okay okay okay If you use tinned tuna for tuna salad, what is the appropriate texture/variety? I prefer flaked because it mixes easier, though I'm not picky on the species; my roommate insists anything except chunk albacore Is Not Real Tuna
hmm... I buy chunk mostly because it's what my family always got, even though I just use it for sandwich filling. I have tried flake instead, but I think being able to decide how smushed it gets instead of having it pre-smushed is a plus, and it keeps a bit better in the fridge if I want to use half the can at a time.
Does anyone else have a food that their parents made all the time as a kid, and they didn't think of it as a food they hated having to eat, but they absolutely do not ever intend to make it ever again as an adult? Because it occurred to me while I was making lunch just now that I will be quite happy to never purchase fresh green beans for the rest of my life until I die.
V e l v e e t a Also picadillo. Its the raisins and olives that put me off it, but i barely fussed when it was put on my plate as a kid
....boiled peas they're fine, they're okay but I'm never going to make them myself. Sugar peas are okay. The green round stuff by itself i don't need at all.
sloppy joe/ground beef "barbecue" I'm down for barbecue, and it was worth it to get something with flavor in that house, but something about the texture of loose ground beef.... not for me.
hamburger pie, which was ground beef, green beans, onions, and something or another in there as flavoring, all topped with mashed potatoes and baked. i actually liked it as a kid, and it was a staple Hard Times food, but canned green beans mixed in with all that....bad
It's a traditional English food that's spread around a bit. Canned green beans are not a requirement, though. (I kinda get the impression that, like a lot of British food, whether it's good or the worst thing you've ever eaten is heavily dependent on the recipe. I make a vegetarian version with lentils and mushrooms occasionally.)
It's cottage pie if it's with beef mince, shepherd's pie if it's with lamb mince. Really one of those foods designed to stretch a small amount of meat to feed a family and the variety of recipes does reflect that somewhat - and is probably where the bland reputation comes from. Spices are an outlay if you don't have much so the basic version is just minced meat, cheap stock likely from cubes, probably onion, carrot and peas, with some porage oats and red lentils cooked through to stretch the meat further if you're really poor (been there; it's not as bad as you might imagine) and then a basic mash topping. Cheap and filling.
Macaroni-based casserole. Boxed mac and cheese with whatever canned veggies we have and canned chicken, topped with way too much shredded cheese and baked. It's not bad, my grandma just didn't believe in seasoning food and it was both too cheesy and incredibly bland. She always made it so the shredded cheese formed this like. Solid layer of crunchy cheese you had to saw through, but the actual macaroni didn't have enough, so it tasted like plain pasta with a hint of cheese. It got better when she started adding nacho cheese to the mac but I still wouldn't make it for myself to eat.
Y'all my mom came into the kitchen and started making picadillo with no earlier knowledge or prompting from me, even though i just complained about it upthread. Luckily we dont have olives or raisins lol Edit: its been literal years. Why.
my family occasionally made kraft mac n cheese with ground beef and frozen mixed vegetables in it, which wasn't awful but was generally mediocre. I have no desire to resurrect it on my own the thing I absolutely detested was ground beef and peas in cream of mushroom soup, complete with large and partially-cooked pieces of onion and garlic, served over some kind of pasta. terrible. the worst. F--, would remain at table for hours not-eating it if required. (using chicken breast instead of ground beef upgraded it to Almost Tolerable, though, bc then I could at least eat around the onion chunks)
So my parents made this... idk I guess it's a casserole? And both of them deny being the one to have brought it with them and neither of them can remember where it came from, but it was A Thing for as long as I could remember. They called tuna and rice. That's it. Just Tuna and Rice. And basically it's this: you cook some white rice, add a can of tuna, cream of mushroom soup, sliced black olives, and some corn (usually frozen). Heat through, salt and pepper to taste, eat resulting congealed slop. I hated it. I'm pretty sure I said I hated it every single time one of them made it, but it was the "fuck, it's a weeknight, we're exhausted and no one wants to cook" meal, so it was regular enough to be a fixture in my memory until after my parents divorced and I became a reasonably independent teen that mostly fed myself. It's that exact sort of awful that can only be invented by a white suburbanite family with no real cooking skills outside of practical basics from a Better Crocker cook book. It was cheap af, filling, and fast, but it was not good, and I suspect my parents knew that, they just didn't know how to come up with any alternatives.
My mom was very big on nutrition but also didn’t love cooking, so we did have our share of Kraft, but it was always a bit of a treat. Macaroni with hotdogs in was something I first experienced at the neighbors’ house when I was 5. Fabulous. My mom made it a couple times but did not feel it was worth the extra effort for the nutrition it provided compared to meals with all the food groups. To me, Kraft is the only valid macaroni there is, and macaroni with hotdogs in remains not just an extra special treat, but a pretty good low spoons food. But ketchup? Not on the menu. Not in my macaroni.
The horrible casseroles are reminding me of an edge case from my family. When I was in high school, my mom kept buying a whole lot of fish because "everyone says fish is good for you," in defiance of the fact that no one in the house particularly liked fish and Sibling actively dislikes it. My dad, around the same time, had latched onto Patak's brand simmer sauces (which, I want to stress, are fine, I have some in my cabinet, but my dad should not be trusted with them). So what kept happening was: Mom would ask Dad to make dinner. He would look in the freezer and see fish as far as the eye could see. He would remove two packages of fish from the freezer. And then 30 minutes later we would be told dinner was ready and see two tiny little hand-sized tilapia fillets that had stewed in an ocean of butter chicken simmer sauce, with an entire package of frozen peas dumped in. I missed a lot of meals in high school.
My parents are both pretty good cooks, but one of my grandmother's favourite dishes while my mum was growing up was pilchard curry.
Spaghetti bolganese is mine. Not only because of bad mouthfeels - for some reason, I can eat Asian style noodles happily but Italian pasta noodles are a bag of 'NOPE I'M EATING WORMS' especially when my dad made it and he would boil the mince first so the resulting bol was like vaguely-meat/tomato flavoured mud - but also trauma reasons, because my dad would be like 'I SLAVED ALL DAY OVER THIS FOOD YOU CAN'T SAY ANYTHING BAD ABOUT IT OR REFUSE TO EAT WITH ME OR I'LL YELL AND THROW THINGS' One time when I couldn't bear to eat any more I narrowly dodged a glass ketchup bottle at my head, so yeah. Spag bog is not my favourite. EDIT: May have misunderstood the question but still.
