Here’s a wood-fired calzone I made with Chef Boyardee at my old job as a pizzamaker once, which has nothing to do with anything.
Hello, clowns!
So, my writing plans came to a screeching halt this week when my cell phone suddenly died.
I came to the sore realization that I use my phone for everything, including taking photos for Food is Stupid, looking up recipes, and even getting on Chicago public transit to get to work (I frequently used a feature on it that would let me swipe onto the bus or train).
As I’m stuck waiting for my new one to get here, I thought I’d try something I rarely do, which is start a conversation thread.
Davida and I were recently talking about our family’s worst and most unusual recipes. She thinks it’s hilarious that my mother used to make us sour cream and jelly sandwiches on toast (my sister thought they were an abomination), while I think it’s equally funny that everyone hated Davida’s mom’s recipe for broccoli cheese soup.
So introduce yourselves to each other and tell me: What’s the worst, most hated recipe in your family’s collection? Do you still make it? And if so, why?
I just might make your family’s recipe for the newsletter. And possibly do terrible things to it. Let’s talk.
Now that my new phone's here, I'll make two recipes from the comment thread, one that I pick, and one that Davida picks (that'll be for paid subscribers, so be sure to upgrade your subs if you want to read that one!).
They'll drop next week on the usual Tuesday and Friday timeslots, so keep an eye out on your inboxes, clowns!!!
My aunt once brought a fruitcake to Christmas dinner. Fruitcake is bad, but THIS was no ordinary fruitcake.
First of all, it was studded with chocolate chips and dusted with cocoa. Second of all, it was hard. Not crusty hard, not 'bad scone' hard, but hardtack hard. A serrated bread knife skipped off the surface like a file off of heat-treated steel.
We used a cleaver and a mallet to break off chunks, which were inedible, so my kid sister and I licked off the cocoa powder and pried out the chips until our mother made us stop. Hours later, in a bourbon haze, my father pitched it into the fireplace where it glowered, ever darker and ever harder, until we banked the coals and went to bed.
In the morning we swept the ash off of the coals and found the fruitcake merely diminished. My mother jabbed at it with a poker, dislodging a chunk of cinder and revealing virgin fruitcake beneath. We piled tinder over it and built another fire which burned for 14 hours or so until bedtime, when we banked the coals around it once more.
On the third day it was visibly smaller but still untouched at the heart so we repeated the process. On the morning of the fourth day it was finally gone after burning for three days and three nights, like a ghastly and inadequate WASP Hanukkah lamp. "A fucking Christmas miracle," as my mother proclaimed.
Notably, it was only the second-worst thing that my aunt inflicted upon us that year. The prize was apricot brandy that she made by putting a pound of dried apricots and a cup of sugar into a wide-mouth half-gallon plastic jug with a fifth of the cheapest vodka money could buy. Rest in Peace, Judith.
I mean...my worst family recipes are some serious gourmet shit next to Dannis' monstrosities, but I'll try...
My in-laws are an extremely flavor-averse bunch. No herbs and spices. No condiments on the table (not even salt and pepper). God forbid, NO hot sauce. Dry salad. That kind of thing.
For my wife's bridal shower, her mom gave her one of her favorite recipes - porcupine meatballs.
The recipe goes like this: 1 LB ground beef, 1/2 cup of rice, 2 cans of plain tomato sauce. Make meatballs with the beef and rice, pour over the sauce, and bake for 45 minutes.
That's it. No salt. No pepper. No onions. No garlic. No spices. No nothing. I almost fell asleep while eating it the first time. I've had hospital food with more flavor.
Not really a recipe, but when we were Mom would stick individual kernels of canned corn on her teeth during dinner and exclaim "LOOK AT MY CORN TEETH." She was confused why a mouthful of protruding yellow hell teeth was not something I found funny.
I once asked my mother to send over the recipe for “ham pie” because I hadn’t had it in a long time and I knew it had a unique taste but I couldn’t remember why. It turns out it was because it was using a whole pie crust, root vegetables, and cubed ham, you know a large pot pie, except the SAUCE WAS KETCHUP. My wife and I made it and I don’t know how I ever ate it growing up. Just disgusting. It should be pixelated like bad food in Legend of Zelda.
my dutch step-grandfather from north dakota used to make some nonsense called stirum ("steer-um"), which is essentially pancake salad? he would chop iceberg lettuce, fry up pancakes and spam and chop those up as well, then toss it all with a mayo-based dressing and drizzle it with pancake syrup. it's so gross and so wet. now that im an adult with the internet i think im discovering that he swerved off road with whatever the original recipe was meant to be.
Hello! My name is TD, I live in Queens, NY, and I enjoy the sometimes mild but also sometimes severe nausea this newsletter induces in me. My family's weirdest recipe was my Aunt's, at every holiday she'd bring a block of cream cheese covered in jarred shrimp cocktail and serve it with Wheat Thins. I loved having it as a child, but now as an adult, I think back on it with a certain level of horror.
My paternal grandmother was well-known by the family to be a terrible cook, but staying with my grandparents in their tiny house in Central Illinois a few times every year was a highlight of my childhood. It still makes me tear up a little when I taste something reminiscent of her cooking--the weird rubbery eggs from her triangular egg molds, mashed potatoes with white gravy, cheap thin steaks broiled to leather. Terrible as her food was, it's a direct spike to my nostalgia vein.
