Scarring Family Meals

[Maggie Dodson]

I feel as if I have countless memories of terrible food prepared in my youth. My father's meatloaf: ground beef shaped around an onion and a red pepper (both un-chopped), smothered in ketchup and baked. His "famous chili mac": basically ground beef with every spice in the pantry, red peppers, Worchester sauce, macaroni and tomatoes. He would ask us not to give the left over to the dogs as it made them sick---little did he know the children were ill as well. : )

I don't prepare these foods for myself but I certainly look back on them with a strange mixture of love and hate. I feel as if they've made me who I am and in turn force me to make better meals. Does anyone else have funny stories or food memories from their youth?

[Alice Levitt]

I mentioned in here my disappointment when my mom cooked my favorite chicken in the microwave.

Even worse? When my dad got a smoker. Everything he cooked came out raw. He said it was bright pink and bleeding because that's how meat looks when it's been smoked. I still get queasy thinking about those several summers. He also had a way of panko crusting and deep frying chicken and somehow ending up with nothing but tendon.

That's why one of my brothers is a chef and the other pretty much doesn't eat anything.

[Haylley Johnson]

Wow Alice, that is unfortunate! I know the worst thing my family ever made was this thing called Butterfly Casserole. Sounds innocent, I know, but really, it was deadly. It was basically a cheese, spinach, and noodle casserole, but the spinach would always get super soggy. For a ten year old, soggy spinach is about the worst thing you could ever be forced to eat! I would literally sit at school and pray that we wouldn't have that for dinner. I lived in fear. Thankfully, we don't really make it anymore.

However, I recently told my mom how I was terrorized by this particular meal, and she was astounded that I disliked it so much. "What's not to like about lots of cheese and pasta? You can't even taste the spinach!" she said. I'm still skeptical, but I'm contemplating making it for myself (when I definitely won't feel obligated to eat it) because it might have been a little kid spinach phobia. I'll let you know how it goes. 

[Morganna]

My mother loved her liver and onions scorched.  I don't know why.  It was leathery and burnt and just yucky yuck yucky.  I hated liver and onions. Fortunately we didn't have them often.  Sometimes Daddy would make something else on those nights, but most of the time we had to just choke it down.  It's strange, really, because my mother was a really good cook for most things.  It's just how SHE liked her liver, I guess.

When I became an adult, I found myself having cravings for liver (well, what you get when you're a woman with chronic anemia I guess).  So I experimented with it, and found if I didn't SCORCH it, and put a little sage in the flour, and cooked with with BACON, it was DELICIOUS.   Now I love liver!

[Undead Molly]

I really didn't. My parents are extremely non-adventurous and repetitive eaters so we had the same meals every week, week after week, year after year. I think that's why I'm now so compulsive about constantly trying new things.

My mom has loads of scarring meal stories, though! She was raised on the family dairy farm where she and her siblings had to eat things like tripe and tongue regularly and they hated it. I spent a lot of time on the farm when I was growing up because my grandmother would babysit for me when my parents were at work, but by that time Gram had rejected offal in favor of Wonderbread, Miracle Whip, and Velveeta.