Stuff Your Mother Never Made You

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Casseroles.....

....Were something else Mom didn't do. I don't think they appealed to her, and they almost certainly wouldn't have appealed to my Dad.

Which was funny in a way, because his Mom, my sainted grandmother Mama Mac, slung a mean casserole, a habit she'd picked up after her son left home.

She made one I still make today - it's raw rice, sliced onions, sauteed hamburger, sliced celery, sliced carrots, canned tomatoes, and tomato juice, all layered in a ginormous casserole dish. Cooks up into the most savory thing you can imagine, and it's actually quite reasonably healthy if you stick to the leaner grades of hamburger, drained well after sauteeing.
 
What a great thread...

My mother and father are both very good cooks. I am from a family of seven kids and pretty much everything that served growing up was made from scratch using produce that was in season. (Basically because they could get large quantities of it and it was inexpensive.) We never were short on food but casseroles and other meals that could easily feed a bunch were common. They never made creamed or fried foods and packaged meals were non-existent in the cabinets.

Things we never had:
1. Real grilled cheese sandwiches. Mom would take sliced sourdough bread, toast it then put cheddar cheese over the top and broil it until melted. When I got to Jr. High where we had a cafeteria with real grilled cheese (butter on both sides, then grilled) I was in heaven. Sheer ecstasy being able to get fried (not baked) fries or tater tots on the side.

2. Rice-a-Roni or any of the Helper (Hamburger, Tuna, etc.) products. Mom had many of her own casseroles that were tasty.

3. Sweetened cereals. We only had thing like Cheerios, Corn Flakes, etc. I loved Lucky Charms and Trix and always begged to get a box. They wouldn't buy them because of the added sugar. (Smart to engrain that habit into your kids. I don't buy them today.)

4. Frozen dinners. Mom made many of her own frozen casseroles that were quite tasty.

5. Hostess or Zinger products. Sometimes my Grandparents would bring them as a treat. It was always a let down when you'd get home after school, run to the refrigerator (box was kept on top), grab the box only to find it was empty because my siblings had already scarfed them down.

Bob
 
Kevin,

Your post about the rabbit for dinner prompted me to remember this scene from the 1956 movie "GIANT".  I think you'll love it.

 
Que Sera Sera

To this day I've never tasted Kraft mac and cheese. Like you, nothing came out of a box. My mother is 87 and she just didn't get into quick foods. In 1970 Sunday nights, we started watching The Doris Day Show. Since the show was set in San Fran, Rice-A-Roni commercials would pop up. I would run through the house singing que sera sera. When I wasn't doing that I was Endora and trying to cast spells. No wonder no one was surprised when I asked from Santa and got an EZ Bake oven. Anyway, I begged and pleaded with Mama for a box of Rice-A-Roni. To this day I love it!!!
 
Ye Gods.

"To this day I've never tasted Kraft mac and cheese."

I think you should rectify this situation as soon as you possibly can. Get the classic blue-and-yellow box where the directions call for butter and milk to be added.

If you thought Rice-A-Roni was fun....
 
Great Discussion

No one in the collection of females that I grew up with could really cook. We always had plenty but ...
As has been said, open the can and then boil for another 30 min. Gray lamb. Pork chops that you could drive nails with. Many of us know the routine. One thing was great cakes both my Mother and my Grandmother did a great job on cakes. Also, my Grandmother did a good job with fish. My Uncle had a boat and we had a lot of friends with private and commercial boats so we had a lot of fish. Mostly baked. And then there was lobster. A friend of my Mother would call and say that her husband just got back from a fishing trip and come get the lobsters. Always wonderful. As I move away I learned that asparagus is really tasty and not limp, pork is wonderful and not rock like, roasts are rare, etc. The end result was whenever I was in Cape May I had the entire family at my house and the question was always: 'Where did you learn to cook like that?' My answer was: 'Self Defense'. My Mother always said that I got it from a great aunt that was supposedly a fantastic cook.
Harry
 