Maybe her most notorious dish was her spaghetti. She'd make "meatballs" by means of squishing plain ground beef with her clenched fist into knobby oblong shapes and fry them in a pan with some garlic before adding a can of tomato sauce and a little bit of dried herbs--basil, oregano, bay leaf, rosemary, nothing too odd. Then she'd add so much cinnamon that it would literally thicken the sauce into a texture approaching polenta and mix in the cooked spaghetti. Desiccated bits of "sauce" would cling in small clumps to those strands of pasta. It wasn't Italian but it wasn't Greek or anything else either. It was just Grandma's spaghetti and I've never had anything else like it.
Last time I visited my mom, I asked her to get out the recipe so I could photograph it. It's not in grandma's handwriting but my mom's but still stained and faded and almost unreadable. I haven't had that spaghetti for decades but I've been drooling over the thought of it, despite the fact that it was objectively awful. I will be making it soon.
My mom was a horrible cook. She knew it, and her cooking became a family joke. Salt and pepper? Never. Other seasonings? Ha, not in her kitchen. Out of all of the recipes that she made, her meatloaf was the worst. Picture two pounds of the cheapest ground beef available, mixed with one single envelope of French onion soup mix. Place the "loaf" in one of those classic metal roasting pans with a lid, and add some water in the pan, just for good measure. Bake until the meat is flabby and gray. Serve with ketchup, because that's the only way to choke it down, "buttered" noodles made with only a tablespoon of margarine, and green beans from a can that have been warmed up on the stove in their canned juice.
We had lots of terrible gems that would make appearances at my mom's family thankgivings. There's grandma's "grey stuffing" that one year went untouched, and to "teach everyone a lesson" grandpa took it home, put it in the freezer, and brought the same pan back next year.
The only one I know the recipe for, however, it "breaded tomatoes". You take a can of stewed tomatoes and mix it with crushed saltine crackers. That's it, that's the recipe. On the thanksgiving table, every, single, year.
My mom is a pretty terrible cook, but most of her food was just bland, unseasoned microwave vegetables. There were only a couple things that stood out to me growing up as uniquely terrible.
Barbecue Roast Chicken: mix equal parts Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ sauce and orange juice. Fill a Pyrex baking dish with the mixture up to a depth of about 1cm. Place 2 or 3 extra large chicken breasts in the dish; do not evenly coat with the sauce, make sure the tops stay dry. Bake at 375 for 90 minutes or until the chicken is too hard to cut with any knife in the house.
Zero Point Soup: from my mom's Weight Watchers days. Bring a few cartons of Swanson's low sodium chicken broth to a boil. Add in chopped zucchini, broccoli, carrots, and some frozen green peas. Boil for about 15 minutes until the vegetables are soft, then blend with an immersion blender until it looks like watery vomit. Serve with saltine crackers.
Iced Skim Milk: fill a large glass with ice. Pour skim milk over the top. Let sit at room temperature until a film of about 1/2 inch of water forms at the top. Serve.
My mom is actually a super good cook but she made a tuna noodle casserole I could never eat. Hot canned tuna is revolting. I never make the recipe, even though she made me a cookbook of handwritten recipes when I moved out of the house and included it. (I have a really wonderful mom.) I used to make the “Naked in The Woods” punch from that cookbook: 2 cans frozen limeade (or frozen whatever), 2 cans Miller Lite, 2 cans of vodka. That will fuck your ass up. A+ recipe.
My mother would buy the most expensive ground beef (i.e., no fat at all), shape it into a ball, cover it with salt (she kept a bowl of salt on the stove), and bake until very well done. Could not even cut it with a knife. Plus ketchup was forbidden at our table.
Long before my time, but my paternal great-grandmother was apparently an *astoundingly* bad cook. We have a letter from my grandfather when he was in boot camp in World War II writing home about how good the food was.
We're not talking, like, taking weird shortcuts because of Depression-era habits. We're talking shit like "she did not pluck chickens before cooking them". Which, come to think of it, might be one way to get a very crispy skin...
I got both my mom's and my grandma's recipe boxes after they died. My mom's is nothing outlandish, just a lot of "cut out of Working Woman magazine in 1989" type stuff combined with some genuinely good, if simple, recipes she occasionally made growing up.
My grandma's however is a treasure trove of mid-century modern cuisine, including one thing called "A Hot Treat of Crab Meat" that I have not actually gotten around to making...yet.
My mother had the best worst taste in all of the Ozarks. One specialty was to boil down RC cola until it had the consistency (and odor) of motor oil left in the crankcase of a 1936 Ford and pooooooour it over those graymeat minute steaks that no amount of overcooking could render chewable. And of course for Klass with a capital K special occasions, an aspic of congealed V8 impregnated by VegAll nuggets. And for every meal - every meal - she had a sliced raw onion on the table.
My sister *loves* cream cheese and jelly sandwiches. Also mayo and cheddar cheese on matzoh in the microwave for like 20 seconds -- a passover favorite but oh my god it's so gross. The oil just gets everywhere and the flavor is something I can only describe as beige.
I grew up vegetarian and my dad always used to make these little appetizer things that were fake bologna with cream cheese rolled around a gherkin. He'd cut them up into little slices and serve with a toothpick. I admit, I still kind of love them.
Me: What's the recipe for that hamburger rice casserole I used to refuse to eat? Dennis Lee is asking for the grossest family recipes.
[My mom was a big fan of the Pizzle]
Mom: 😳😳heck no
Me: It was hamburger and rice and cream of mushroom soup and ???
