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Most hated meal growing up.

Anything with onions or bell peppers in it. My mother and grandmother would cook however they wanted and would tell me to pick them out. You can get by picking out the bell peppers, but onions contaminate everything into a nasty hurl inducing mess. So I, for example, would get the see the rest of the family having spaghetti with meat, sauce, etc while I just got a plate of cold noodles. No salmon patties, meat loaf, sloppy joes, tacos, etc for me. It's not that I just don't like the taste of onions---I don't---it's an instant gag reflex. Strangely, garlic and other peppers are fine though.

The worse actual meal: I had done a particularly hard and dirty job for my father. As a reward he took us all to Pizza Hut which was a very rare occurrence because he doesn't like pizza. He then proceeds to order supreme pizzas. Yup all I got was some pizza dough with what thin coating of sauce was left after scraping away the nasty bell pepper and onion infused cheese. He literally couldn't understand why I wasn't thrilled knowing full well I hate that @#$%.


Edited to add: Fruit Loops. My older brother and I were fed nothing but Fruit Loops for breakfast for many years until we both just stopped eating breakfast because we were so sick of them. I was 12. I didn't start back eating breakfast until my late 20's.
 

TexLaw

Fussy Evil Genius
It would be a combination of spaghetti (normally my mum did that very well) and the "need" to keep warm for hours (usually waiting for my dad and I to get home from fishing). Mum would keep the plate of pasta and sauce heated in the oven ... and those noodles that were not grossly overcooked would be dried out into a crispy mess.

Your story reminded me of a similar story told to me by one of my former co-workers. His father would get home from work between 6 and 7 every night, and then he would have a cocktail.

His dutiful mother would make dinner every night, and baked potatoes worked well. She would put them by 5:15 every night to make sure they were ready by 6:15, which was the earliest Dad might be done with his cocktail. Can't keep him waiting, right? If it was a later night, they could hold in the oven. Sometimes, they had to hold until 7:30--not the best potatoes at that point, but that's what you do. It was the '60s.
 

Tirvine

ancient grey sweatophile
My father loved weird stuff like kidneys, brains and scrambled eggs, liver, etc. I was not happy when I smelled kidneys cooking. Liver wasn't much better. Some offal was ok. I love sweetbreads. Overcooked spinach gave me a gag reflex.
 
When I was a kid I hated the smell of liver being cooked (still kinda grosses me out) so that was a turn off, and I remember one time my mum serving us spam once. The way it made the silence of the lambs slithering sound as it worked its way out of the tin and then unceremoniously plopped on the plate below was, well, a turn off. Having said that, I grew up in a household like many of you did when it came to food. We got the “There’s starving kids in Africa” thing the odd time we had to be convinced to finish our food which, thankfully for my parents, wasn’t all too often. After all one of my nicknames as a kid was the “garburator”.
 
Least favorite food growing up was spaghetti.

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Liver seems to be at the head of the pack and I concur. Also, we would often have leg of lamb for Sunday dinner. It was okay, sometimes even good. The horror was the reheated leftovers the next week. Chunks of lamb gristle and congealed fat either undercooked or burned in a Revere ware skillet.
 

Doc4

Stumpy in cold weather
Staff member
Like several others I hated the liver, bacon and onions back then. Strangely I love them now!

Gareth
Ditto.

My parents new better than to serve us kids liver, but I did try it once or twice and hated it.

But as an adult ... I love it. Especially with fried mushrooms.
 
LIVER!! My mom only tried to pull that sh@$ once! :thumbdown 🤣
Same here! Real steak was a luxury when I was a kid, so we had liver for dinner instead, or we used it to try and catch dinner. Cat fish happen to like liver where I don't! Now that I think of it, I hate eating cat fish as well! It wasn't until I was a teenager that I had the opportunity to eat real seafood instead of mud guppies! Night and day!
 

Chef455

Head Cheese Head Chef
I am always a shade flabbergasted at the dislike of liver. I often wonder if it is along the lines of brussels sprouts... frozen, mushy and with an aggressive flavor one is likely doing damage by serving a potential catastrophe.

The same could be said of liver. With such a strong flavor one could do damage to an average pallete in a hurry. And that is a shame. I used to bring in whole calf livers. Breaking them down was actually one of the more soothing things I could do in the kitchen. For the neophytes it would be kept simple. Lightly breaded in flour, Sautéed to medium, enhanced with a little bacon or pancetta, deglazed with red wine (creme de cassis if it's snowing out) served over garlic mashed potatoes and a veggie, topped with razor thin sliced fried onions. Sigh.

I can't remember a specific dish that was served to me growing up that I hated. But I will share a story. I went through a little phase where as my parents were cooking dinner I'd ask, as it was being presented, "Is that all we are having?" Could've been the main, veggie, or starch that hit the serving dish but that was my childish question. Alas, after a week or two of my inquiry of "is that all we're having?" mom set the peas down on the table and told me "Yep. That's all we're having." God rest her soul. I never asked it again.
 
...why ruin corn by adding lima beans just to call it succotash? Who invents this stuff, anyway?
Supposedly succotash came from Native Americans way back when the Colonists arrived. That was probably a mixture of broken corn kernels with shell beans, maybe with bits of preserved meat or vegetables added.

Lima beans came later. This mix was a cheap food during the Great Depression, maybe dressed up with a pie crust on top.
 
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