Growing up, my mother was an excellent Neapolitan cook and was not a supporter of any prepared foods. Being Italian, she felt they were not healthful and that they were more expensive than what she could produce - and also being fairly lower income, she didn't have a lot of extra dough to spend on prepared foods. However, she taught us to eat mostly anything except liver, tripe any other organ meats as well as lamb and rabbit. Those were all things she had to endure as a child of the depression and she simply wouldn't eat them. In her defense, she followed what is now considered the Mediterranean diet - lots of beans, lentils and vegetables, some fish and meat (how many kids ate and liked broccoli rabe, artichokes, escarole, chick peas and cardoons?). Even living in Brooklyn, we had fairly reliable access to fresh vegetables - with the fruit/vegetable guy coming around every few days well into the late 1960s. The struggle for her was my father who was from American born parents so was used to a more meat and potatoes diet. He wouldn't eat what he called depression food (pasta &chick peas, lentils and rice, frittatas, escarole and beans, etc...). So meals were an adventure.
When she went back to work, she did cave in to a few convenience items. Yes, Rice-A-Roni was one of them (though I hated it), Lipton Onion Soup (for cooking pork chops and brisket) and occasionally the canned teriyaki or chow mein preparations. Well, it was the 70's...
 
We never had corn on the cob or sweetcorn as my mum didn't like it, whist it is one of my favourites. We also never had sardines or pilchards but that was because my dad was given them so often as a child he vowed never to have them in his own home. I don't think I ever had rice or pasta as part of a main course until I started doing my own cooking. Such things would have been classed as "foreign muck", though we did sometimes have rice pudding as a dessert. I used to add a dollop of home made blackcurrant jam to my rice pudding then get shouted at if I stirred it up and it turned grey!
 
When she felt like it,

my Ma was a fabulous cook, so my sister and I didn't miss much. We considered some boxed things to be school night items, for Ma taught....

For a while, she had a heavy flirtation with Betty Crocker potato mixes. We had Rice-A-Roni, only the Beef flavor, once a month.

However, most weekends she cooked from scratch. That is, when she wasn't testing recipes for various classes. If we disapproved, she knew her students would as well.

I'm almost (almost!) embarrassed to say it, but Ma never made Hollandaise sauce often enough in my opinion.

Lawrence/Maytagbear
 
Uncle Ben's Rice.  Mama liked Comet Rice and she liked her rice cooked down all mushy and gooey but I've always enjoyed my rice fluffy.  I would ask Mama to make Uncle Ben's rice but she would look at me and ask"Wouldn't you really rather have good rice?"  Bless her heart.  Mama was a wonderful cook but I hated her sticky rice!  The only memory I have of my paternal grandmother was when I was probably 5 or 6.  We went to Brookhaven, Mississippi to visit my dad's mother and she and I walked downtown to the A&P Store where she bought a frozen apple pie!!!!!  I was so excited because Mama never bought a frozen or store pie...she always made hers from scratch.  I don't remember eating any of the frozen apple pie but I remember how excited I was when she bought it.   Mama told me she remembered when we came back from the A&P and how excited I was over a silly apple pie!  
 
It didn't take much....

Didn't take much to excite us then. My mother used Uncle Ben's exclusively. I remember her telling me her mother used Comet and something about rinsing it after it cooked. I can't believe I'm from the south and don't know what she was rferring to. I'll have to ask her the next time I see her. My best guess is it was to rinse off some of the starch so it wouldn't clump. Oh and I always wanted my mother to buy Redi-Whip and she wouldn't. She always made her own whipped cream in her Mixmaster. I didn't know how good I had it.
 
Since I am a bit younger, and grew up in the 80's and 90's, my mom worked on and off. Even when she was in between jobs, she didn't cook a whole lot. She did have her specality receipes that she would make, and did real well. To this day, I can't find a meatloaf as good as hers. She would also make a Hamburger pie(like sherpards pie, but with different stuff). My dad would also cook every now and then too. I do remember eating a lot of fast food and a lot of the boxed meals. I prefer the home cooked from scratch meals.

In regards to mac and cheese. As a kid I never really cared for it(homemade or the kraft). Then one time my grandmother fixed it and wouldn't let me leave till I ate everything. By the time I got done, I was gagging on it. To this day, I will gag if I even smell it. That is about the only thing I would refuse if I were eating at someone elses house.
 
Product Alert!

My friend worked as asst. mgr. for a supermarket here in the Garden State. Things to avoid: Uncle Ben's ANYTHING! This was the first stop for County Weights and Measures=ALWAYS short-weight! Next thing, those "fireplace logs" that are wax-infused. They deteriorate with shelf life. Again, short-weight.

Be enlightened!
 
Macaroni and cheese and rice!

Until I was grown I never knew there was any other kind of mac and cheese but Kraft Deluxe, as for rice my Mother used Uncle Bens and I hated it, I use old fashioned Comet, then add 1/2 stick butter and Carnation milk and cook and stir until its about like oatmeal!, if you want fluffy rice, you sure wont like that!!LOL!
 
Growing up in the 60s and 70s...