Mom: Okay uncle bens converted rice. 1 1/2 cups. I pound hamburger. Cream mushroom soup. Cream chicken soup. Lipton beefy onion soup mix. I cook the rice first and brown the hamburger. Add water as needed. It can get dry.
I should begin with one of my favorite 1950’s recipes, made by my mother. Her mother (my grandmother) was a wonderful cook and baker, using many old country products and techniques, so the only excuse I can find for my mother’s penchant for horrible and quick dishes is the fact that she was a product of her generation. One of fast, frozen, tasteles, yet convenient recipes and products. Who can forget those delicious, foil-flavored apple messes in the corner of a Swanson’s TV Dinner?
So. Let’s begin with our spice cabinet which contained the following “spices”: Salt (the fine Morton’s kind), fine McCormick’s Black Pepper, McCormick’s bottled Garlic Salt (fresh garlic? What was that?), McCormick’s Paprika (neither smoked, nor Hungarian), McCormick’s Oregano (pronounced “or-ay-GA-no”, and, lastly, an unrefrigerated can of Parmesan (pronounced “par-MEE-jee-uhn” Cheese. Now for a favorite childhood recipe (one of scads): “Homemade” Spaghetti Sauce:
In a 10” cast iron skillet, melt 1 Tbspn Crisco.
Add a pound o’ Ground Round and 1 chopped (“diced” was unknown in my mother’s kitchen) Onion. If feeling particularly festive, add 1 chopped green bell pepper (who knew these came in other colors?). To finish add 1 can Campbell’s Tomato Soup and a sprinkling of canned OreGAN-o and voila!! Serve on top of over-boiled dried spaghetti noodles (the only known pasta noodle in the universe). Wash down with a glass of pasteurized milk.
My parents used to make this "beef and cabbage casserole" which had a distinctive salty vinegary pepper profile, but imagine it still strangely bland and sickening at the same time. The smell of the dish made me sick to my stomach without fail, but it took me years to realize I didn't actually *have* to consume it. I guess when that's the only thing for dinner as a kid, you're always hungry (fast metabolism, really active kid, etc.), and you have it once a month for 12 years, you just think that feeling sick before eating something is normal.
On a separate note, I've been told my family recipe for a cheddar cheese and apple butter omelette is weird, and my mom loves fried bananas liver mush.
My mom is actually a great and creative cook, but as a kid sometimes she would get a little too creative, specifically with sandwiches. She would put sprouts in everything, and I remember a particular repeat sandwich with peanut butter, mayo, bananas, and alfalfa sprouts, which would get slimy by the time I unpacked my lunch.
Then again, her peanut butter and tuna was pretty good.
My grandmother makes “chili” with boiled hamburger meat, canned diced tomatoes, canned peas, huge chunks of white onion, and whichever canned beans she has in the pantry. No seasonings.
My paternal grandmother's approach to cooking more or less anything was to boil it into submission - her "speciality" which she'd make for my grandfather was tripe and onions cooked in milk until the tripe had all the texture and flavour (and indeed appearance) of an old mattress. Took me years to realize that tripe could actually be tasty.
(my father, in a sort of Stockholm Syndrome phenomenon, still likes his vegetables boiled into mush, any time we have a family meal we have to do his broccoli or sprouts or whatever separately or he will complain that they are "raw")
Microwaved chicken breasts. Just an expanse of unseasoned, unbrowned, overcooked white meat, with no sauce or anything. My parents are decent cooks. I have no idea why they insisted on making this. They were surprised to find out I didn't like it.
My mom once made something called "Million Dollar Spaghetti." It was from a community cookbook -- a church or possibly a Junior League, though we were not Junior League types. To the best of my recollection, it was spaghetti tossed with a jar of Ragu, a block of cream cheese and a big glop of sour cream. It was unpleasantly sticky. We immediately renamed it "Fifty-Cent Spaghetti."
I once tried to make an imitation of Mission Chinese's Salt Cod Fried Rice at home, without soaking the salt cod first. I ended up moving when all attempts to get the resulting stink out of my kitchen failed.
Oh, this barely counts as a “recipe,” but it seems to be unique to my mom: Fritos dipped in cottage cheese. Everyone outside of my family finds it revolting, but they are extremely wrong; it is 100% delicious. Just thinking of it now makes me hungry tbh.
My MIL makes her own phyllo dough, which is not only fine, but often quite good. Except that she uses it for pizza crust. This results in the outside of the pizza with no toppings being hard as a rock, almost unchewable, and the rest of the crust having the structural integrity of wet paper. Just so ideal for something you’re supposed to pick up and eat with your hands.
This isn't a recipe per se, but my family used to cook spinach for 20 FULL MINUTES...I used to gag trying to eat it lol but I love spinach now that I know what it's supposed to taste like.
One recipe that does stick out to me is my grandmothers cheese pie recipe. It was basically just cottage cheese and sugar. I had a crazy sweet tooth as a kid but this was the one dessert I didn't like.
I used to make this and bring it to lunch at school when I was maybe 7-10. I would take a saltine cracker, cut a circle of bologna into quarters and put on quarter of it on there, then a dollop of strawberry yogurt, then another cracker, and you have a sandwich that just about makes me hurl to describe to you. Sorry! I have no memory of inventing it but I think the credit/blame is on me.
