Funny: my parents are the exact opposite. Their steaks are always rare, if you want something else you have to leave it on the grill :D

I had my mother over for Sunday dinner. I promised her homemade chicken soup. I guess she figured it would be similar to the red and white cans. She was not expecting curry powder in her soup. :D

Oh well, Mrs BamaVol's peanut butter cookies put the twinkle back in her eye.

Tuna fish with mac and cheese, the horror

Or when we were running low on money - cutup hotdogs with ketchup.

It wasn't a main course, but a dessert. Apple pie! Seriously.

My mom found a recipe for apple pie that used green tomatoes instead of apples. Supposedly it was healthier than "regular" pie so she thought it would be the greatest thing in the world. From a distance, the finished product looked and smelled just like real apple pie but it didn't taste like apple pie nor was the texture right. It was slimy and stringy and had various tomato seeds in it. It was probably the only time I had to fight the gag reflex while eating dessert.

That's funny because I'm guessing that it took more sugar to make tomatoes taste like a dessert than it did apples.

I wonder if anyone here ever had the mock apple pie made with Ritz crackers. I never did - sounds awful. I'm guessing it was a depression thing?

I've had it and it's good - depending on who makes it.

And yet a (savory) tomato pie is a wonderful thing! But not as a substitute for apple pie...no.

My mother was an excellent cook. Unfortunately, over the course of the years, she felt the need to start lightening things up because "everyone's dieting." So meals had all fats, sugars, etc removed. Now while some things were really good there were some that were pretty much inedible. Like "pizza minestra" which is greens sautéed in oil & garlic, served over polenta. Except that these greens were boiled, served over a "polenta' made as dry as sand with nothing but plain water.

Also, aside from fresh basil (thrown whole into the sauce...leaves, stem, flowers) or dried oregano there was NO seasoning used. Except for vegetable bouillon cubes. Because salt was bad. I tried explaining to my mother that the bouillon had more sodium than salt but it didn't matter.

One of her most memorable creations was "diet" cream puffs. Basically homemade choux pastry shells filled with plain, unflavored yogurt and whole grapes. You didn't need to sweeten the filling with anything because "the fruit was sweet enough." It was indescribable, like the house of horrors "eyeballs in slime." You would bite into them expecting a cream puff but end up experiencing some sort of horrible, cruel, sour trick with the occasional squishy lump thrown in.

Of course once I was cooking for myself and learned that you could use things like butter and oil when you cooked I gained about an entire additional person in weight so maybe there was something to her "diet" cooking? (especially if you couldn't manage to eat it.)

I gagged just reading that description!

Yogurt with fruit. How bad can it be? Though if you were expecting a cream puff.....:D

I think that was what topped it. The expectation of enjoying a cream puff but the reality being some sort of cruel hoax. It might not have been as horrifying if it was a bowl of yogurt and fruit...you have an idea of what to expect.

Plus the whole grapes in yogurt thing really did look gross.

my mum's worst, yet strangely best, meal is toad in the hole as it ends up being a loaf of bread with sausages in it...

Liver and onions.

Now, however, I do like a liver appetizer.

Especially if from the goose. :)

Worst meals would be venison and fried green tomatoes (we were in Pennsylvania), not necessarily at the same time. I still won't eat either of those things today.

The worst I can remember was a meatloaf that somehow ended up with two raw eggs in the middle.