Since someone mentioned tuna casserole, our mom made it all of the time with macaroni, canned tuna, peas, potato chips, and cream of mushroom soup (campbell's). She also used cream of mush for green bean casserole with fried onion bits on top, and any other dish that needed a cream base. I had blocked much of this from my memory...thanks guys, LOL. The upshot is that meals were always a family affair, and we kids become better cooks because of them. One thing she always did for Thanksgiving that I still do today is to take that can of cranberry sauce out of the fridge and decant that sucker with all of the Wisconsin flair I can muster for my guests. The ridges from the can are an important culinary aesthetic, IMO.

So Thanksgiving dinner was pretty good this year except my Mother somehow managed to really screw up the mashed potatoes. They were incredibly lumpy and it felt like there was raw potato in them. Who does that?

I'm a horrible eater, but what really got me as a kid, is my mom loves onions, and I hate em, she'd put them in in meatballs, meatloaf, chili, spaghetti...all items I enjoy but would be ruined by onions.

In my house, pigs in a blanket were not hot dogs or sausage wrapped in a pastry, but halupki (cooked cabbage, wrapped around cooked ground meat--hamburger, pork, or a mixture of both and rice, and baked in tomato sauce).

Miss BamaVol was at a holiday party last week and tells me one of her co-workers made a potato salad without cooking the potatoes. yikes!

Must be a trend. I reported the same thing seven or eight posts up. Yuck

Bingo. The cabbage was the blanket.

We call those cabbage rolls. Just made a batch last week.
Oh wait. The meat is raw when mixed with the rice and rolled into the cabbage leaf in ours...

I actually fine tuned my mothers cooking i told her when it was bad and why and now most of the time the food is great!

It's been ages since I've made them--I guess it is uncooked, and cooks when you bake it.

Do you suppose someone is doing this on purpose? Raw foods movement? She didn't ask who made it, didn't want to embarrass the person. Just spit it out and moved on.

In my house growing up we had two polar opposites in cooking methods.

My father was always a great cook and made wonderful chili, stews, fried chicken, beans and cornbread, mexican food, and lots of other dishes. We looked forward to his cooking and ate well those nights.

My mother on the other hand could best be described as "inventive" with a side of forgetful in her cooking. She was always trying to use some type of expired goods in the meals she was fixing. I can remember many times my mom would try to make some form of fusion between two recipes and fail, to my misfortune at the dinner table.

The one my wife remembers best is my mother's "leftover stew." This was not my fathers stew that had been leftover and would almost get better with age. This was various leftovers from around the fridge that my mother had combined into a stew..... That possibly could have been fine, but on further inspection of the stew it was discovered that it included absolutely everything from the fridge including cheese and a cherry pie.


My wife had it even worse that I did since neither of her parents were good cooks. When we met she had a very small selection of "safe" foods that she would eat which mostly consisted of chef-boyardee and breakfast cereal (never at the same time).

My most memorable meal with my MIL consisted of turkey loaf (some form of store bought reconstituted "turkey" in a loaf shape smothered in gravy), canned corn, canned grean beans, and blueberry muffins made from a box. This meal could have just been a low point in food for a while until I discovered that my MIL had found a way to remove the non-stick coating from the muffin pan using only Pam (a non-stick cooking spray) and box muffins.

A typical meal with my FIL consisted of chicken tenders, canned peas, mashed potatoes from scratch, and kool-aid. The thing that made this a unique meal is his method of cooking the chicken. This includes taking the chicken and putting it in a pan filled with 2 inches of water and effectively boiling it in the oven until it was cooked. This basically created "protein strips" with no seasoning or flavor. This was then coated with ketchup, barbecue, or other sauce and was my wife's favorite meal either parent would make at home.

That. Is an abomination.

I think I'd rather go hungry.

No idea. That's pretty much what we did

In fairness to my mother, whom I love dearly, I must point out that she could bake like nobody else. Everything was from scratch and the freezer was filled to overflowing with homemade cookies the likes of which I haven't encountered elsewhere.

My favorites:

Chocolate Bread Pudding
Christmas cookies with a chocolate mint hidden inside
Pecan Sandies
Flaky Glazed Twists (can't really describe)
Italian Cookies frosted and topped with crushed peppermint
English Apple Pie (not a pie and tasted like walnuts)

Holiday meals might be humdrum but there were always a half dozen pies for dessert.

My dad was 5'7 and easily 250 lbs. She knew what made him happy.