My mother was raised in Michigan's Upper Peninsula - my dad (who was raised just across the river in Wisconsin) used to joke he could tell what day of the week it was by what her mother was cooking for dinner. Wednesdays were Salmon Patty night and as a child when we'd visit the family 'up nort'' I'd get subjected to this atrocity at least once. Basically, canned salmon mixed with breadcrumbs and egg until you can form patties, pan fry, serve with creamed peas (also ew). One of my aunts would be a saint and pick out the bones and skin from the slimy canned flesh, the other would not. I hated it so much to this day I refuse to eat cooked salmon, even freshly made.
My mom was vegetarian when I was growing up, so we had some gems, but the worst were all the veggie burger mixes she would make over the years. Just the mix and water, formed into a batter, griddled until dry again, then drowned in ketchup and Mayo and mustard and whatever else we could to hydrate the things again.
There's a 'salad' that we had during the holidays as kids, and which my mom insists on making for me every time I see her to this day...it is sweeter than any dessert I've ever enjoyed, and I couldn't eat more than a spoonful these days. It is basically this (https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/23148/cherry-fluff/), but she uses mandarin orange segments in place of the crushed pineapple
My MiL is not great at cooking, and one time I watched her make dinner: unseasoned boneless skinless breasts, in a skillet on low heat until the outside looks cooked, then dump a can of low fat, low sodium tortilla soup over top. Dinner served. I wasn't invited for dinner that night. Thank goodness.
I don't have a recipe, but for years (maybe even decades???), I thought I didn't like Cuban food because my mom made the world's driest arroz con pollo. Sometime in my 20s I realized that Cuban food is delicious, my mom is just a bad cook.
My Mom was in Diet Workshop for decades. They didn't make you buy food like a Weight Watchers; they were more of a support group. Overall, Mom was a great cook if basic, as there were 8 of us kids to feed. But her Diet Workshop recipe for lasagna featured cottage cheese as it's only cheese. It was THE NAST!! I don't have the recipe since sister Sue inherited Mom's recipe box, but that piece of paper which it was written on should be burned in the hottest flames of hell anyway, so...
As a kid, my mom would make this vegetable side dish somewhat frequently: one can of green beans, drained. Approx. 1/4 cup of Hidden Valley Ranch dressing. Stir. Put in freezer (yep) briefly to chill. Serve to your horrified children. Canned green beans are horrible and I never liked ranch dressing.
Orange spaghetti is what we called it. Pasta sauce made with onions, ground beef and . . . condensed tomato soup. Very sweet and very orange. Sorta like homemade spaghettiOs. It originated with my former step father's family who found more traditional sauce/gravy/ragu to be too "spicy." I sense that it may have been a real 1970s era recipe in the spirit of many other canned soup concoctions. I will say it wasn't exactly bad in the inedible sense, just deeply wrong and not at all what most people want or expect from a pasta dish.
It looked like baby shit, and there was nothing souffle about it. And I have no idea why it called for leaving a single garlic clove whole in the final dish. My mom would make like a 5 quart casserole of this every year at thanksgiving and we'd throw the whole thing out every year.
Broccoli Souffle
1 bunch broccoli,
2 tablespoons margarine
1 clove garlic, peeled and left whole
¼ cup cream
Add broccoli to boiling water and cook approximately 10 minutes.
Drain broccoli and put in a blender and process to a fine puree.
Melt the margarine with the whole garlic clove in a sauce pan. Add the broccoli puree
and salt and pepper to taste. Add the cream and stir to blend. Pour into casserole dish
Technicallly it is my husband’s family recipe, and I think it is actually somewhat common. It’s called Watergate salad, and it’s horrible, but I ate it every Thanksgiving because I loved his Nana. It’s mini marshmallows, canned mandarin oranges, some kind of crunchy nut, pistachio pudding, and I think Cool Whip combined. Horrendous. When I described it to my new Southern friend, she said it was a family favorite (ha).
As one of five children, my mom would mail it in on dinners sometimes. One I remember her making semi-regularly was what she called Girl Scout Spaghetti. It was basically a large can of Franco-American spaghetti and a large can of beef with barley soup. Sometimes she'd add more ground beef to spread it out.
I can remember a family trip gone awry where my parents snuck at least three of us children into the hotel and she cooked that on a hot plate in the room. Maybe we were more poor than I remember?
The first thing that comes to mind is tuna casserole. Base of crumbled up potato chips (bonus if you hoarded almost empty chip bags to amass enough pre-pulverized dregs). Middle layer of canned tuna. Top layer was “white sauce” which is just butter, flour, and milk if I recall correctly. Add some canned black olives too for *fun*. Bake in oven until heated.
Have not made it in ages but still sometimes request it when I’m visiting the parents.
there's this chinese dish called stinky tofu that my parents really like. it's like durian - great if you can ignore the smell, but you Cannot Ignore The Smell. i cannot describe its scent further than fecal and sweaty. i think dennis would probably get a kick out of it, though.
Now that my new phone's here, I'll make two recipes from the comment thread, one that I pick, and one that Davida picks (that'll be for paid subscribers, so be sure to upgrade your subs if you want to read that one!).
They'll drop next week on the usual Tuesday and Friday timeslots, so keep an eye out on your inboxes, clowns!!!
My aunt once brought a fruitcake to Christmas dinner. Fruitcake is bad, but THIS was no ordinary fruitcake.