... prepared or packaged foods never made it into our house - with the exception of "baker's bread" (always the Marhoeffer brand and always white), condiments, Campbell's condensed soups, Jell-O, puddings, tomato paste, and spaghetti sauce (canned, though there were always packets of McCormick spaghetti sauce mix - for what my mother called "quickie spaghetti," made on days when, for whatever reason, time was tight).

My mother was an excellent cook, and having grown up on a farm during the depression ("we may have been poor, but we were never hungry," she oft times said), cooked from scratch. As a kid, we always had a large garden. Veggies were used fresh, in season, and canned or frozen through the rest of the year. Meats were bought on sale, then my father would portion them out and wrap them in white freezer paper, in preparation for storage in the "deep freeze" in the basement. Jelly was always homemade, and always elderberry. It wasn't until I began visiting friends, that I discovered that there were other varieties like grape and apple.

My mother cooked what she grew up with, and tailor made her repertoire to my father's tastes (steaks pan fried to a shoe leather consistency, no shellfish - "they eat dirt," a few Slovak specialties, and mashed potatoes at almost every meal). Again, I was in high school and eating at friends' houses when I realized that mashed potatoes were considered by some to be a treat. For variety, she would consult her collection of "Favorite Recipes of Home Economics Teachers" cookbooks - my grandmother was the cafeteria manager at the local junior high school, and no doubt purchased the books from home ec. teachers at the school, then gave them to my mother as gifts.

Even after my mother went back to work, a hot meal, from scratch, was always on the table in time for my father's arrival home from work, around 3:30 (I was shocked to learn that a lot of folks ate "late" - between 5:00 and 6:00 in the evening).

It wasn't until I was in college, that I "learned" how to eat things like shrimp, crab, the dreaded and dirty clams and oysters, and...liver and onions (something that I really enjoy, but only eat a couple times a year, and always at a restaurant.

Joe

[this post was last edited: 5/26/2013-09:48]
 
Mom was a great

basic cook and more so really a baker. She would venture into French with success her sole meuniere was deelish! But at her heart a terrific Scottish baker! Her shortbread would crumble like sawdust on your tongue and then suddenly melt away. Her apricot squares were the envy of my entire Dorm at BU. One of my favorite dishes ever was her "scottish stew" which really wasn't a stew at all. She would take the butt end of a roast of beef cube it , cube potatoes, cut carrots and onions and pile it all together in a glass baking dish DRY! Then cover and bake for an hour or more and when it came out WOW! The beef was double cooked ,had steamed and was tender and crunchy & all the vegetables had steamed together and everything had this wondrous flavor infused all through! 
 
Jon:

"She would take the butt end of a roast of beef cube it, cube potatoes, cut carrots and onions and pile it all together in a glass baking dish DRY!"

This is intriguing! Was your mother using the butt end of a roast that has already been cooked, or was she using it raw?

I can see how this would be very hearty and good. I'm willing to bet its origin was a magazine or newspaper recipe - this is exactly the kind of labor-saving thing that '50s housewives doted on.
 
I would be afraid that putting everything in a dry glass baking dish would result in it exploding. Liquids in recipes like this help distribute the heat. Since we have a lot of glass cookware I was always told to use some kind of water or broth when baking in those.
 
Mom is a very good cook and my dad as well, although my dad leans more towards fritters and desserts. There was always prepackaged/frozen foods at home as far as I can remember. Mom ran the office at my dads appliance store so sometimes she was just too tired to cook at the end of the day. A few times a week it was take out or home delivery for dinner. "Don't cook tonight call Chicken Delight!" was one of my favorites. I was always a real picky eater and would only eat it if I really liked it, sooooo, I ate a LOT of frozen foods. Breakfast was almost always cold cereal, Quisp, Alpha-Bits, Trix and so on. For lunch, I usually had a hero and a Pepsi or went out to get a slice of pizza. I never ate the cafeteria food at school, I couldn't stand that stench.  When I got home from All Saint's I'd fix myself a snack, a Buitoni Toaster Pizza (those thing's could give a lethal 3rd degree burn to your mouth if you weren't careful.
smiley-surprised.gif
) or a Kellogg's toaster pastry (cinnamon sugar) and a big glass of milk, then sit down to see what was Barnabas up to on Dark Shadows. Depending what was for dinner, I'd either have a Swanson's Kid's Meal, or a regular Swanson's or Morton's frozen entree with a Pepsi Light.
 
