rabbits from the time they were very little and I could never bring myself to eat them.

 

So almost everything I eat now other than basic chicken is different than what I ate as a kid.  My dad is always laughing at my food choices and wondered how I can stand such "strange" food when I eat pesto, or hummus or even brown rice. 

[creekland]

That's not the swiss steak I grew up with.  It was some kind of hamburger in gravy concoction. 

 

The swiss steak I love is tomato based.  Beef, flour and spices coating it, onions, green peppers, & celery, all cooked in tomatoes for quite some time (the steak longer than the rest to tenderize it).  It's served over mashed potatoes and tastes delicious.  Even my picky eater youngster loved it.

 

Spin off question:  How did you end up cooking differently from your FOO?

 

Exposure to others in college, travel and finding other "local" dishes, and a hubby who has said, "You know, I bet we can make something like this."

 

Couple that with the fact that my parents and grandparents have diabetes and heart issues and all the linkages between that and diet, so I was searching for better options for myself.

 

Then I learned I wasn't just choosing the better options for my health - they actually TASTE so much better.

 

And now I'm not so sure the health foods do all that much for one medically anyway, but they still TASTE better.

 

TBH, I have never cooked stuffed cabbage, kielbasa and potatoes, stuffed peppers, cabbage soup or cabbage and noodles. I can't say I miss any of it at all. 

 

My family and I all love kielbasa and potatoes & stuffed peppers (I've modified this recipe).  Cooked cabbage - unless sauerkraut - is disgusting (to me - hubby likes it).

[The Girls' Mom]

My branching out came partially from learning about how food impacted health.  The other part is just because dh and I both really, really love food and eating, and like to try new things.  Moving to metropolitan areas helped a lot too, because suddenly I had easy access to foods I never even knew existed.

 

 

[PrairieSong]

LOL!

 

That's something my dad made sometimes. Real brewed iced tea. I don't care for it though. I love that Nestea stuff, but it's got way too much sugar so I don't drink it. I have the diet stuff, but it doesn't taste as good to me.

Hmm..is all Nestea sweetened now, with either sugar or sugar substitute? Ours wasn't back in the day. It was plain and you had to add your own sugar.

[TrixieB]

Some foods I eat now that weren't included in Mom's home cooking:

 

broccoli

plantains

tofu

tempeh

black beans

plain yogurt (we only got flavored Yami brand in little cups)

avocados

stir-fried anything

any type of Asian or Asian-inspired food

kefir

mangos

red, yellow, and orange peppers

almond butter (or any nut butter except peanut butter, which isn't nut butter at all, but I digress)

hummus

fresh cooked beets (we had only pickled, from a can)

non-medium-cheddar cheese: feta, brie, jack, sharp cheddar, gouda, provolone, etc. etc. etc.

millet

quinoa

collard greens

kale