First of all, it was studded with chocolate chips and dusted with cocoa. Second of all, it was hard. Not crusty hard, not 'bad scone' hard, but hardtack hard. A serrated bread knife skipped off the surface like a file off of heat-treated steel.
We used a cleaver and a mallet to break off chunks, which were inedible, so my kid sister and I licked off the cocoa powder and pried out the chips until our mother made us stop. Hours later, in a bourbon haze, my father pitched it into the fireplace where it glowered, ever darker and ever harder, until we banked the coals and went to bed.
In the morning we swept the ash off of the coals and found the fruitcake merely diminished. My mother jabbed at it with a poker, dislodging a chunk of cinder and revealing virgin fruitcake beneath. We piled tinder over it and built another fire which burned for 14 hours or so until bedtime, when we banked the coals around it once more.
On the third day it was visibly smaller but still untouched at the heart so we repeated the process. On the morning of the fourth day it was finally gone after burning for three days and three nights, like a ghastly and inadequate WASP Hanukkah lamp. "A fucking Christmas miracle," as my mother proclaimed.
Notably, it was only the second-worst thing that my aunt inflicted upon us that year. The prize was apricot brandy that she made by putting a pound of dried apricots and a cup of sugar into a wide-mouth half-gallon plastic jug with a fifth of the cheapest vodka money could buy. Rest in Peace, Judith.
I mean...my worst family recipes are some serious gourmet shit next to Dannis' monstrosities, but I'll try...
My in-laws are an extremely flavor-averse bunch. No herbs and spices. No condiments on the table (not even salt and pepper). God forbid, NO hot sauce. Dry salad. That kind of thing.
For my wife's bridal shower, her mom gave her one of her favorite recipes - porcupine meatballs.
The recipe goes like this: 1 LB ground beef, 1/2 cup of rice, 2 cans of plain tomato sauce. Make meatballs with the beef and rice, pour over the sauce, and bake for 45 minutes.
That's it. No salt. No pepper. No onions. No garlic. No spices. No nothing. I almost fell asleep while eating it the first time. I've had hospital food with more flavor.
Sigh, the things we do for love.
Not really a recipe, but when we were Mom would stick individual kernels of canned corn on her teeth during dinner and exclaim "LOOK AT MY CORN TEETH." She was confused why a mouthful of protruding yellow hell teeth was not something I found funny.
I once asked my mother to send over the recipe for “ham pie” because I hadn’t had it in a long time and I knew it had a unique taste but I couldn’t remember why. It turns out it was because it was using a whole pie crust, root vegetables, and cubed ham, you know a large pot pie, except the SAUCE WAS KETCHUP. My wife and I made it and I don’t know how I ever ate it growing up. Just disgusting. It should be pixelated like bad food in Legend of Zelda.
my dutch step-grandfather from north dakota used to make some nonsense called stirum ("steer-um"), which is essentially pancake salad? he would chop iceberg lettuce, fry up pancakes and spam and chop those up as well, then toss it all with a mayo-based dressing and drizzle it with pancake syrup. it's so gross and so wet. now that im an adult with the internet i think im discovering that he swerved off road with whatever the original recipe was meant to be.
Hello! My name is TD, I live in Queens, NY, and I enjoy the sometimes mild but also sometimes severe nausea this newsletter induces in me. My family's weirdest recipe was my Aunt's, at every holiday she'd bring a block of cream cheese covered in jarred shrimp cocktail and serve it with Wheat Thins. I loved having it as a child, but now as an adult, I think back on it with a certain level of horror.
My paternal grandmother was well-known by the family to be a terrible cook, but staying with my grandparents in their tiny house in Central Illinois a few times every year was a highlight of my childhood. It still makes me tear up a little when I taste something reminiscent of her cooking--the weird rubbery eggs from her triangular egg molds, mashed potatoes with white gravy, cheap thin steaks broiled to leather. Terrible as her food was, it's a direct spike to my nostalgia vein.
Maybe her most notorious dish was her spaghetti. She'd make "meatballs" by means of squishing plain ground beef with her clenched fist into knobby oblong shapes and fry them in a pan with some garlic before adding a can of tomato sauce and a little bit of dried herbs--basil, oregano, bay leaf, rosemary, nothing too odd. Then she'd add so much cinnamon that it would literally thicken the sauce into a texture approaching polenta and mix in the cooked spaghetti. Desiccated bits of "sauce" would cling in small clumps to those strands of pasta. It wasn't Italian but it wasn't Greek or anything else either. It was just Grandma's spaghetti and I've never had anything else like it.
Last time I visited my mom, I asked her to get out the recipe so I could photograph it. It's not in grandma's handwriting but my mom's but still stained and faded and almost unreadable. I haven't had that spaghetti for decades but I've been drooling over the thought of it, despite the fact that it was objectively awful. I will be making it soon.
My mom was a horrible cook. She knew it, and her cooking became a family joke. Salt and pepper? Never. Other seasonings? Ha, not in her kitchen. Out of all of the recipes that she made, her meatloaf was the worst. Picture two pounds of the cheapest ground beef available, mixed with one single envelope of French onion soup mix. Place the "loaf" in one of those classic metal roasting pans with a lid, and add some water in the pan, just for good measure. Bake until the meat is flabby and gray. Serve with ketchup, because that's the only way to choke it down, "buttered" noodles made with only a tablespoon of margarine, and green beans from a can that have been warmed up on the stove in their canned juice.