Kraft's Macaroni and Cheese wasn't made at my house until I was a teen, and Rice a Roni was never prepared, despite it being heavily advertised on TV back then. Mom always made/makes some great dishes, Manicotti, Lasagna, eggplant/veal parmigiano, spaghetti with ground beef or sausages to name a few, oh and tacos! Beef was the meat of choice back then, followed by chicken and pork. Fish was featured once in awhile, and of course during Lent.  Fast food was something we had a couple of times a month, We only had McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken and White Castle near my home in those days. For take out/delivery, chinese, pizza and Chicken Delight.
 
A side note on Rice A Roni, I started making it about 6 years ago (Creamy 4 Cheese) for hubby, it may not be appetizing to look at, but he sure likes it. I regularly send some boxes to Barcelona for my mother-in-law. She's so hooked! LOL!
 
Chicken Delight radio spot:
 
<iframe width="640" height="480" src="" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
 [this post was last edited: 5/26/2013-19:15]
 
call Chicken Delight

LOL..that ad brought back some memories...our family ordered from Chicken Delight - once or twice - there was place on Woodward, in Royal Oak, Mich. Thanks for posting.
 
I grew up in a family of cooks. My Mom is Mexican so of course we had plenty of Mexican dishes through out the month, and with my Dad being okie white, we also had an equal share of southern cooking. Even with all the good cooking in our house, we always had a pantry full of Stove Top, Rice a Roni and Pasta Roni. Vienna Sausages (my Dad's favorite) SPAM, mine and my brothers favorite along with Underwood Deviled Ham or Chicken Spread, and we ALWAYS had Kraft Mac and Cheese on hand. There was only one thing really my Dad absolutely HATED to see in the freezer and that was T.V. Dinners. My Mom on the other hand, loved T.V. dinners as did I. With my Dad being in construction, he would sometimes have to work far out of town and would be gone all week and come home on the weekends. So during the week, Mom and I would run off to the grocery store and get a few T.V. dinners. We always had so much fun cooking them up and eating them while watching a T.V. show or movie. Another thing that was a rarity in our home was fast food. We weren't totally deprived, but we knew when Dad was in a good mood when he'd say "I don't know about you, but I'm having a Big Mac attack." Mom and I would go to McDonalds with everyones orders and bring them home. Once in a while it would be "How about something from the Colonel?" Meaning a night of Kentucky Fried Chicken. But the real treat was when we went out for pizza, or on the majority of occasions we would pick it up and bring it home. This was before home delivery had become the norm. And it was always a combination from Round Table or Me N Ed's. For those of you not from or in California, Me N Ed's is THE place to go for pizza. People who once lived here then moved away and come back for a visit, always make Me N Ed's their first stop. But anyway's back to the subject, there was really no limit on what we had in our house when it came to food.
 
I know it's off topic but...

<span style="font-size: medium;">Does anyone remember these products?</span>

 

<span style="font-size: medium;">Cheeza, Wyler's Funny Face drink mixes, Morton's frozen cream pies and sticky buns, Patio Mini Tacos and assorted Tex-Mex TV dinners, Buitonni Toaster pizzas and square frozen pizza, Tree Tavern frozen pizza, Graham Cracko's King Vitamin, Quake cereals, Sunshine's Golden Fruit Biscuits and Lemon Coolers, Burry's Fudgetown cookies, Kellogg's Danish Go-Rounds, Nabisco's Toastettes, Hormel's Tamales...I better stop, I'm getting too nostalgic. </span>
 
One item that seldom appeared on our dinner table growing up was Hamburger Helper.  I like the pizza and bacon cheeseburger varieties, but not too often.
 
When I was in college I bought a box of Hamburger Helper "Beef Stroganoff" flavor.
I made it at my apt that night. This was about 1972 or so.

An hour after consuming it I couldn't believe what bad shape my stomach was in. By the next morning I was afraid to go more than 3 feet away from the toilet. The food didn't taste bad, but boy did it do a job on my stomach. I wonder what was in it that made me react that way? I've never had it again.
 
Whirlcool: sure sounds like you had bad hamburger or whatever you added...if it only happened once, you got tainted meat. Otherwise, spices, preservatives(fondly named Natural Flavors by manufacturers) and Godknowwhatelse probably attacked, if you never ate it again.

Ultramatic - omg, I just gained a 100 pounds reading your post, lol.

ovrphil++6-7-2013-14-58-44.jpg
 
I think it may have been the MSG in the Hamburger Helper. Later on I found that I was sensitive to it. So when we go to Chinese food places I only go to places that advertise that their food is MSG free. And a lot of the restaurants around here are like that.
 

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