My mom is the reason I learned to cook. She worked three jobs, and she would make her go-to recipe when she was home around dinner time.
Creamed Tuna on Toast (or crusts)
Open a can of tuna - drain if you want to and dump it into a saucepan
Make some powdered milk - (Timesaver: pour powdered milk onto tuna and just add water)
Heat up to thicken (hopefully)
Meanwhile, open a can of green peas and heat them in the microwave so they get mushy
Toast the bread or crusts (Mom said the black part was flavor)
Plate the meal - toast, creamed tuna, topped by the colorful pale green peas.
Enjoy!
Oh, I almost forgot dessert:
Vanilla Ice Cream with Strawberry Jam
Mom always called it a "Protective Ice Flavor Layer" that somehow covered the ice cream.
Your Cinnamon Toast Bungholes almost cause me to pee my pants!
Unsure if you could even call it a recipe, but my mom used to just put plain hominy in a bowl and dole it out as a side
Just straight from the can
Not warmed
No seasoning
We had lots of terrible gems that would make appearances at my mom's family thankgivings. There's grandma's "grey stuffing" that one year went untouched, and to "teach everyone a lesson" grandpa took it home, put it in the freezer, and brought the same pan back next year.
The only one I know the recipe for, however, it "breaded tomatoes". You take a can of stewed tomatoes and mix it with crushed saltine crackers. That's it, that's the recipe. On the thanksgiving table, every, single, year.
My mom is a pretty terrible cook, but most of her food was just bland, unseasoned microwave vegetables. There were only a couple things that stood out to me growing up as uniquely terrible.
Barbecue Roast Chicken: mix equal parts Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ sauce and orange juice. Fill a Pyrex baking dish with the mixture up to a depth of about 1cm. Place 2 or 3 extra large chicken breasts in the dish; do not evenly coat with the sauce, make sure the tops stay dry. Bake at 375 for 90 minutes or until the chicken is too hard to cut with any knife in the house.
Zero Point Soup: from my mom's Weight Watchers days. Bring a few cartons of Swanson's low sodium chicken broth to a boil. Add in chopped zucchini, broccoli, carrots, and some frozen green peas. Boil for about 15 minutes until the vegetables are soft, then blend with an immersion blender until it looks like watery vomit. Serve with saltine crackers.
Iced Skim Milk: fill a large glass with ice. Pour skim milk over the top. Let sit at room temperature until a film of about 1/2 inch of water forms at the top. Serve.
My dad makes:
1. the worst spaghetti sauce - it's thin and disgustingly sweet. I think it's just tomato juice and brown sugar.
2. the worst sandwiches. bologna and ketchup and raw onion.
3. the best "salad" - it's cherry pie filling, cool whip, crushed pineapple and mini marshmallows.
My mom is actually a super good cook but she made a tuna noodle casserole I could never eat. Hot canned tuna is revolting. I never make the recipe, even though she made me a cookbook of handwritten recipes when I moved out of the house and included it. (I have a really wonderful mom.) I used to make the “Naked in The Woods” punch from that cookbook: 2 cans frozen limeade (or frozen whatever), 2 cans Miller Lite, 2 cans of vodka. That will fuck your ass up. A+ recipe.
My mother would buy the most expensive ground beef (i.e., no fat at all), shape it into a ball, cover it with salt (she kept a bowl of salt on the stove), and bake until very well done. Could not even cut it with a knife. Plus ketchup was forbidden at our table.
Long before my time, but my paternal great-grandmother was apparently an *astoundingly* bad cook. We have a letter from my grandfather when he was in boot camp in World War II writing home about how good the food was.
We're not talking, like, taking weird shortcuts because of Depression-era habits. We're talking shit like "she did not pluck chickens before cooking them". Which, come to think of it, might be one way to get a very crispy skin...
I got both my mom's and my grandma's recipe boxes after they died. My mom's is nothing outlandish, just a lot of "cut out of Working Woman magazine in 1989" type stuff combined with some genuinely good, if simple, recipes she occasionally made growing up.
My grandma's however is a treasure trove of mid-century modern cuisine, including one thing called "A Hot Treat of Crab Meat" that I have not actually gotten around to making...yet.
My mother had the best worst taste in all of the Ozarks. One specialty was to boil down RC cola until it had the consistency (and odor) of motor oil left in the crankcase of a 1936 Ford and pooooooour it over those graymeat minute steaks that no amount of overcooking could render chewable. And of course for Klass with a capital K special occasions, an aspic of congealed V8 impregnated by VegAll nuggets. And for every meal - every meal - she had a sliced raw onion on the table.
My sister *loves* cream cheese and jelly sandwiches. Also mayo and cheddar cheese on matzoh in the microwave for like 20 seconds -- a passover favorite but oh my god it's so gross. The oil just gets everywhere and the flavor is something I can only describe as beige.
I grew up vegetarian and my dad always used to make these little appetizer things that were fake bologna with cream cheese rolled around a gherkin. He'd cut them up into little slices and serve with a toothpick. I admit, I still kind of love them.
Actual text exchange with my mom just now:
Me: What's the recipe for that hamburger rice casserole I used to refuse to eat? Dennis Lee is asking for the grossest family recipes.
[My mom was a big fan of the Pizzle]
Mom: 😳😳heck no
Me: It was hamburger and rice and cream of mushroom soup and ???
Mom: Okay uncle bens converted rice. 1 1/2 cups. I pound hamburger. Cream mushroom soup. Cream chicken soup. Lipton beefy onion soup mix. I cook the rice first and brown the hamburger. Add water as needed. It can get dry.
I also add mixed veggies to it now
[post-Y2K update]
Me: Ok. Not making that. Ew!
Mom: It's good
I should begin with one of my favorite 1950’s recipes, made by my mother. Her mother (my grandmother) was a wonderful cook and baker, using many old country products and techniques, so the only excuse I can find for my mother’s penchant for horrible and quick dishes is the fact that she was a product of her generation. One of fast, frozen, tasteles, yet convenient recipes and products. Who can forget those delicious, foil-flavored apple messes in the corner of a Swanson’s TV Dinner?
So. Let’s begin with our spice cabinet which contained the following “spices”: Salt (the fine Morton’s kind), fine McCormick’s Black Pepper, McCormick’s bottled Garlic Salt (fresh garlic? What was that?), McCormick’s Paprika (neither smoked, nor Hungarian), McCormick’s Oregano (pronounced “or-ay-GA-no”, and, lastly, an unrefrigerated can of Parmesan (pronounced “par-MEE-jee-uhn” Cheese. Now for a favorite childhood recipe (one of scads): “Homemade” Spaghetti Sauce:
In a 10” cast iron skillet, melt 1 Tbspn Crisco.
Add a pound o’ Ground Round and 1 chopped (“diced” was unknown in my mother’s kitchen) Onion. If feeling particularly festive, add 1 chopped green bell pepper (who knew these came in other colors?). To finish add 1 can Campbell’s Tomato Soup and a sprinkling of canned OreGAN-o and voila!! Serve on top of over-boiled dried spaghetti noodles (the only known pasta noodle in the universe). Wash down with a glass of pasteurized milk.
Stay tuned for more.
My parents used to make this "beef and cabbage casserole" which had a distinctive salty vinegary pepper profile, but imagine it still strangely bland and sickening at the same time. The smell of the dish made me sick to my stomach without fail, but it took me years to realize I didn't actually *have* to consume it. I guess when that's the only thing for dinner as a kid, you're always hungry (fast metabolism, really active kid, etc.), and you have it once a month for 12 years, you just think that feeling sick before eating something is normal.
On a separate note, I've been told my family recipe for a cheddar cheese and apple butter omelette is weird, and my mom loves fried bananas liver mush.
My mom is actually a great and creative cook, but as a kid sometimes she would get a little too creative, specifically with sandwiches. She would put sprouts in everything, and I remember a particular repeat sandwich with peanut butter, mayo, bananas, and alfalfa sprouts, which would get slimy by the time I unpacked my lunch.
Then again, her peanut butter and tuna was pretty good.
My grandmother makes “chili” with boiled hamburger meat, canned diced tomatoes, canned peas, huge chunks of white onion, and whichever canned beans she has in the pantry. No seasonings.
These answers are fucking incredible!
My paternal grandmother's approach to cooking more or less anything was to boil it into submission - her "speciality" which she'd make for my grandfather was tripe and onions cooked in milk until the tripe had all the texture and flavour (and indeed appearance) of an old mattress. Took me years to realize that tripe could actually be tasty.
(my father, in a sort of Stockholm Syndrome phenomenon, still likes his vegetables boiled into mush, any time we have a family meal we have to do his broccoli or sprouts or whatever separately or he will complain that they are "raw")
Microwaved chicken breasts. Just an expanse of unseasoned, unbrowned, overcooked white meat, with no sauce or anything. My parents are decent cooks. I have no idea why they insisted on making this. They were surprised to find out I didn't like it.
My mom once made something called "Million Dollar Spaghetti." It was from a community cookbook -- a church or possibly a Junior League, though we were not Junior League types. To the best of my recollection, it was spaghetti tossed with a jar of Ragu, a block of cream cheese and a big glop of sour cream. It was unpleasantly sticky. We immediately renamed it "Fifty-Cent Spaghetti."
Leftover salad was regularly served to me for school lunches. my mom called it "Marinated Salad". The recipe is as follows:
Make a salad. Dress the salad. Leave the salad in the fridge overnight to "marinate". Serve in a tupperware at room temperature.
I once tried to make an imitation of Mission Chinese's Salt Cod Fried Rice at home, without soaking the salt cod first. I ended up moving when all attempts to get the resulting stink out of my kitchen failed.
Oh, this barely counts as a “recipe,” but it seems to be unique to my mom: Fritos dipped in cottage cheese. Everyone outside of my family finds it revolting, but they are extremely wrong; it is 100% delicious. Just thinking of it now makes me hungry tbh.
My MIL makes her own phyllo dough, which is not only fine, but often quite good. Except that she uses it for pizza crust. This results in the outside of the pizza with no toppings being hard as a rock, almost unchewable, and the rest of the crust having the structural integrity of wet paper. Just so ideal for something you’re supposed to pick up and eat with your hands.
This isn't a recipe per se, but my family used to cook spinach for 20 FULL MINUTES...I used to gag trying to eat it lol but I love spinach now that I know what it's supposed to taste like.
One recipe that does stick out to me is my grandmothers cheese pie recipe. It was basically just cottage cheese and sugar. I had a crazy sweet tooth as a kid but this was the one dessert I didn't like.
I used to make this and bring it to lunch at school when I was maybe 7-10. I would take a saltine cracker, cut a circle of bologna into quarters and put on quarter of it on there, then a dollop of strawberry yogurt, then another cracker, and you have a sandwich that just about makes me hurl to describe to you. Sorry! I have no memory of inventing it but I think the credit/blame is on me.
My mother was raised in Michigan's Upper Peninsula - my dad (who was raised just across the river in Wisconsin) used to joke he could tell what day of the week it was by what her mother was cooking for dinner. Wednesdays were Salmon Patty night and as a child when we'd visit the family 'up nort'' I'd get subjected to this atrocity at least once. Basically, canned salmon mixed with breadcrumbs and egg until you can form patties, pan fry, serve with creamed peas (also ew). One of my aunts would be a saint and pick out the bones and skin from the slimy canned flesh, the other would not. I hated it so much to this day I refuse to eat cooked salmon, even freshly made.
My mom was vegetarian when I was growing up, so we had some gems, but the worst were all the veggie burger mixes she would make over the years. Just the mix and water, formed into a batter, griddled until dry again, then drowned in ketchup and Mayo and mustard and whatever else we could to hydrate the things again.
There's a 'salad' that we had during the holidays as kids, and which my mom insists on making for me every time I see her to this day...it is sweeter than any dessert I've ever enjoyed, and I couldn't eat more than a spoonful these days. It is basically this (https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/23148/cherry-fluff/), but she uses mandarin orange segments in place of the crushed pineapple
My MiL is not great at cooking, and one time I watched her make dinner: unseasoned boneless skinless breasts, in a skillet on low heat until the outside looks cooked, then dump a can of low fat, low sodium tortilla soup over top. Dinner served. I wasn't invited for dinner that night. Thank goodness.
I don't have a recipe, but for years (maybe even decades???), I thought I didn't like Cuban food because my mom made the world's driest arroz con pollo. Sometime in my 20s I realized that Cuban food is delicious, my mom is just a bad cook.
My Mom was in Diet Workshop for decades. They didn't make you buy food like a Weight Watchers; they were more of a support group. Overall, Mom was a great cook if basic, as there were 8 of us kids to feed. But her Diet Workshop recipe for lasagna featured cottage cheese as it's only cheese. It was THE NAST!! I don't have the recipe since sister Sue inherited Mom's recipe box, but that piece of paper which it was written on should be burned in the hottest flames of hell anyway, so...
As a kid, my mom would make this vegetable side dish somewhat frequently: one can of green beans, drained. Approx. 1/4 cup of Hidden Valley Ranch dressing. Stir. Put in freezer (yep) briefly to chill. Serve to your horrified children. Canned green beans are horrible and I never liked ranch dressing.
Orange spaghetti is what we called it. Pasta sauce made with onions, ground beef and . . . condensed tomato soup. Very sweet and very orange. Sorta like homemade spaghettiOs. It originated with my former step father's family who found more traditional sauce/gravy/ragu to be too "spicy." I sense that it may have been a real 1970s era recipe in the spirit of many other canned soup concoctions. I will say it wasn't exactly bad in the inedible sense, just deeply wrong and not at all what most people want or expect from a pasta dish.
It looked like baby shit, and there was nothing souffle about it. And I have no idea why it called for leaving a single garlic clove whole in the final dish. My mom would make like a 5 quart casserole of this every year at thanksgiving and we'd throw the whole thing out every year.
Broccoli Souffle
1 bunch broccoli,
2 tablespoons margarine
1 clove garlic, peeled and left whole
¼ cup cream
Add broccoli to boiling water and cook approximately 10 minutes.
Drain broccoli and put in a blender and process to a fine puree.
Melt the margarine with the whole garlic clove in a sauce pan. Add the broccoli puree
and salt and pepper to taste. Add the cream and stir to blend. Pour into casserole dish
Reheat at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes.
Technicallly it is my husband’s family recipe, and I think it is actually somewhat common. It’s called Watergate salad, and it’s horrible, but I ate it every Thanksgiving because I loved his Nana. It’s mini marshmallows, canned mandarin oranges, some kind of crunchy nut, pistachio pudding, and I think Cool Whip combined. Horrendous. When I described it to my new Southern friend, she said it was a family favorite (ha).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_salad
Chicken "enchiladas" with cream of chicken soup, sour cream, and skim milk mixed together as some kind of glop both inside and outside of them
As one of five children, my mom would mail it in on dinners sometimes. One I remember her making semi-regularly was what she called Girl Scout Spaghetti. It was basically a large can of Franco-American spaghetti and a large can of beef with barley soup. Sometimes she'd add more ground beef to spread it out.
I can remember a family trip gone awry where my parents snuck at least three of us children into the hotel and she cooked that on a hot plate in the room. Maybe we were more poor than I remember?
The first thing that comes to mind is tuna casserole. Base of crumbled up potato chips (bonus if you hoarded almost empty chip bags to amass enough pre-pulverized dregs). Middle layer of canned tuna. Top layer was “white sauce” which is just butter, flour, and milk if I recall correctly. Add some canned black olives too for *fun*. Bake in oven until heated.
Have not made it in ages but still sometimes request it when I’m visiting the parents.
Another has come to mind: whole roast chicken, only flavoring is whole cloves of garlic put under the skin. Bake until dry as hell.
there's this chinese dish called stinky tofu that my parents really like. it's like durian - great if you can ignore the smell, but you Cannot Ignore The Smell. i cannot describe its scent further than fecal and sweaty. i think dennis would probably get a kick out of it, though.